Jason Abbot
Jason Abbot founded Jason Abbot Gunmakers in 1974, specializing in high-quality English guns, which he buys, sells and restores. He is a well-known game shot who won the British Open Side-by-Side Championship in 1993, 1995 and 1999. He has written on guns and shooting for, among others, The Field, Shooting Times and Shooting Gun.

Mansour Ajami
Mansour Ajami is a translator and Reviser in Arabic in the English Verbatim Reporting department at the United Nations in New York City. He grew up in Lebanon, earned his B.A. and M.A. degrees from the American University of Beirut and his doctorate from Columbia University. His most recent publication is Words in the Memory of the Night: Selected Poems. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Stephanie Allison
Stephanie Allison lives in New York City and often reads about neuroethics.

Lisa Anselmo
A creative director, writer and sometime singer, Lisa Anselmo can be currently found heading up the creative department of marketing for Time Inc.’s Style & Entertainment Group. While she lives in New York full time, she calls Paris her part-time home, and writes about it at MyParttimeParisLife.

Linda Ashton
Linda Ashton used to be a movie and TV producer; after divorcing her husband (who thought she looked foolish in hats) she moved to New York City, working in rock music production and advertising. After she was laid off from her job, she began making hats and was invited by Ann Arbrizio, the grande dame of American millinery to train under her at the Fashion Institute of Technology; she has been a hatmaker ever since and is now president of the Milliners Guild, which promotes handmade hats.

Robert J. Barnett
Robert J. Barnett is the founder and director of the Modern Tibetan Studies program at Columbia University in New York City His most recent book is Tibetan Modernities: Notes from the Field on Social and Cultural Change, co-edited with Ronald Schwartz (Brill, 2008). Before joining Columbia, he worked as a journalist and researcher specializing in Tibetan issues for the BBC, the South China Morning Post, the Guardian, the Independent and other media outlets.

Richard Barrett
Richard Barrett, a former member of the British Intelligence Service, is the Coordinator for the Al-Qaida/Taliban Monitoring Team at the United Nations. He lives in New York City.

Michèle Barry
Michèle Barry, M.D., F.A.C.P., taught medicine at Yale Medical School for 30 years and is now a professor of medicine and tropical diseases at Stanford University and the director of its Center for Innovation in Global Health.

Max Blagg
Max Blagg is a writer who was born in England and has lived in New York since the HighLine was a working railroad.

Paul Brady
Paul Brady is a travel writer and editor whose work has appeared in the Huffington Post, Condé Nast Traveler, Budget Travel and many other publications. He posts a lot of photos from the road on Tumblr.

Sarah Funke Butler
As literary archivist for Glenn Horowitz Bookseller, Inc., Sarah Funke Butler has worked with dozens of writers, including Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, and Tim O’Brien. As a freelance literary agent she represents Ben Loory and others. She is not related to (or even the same as) the Sarah Funke who has an American literature blog or the Sarah Canice Funke who writes about archival theory, poetry, and more, on her website. Really, she’s not.

Stefanie Carp
Stefanie Carp grew up in Hamburg, Germany, studied in Berlin and has worked for more than 20 years as the dramaturg for the artistic teams of several theaters. For the last four years she has been responsible for the performing arts program of the Wiener Festwochen, a music, art and theater festival in Vienna.

Randy Cohen
Randy Cohen’s first professional work was writing humor pieces, essays, and stories for newspapers and magazines (The New Yorker, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Young Love Comics). His first television work was writing for Late Night with David Letterman, for which he won three Emmy awards. His fourth Emmy was for his work on Michael Moore’s TV Nation. He received a fifth Emmy as a result of a clerical error, and kept it. For 12 years he wrote “The Ethicist,” a weekly column for the New York Times Magazine syndicated throughout the U.S. and Canada. He is currently developing A Question of Ethics for public radio. He lives in New York City, and you can like him on Facebook here.

Polly Coles
Polly Coles studied English at Oxford University before becoming a teacher in inner-city London. She went on to earn a master’s degree in anthropology at the London School of Economics, after which she started writing full-time. She writes about art and abridges books for BBC Radio 4. She was closely involved in the recording of the complete Arkangel Shakespeare and, most recently, has written texts to accompany two exhibitions at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford. She and her partner, the violin maker Andrea Ortona, have four children and divide their time between Italy and England. Her book The Politics of Washing: Real Life in Venice will be published by Robert Hale on March 29, 2013.

