Suzanne Roberts is the author of the memoir Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail, winner of the National Outdoor Book Award, as well as four collections of poetry, including Three Hours to Burn a Body: Poems on Travel. She writes and teaches in South Lake Tahoe, California.

Pam Houston is the author of five books of fiction and nonfiction, including Cowboys Are My Weakness and Contents May Have Shifted. Director of Creative Writing at UC Davis, she teaches in the Pacific University low-res program.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest is the author of two memoirs: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana and Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines; the guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go; and editor of Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010. She teaches CNF at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Tracy Ross is a 2009 National Magazine Award winner, a contributing editor at Backpacker magazine, a contributor to Outside, Skiing, Bicycling, and other magazines, and she is the author of critically lauded The Source of All Things: A Memoir, which O magazine named one of its "Memoirs We Love" in 2011.

Lavinia Spalding is series editor of The Best Women’s Travel Writing, author of Writing Away: A Creative Guide to Awakening the Journal-Writing Traveler and coauthor of With a Measure of Grace: the Story and Recipes of a Small Town Restaurant. Her work appears in many print and online publications.