Kate Dailey's travels have taken her to Dublin, Ireland, where she wrote for The Dubliner magazine; Berlin Germany, as part of a Gordon Grey fellowship in international reporting; and to a very shabby motel room in Cleveland, Ohio, for a long weekend involving a bottle of tequila and a male stripper (but not the way one might think, she assures us). She's written for numerous publications, including Men's Health, Men's Journal, MediaBistro, NYMag.com, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal. She now works for Newsweek, where she runs the Human Condition blog.

Jaed Coffin is the author of A CHANT TO SOOTH WILD ELEPHANTS (Da Capo, 2008), which chronicles the time he spent as a Buddhist monk in his mother's village in Thailand. As the 2008 Resident Fellow of The Island Institute, Coffin researched his next book, ROUGHOUSE FRIDAY, which documents the year he spent as a the middleweight champion of an Alaskan barroom boxing circuit. From Brunswick, Maine, he teaches at University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing.

A New York-based writer who grew up on a hazelnut farm outside of Portland, Oregon, Christian DeBenedetti founded The Accidental Extremist in early 2009. Previously he has worked on the staffs of Outside, National Geographic Adventure, and Men’s Journal magazines. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, FOOD&WINE, and others. A Contributing Editor to National Geographic Adventure and a Correspondent for Outside, he once spent an entire year traveling alone to study ancient methods of making beer in 14 European and West African nations, a journey which resulted in—among other things—malaria, a fall into a Togolese drain ditch, bribery at gunpoint, and an arrest for defiling the musical legacy of Bob Dylan on Prague’s Charles Bridge without a permit.