Patrick Collingwood
Patrick Collingwood is an architecture student at Cooper Union in New York City. As well as carving stone, he has designed furniture and fixtures for art exhibitions and costume designs. He also makes architectural models.

Margaret Diehl
Margaret Diehl has published two novels, Men (Soho Press, 1988), Me and You (Soho, 1990) and a memoir, The Boy on the Green Bicycle (Soho, 1999). She lives in New York City, writing and editing for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Joe Dolce
Joe Dolce is the founder and CEO of Joe Dolce Communication and co-founder of Paper & String, a neighborhood-level marketing network for independent merchants. He is the former editor-in-chief of Details and Star magazines.

Henry Ehrlich
Henry Ehrlich is the editor of the Wiley Book of Business Quotations and author of Writing Effective Speeches, which he is now revising for republication by Third Avenue Books. However, if you would like to buy a copy of the original edition for $10 plus postage, or if you need professional writing services, you may write to him at henryde@earthlink.net. He edits AsthmaAllergiesChildren.com and is co-author of Asthma Allergies Children: A Parent’s Guide.

Mickey Ehrlich
Mickey Ehrlich is a journalist and writer. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches English at Kingsborough Community College.

Hamed El Said
Hamed El Said is a professor and chair of international business and political economy at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is Jordanian by birth with British nationality, and has lived in the U.K. since 1992. His recent publications include Globalisation, Democratisation and Radicalisation in the Arab World and Aid and Power in the Arab World: IMF and World Bank Policy-based Lending in the Middle East and North Africa (both edited with Jane Harrigan). His book Beyond Belief: Counter Radicalisation and De-Radicalisation Programs in Muslim-Majority States will be published later this year.

Deborah Fantera
Deborah Fantera is an architect and partner in the firm of Ohlhausen DuBois in New York City.

Leslie Fois
Leslie Fois is a sales and marketing manager for Italian media content. She lives in Milan, Italy, with her Italian husband and bilingual seven-year-old son.

Gayle Forman
Gayle Forman is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel If I Stay and its forthcoming sequel Where She Went, to be published in April 2011. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and two daughters. And CTKYOL means absolutely nothing—she made it up.

Josh Gelman
Josh Gelman currently works as a television news producer and currently plays as a 50-year-old triathlete desperately trying to reclaim his long-vanished youth.

Tamara Glenny
Tamara Glenny has been a magazine and book editor for 30 years. She now works as an editor and translator at the United Nations in New York.

Georgina Greenough
Georgina Greenough is senior at Colby College in Maine majoring in art history with a minor in philosophy, and about to go on her first job interview next week as a floater at Sotheby’s. She hopes to be an interior designer.

Eric Hanson
Eric Hanson is the author of A Book of Ages (Harmony/Random House), which features anecdotes about famous authors, painters, rock stars, ballplayers, politicians, rogues and wits, arranged by year of age. His stories and satires have appeared in McSweeney’s, the Atlantic, Smithsonian and other magazines. His illustrations have appeared in the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Harper’s, the New Yorker and Vanity Fair.

Matt Heimer
Matt Heimer is the deputy editor of Smart Money magazine and co-author of the musical comedy BLOOM. He and his actress wife Marya Grandy recently moved to Chicago, and he misses the group a lot–he still occastionally tunes in to the readings via Skype.

Jane Herold
Jane Herold is a potter who has been making dinnerware and pottery for more than 30 years, using ash glazes and wood firing, at her potteries in Palisades, New York, and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Her motto: Life is too short to live with heartless dishes.

Harald Hille
Harald Hille is a retired United Nations translator and terminologist. He recently published a Swedish-English English-Swedish Practical Dictionary. He lives in Connecticut.

Veronica Horwell
Veronica Horwell writes for the older forms of media—newspapers, magazines, theater—in London, Oxford and, once in a blue moon, Paris. She can sing all the words to all the parts in Sondheim’s favorite, “Someone in a Tree,” from Pacific Overtures, but you wouldn’t want to hear her do it.

Dana Johnson
Dana Johnson is an American psychodrama therapist, artist, publisher, bookbinder and mother who has lived in Sweden for more than 25 years.

Chris Kelly
Chris Kelly is an Emmy-winning writer for HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher and a consulting producer on CBS’s $#*! My Dad Says.

Guillermo Kendall
Guillermo Kendall is a political affairs officer with the United Nations Al-Qaida/Taliban Monitoring Team. Born in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he studied law, he came to New York City in 1999 to work for the Argentine Mission to the United Nations. He lives in Long Island City, New York.

Breda Kennedy
Breda Kennedy is an arts consultant for non-profits who lives and works in the west of Ireland.

Michelle Knight
Michelle Knight originally trained as a violinist at the Royal Northern College of Music before reading English at Christ Church, Oxford. Her first foray into arts management was as an assistant at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature, after which she worked as assistant administrator with the English Symphony Orchestra. In 2004 she joined UK Arts International, first as a tour booker and project manager and then as associate director. From 2007 to 2009 Michelle was general manager at the Foursight Theatre in Wolverhampton, West Midlands. She is currently involved in producing work at the Bristol Old Vic and the Arcola Theatre in London, as well as nurturing international projects with artists working in Bolivia and Cameroon.

Win Knowlton
Win Knowlton is an artist and garden designer who lives and works in New York City.

Winthrop Knowlton
Winthrop Knowlton, now retired, has been a U.S. Treasury official; chairman and CEO of the publishing house Harper & Row (now HarperCollins); president of the New York City Ballet; professor at the Kennedy School for Public Policy at Harvard University; and most recently a money manager. He lives and works in New York City and reads around 100 or more books a year. Here’s what he got through in June 2011.

Kirsty Lang
Kirsty Lang is a journalist and presenter for BBC TV and radio, including Radio 4′s arts and culture show Front Row.

John Laws
John Laws is a freelance explorer who designs and implements surveys of the earth’s subsurface for hydrocarbon exploration and engineering. He avoids big oil and lives in Gascony and Canada, or wherever the work is.

Laurie Lewis
The celebrated Laurie Lewis is a London-based photographer who specializes in the arts. His pictures are part of major collections everywhere, including the National Portrait Gallery.

Alex Miranda
Alex Miranda has been in the wine and food business in San Francisco and New York City since the mid-1980s as a restaurant manager, maitre d’ and sommelier. He currently works in the wine importing and distribution racket with the David Bowler Wine Company and resides in Brooklyn.

George Misiewicz
George Misiewicz is a retired gastroenterologist who lives in London. He was born a little while ago in Poland in Lwow (now in the Ukraine and called Lwiw) and came to England in 1949. He is the author of numerous articles, book chapters, and a textbook dealing with diseases of the gut, and has edited medical journals in his specialty for many years. One of the journals is named Gut—no, really. He speaks English and Polish, but not Ukrainian, except for the sporadic utterance of na pohybel.

Mary Jo Otsea
Mary Jo Otsea joined Sotheby’s in 1983. She is senior vice president and worldwide director of the auction house’s carpet department. She is responsible for four major rug sales annually, two each in London and New York, as well as for carpets offered in sales of Americana, Continental and French fine furniture throughout the year, and presides over numerous sales as auctioneer.

Ann Pasternak Slater
Ann Pasternak Slater is a senior research fellow in Renaissance and modern English literature of St Anne’s College, Oxford. She has translated Leo Tolstoy and Boris Pasternak and written on George Herbert, William Shakespeare and Evelyn Waugh. She lives in Venice, Italy.

Muhammad Mehboob Qadir
Muhammad Mehboob Qadir is a retired brigadier in the Pakistan Army. He lives in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.

Melissa Raimes
Melissa Raimes has worked in television for more than 20 years. She started her career at the BBC in the days when they still had a documentary unit, and has directed films for the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and HBO. Before that she was a cowgirl in Australia and a psychiatric social worker.

Craig Raine
Craig Raine is a poet, dramatist, novelist, librettist and essayist, and the editor of Areté, a tri-quarterly magazine about the arts. His new book of poems, How Snow Falls, will be published by Atlantic in December; his second novel, The Divine Comedy, will appear in June 2011.

Louise Roug
Louise Roug is an editor at The Daily Beast. She previously worked as a foreign and national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, living in Baghdad and elsewhere in the Middle East for several years. She is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and the recipient of a Hal Boyle Award from the Overseas Press Club. She just finished her first book.

Fiona Ryan
Fiona Ryan is a pseudonym for a former magazine editor who for legal reasons cannot disclose her real name. She has worked at half a dozen consumer magazines over a 30-year career, and taught journalism at the college and graduate level.

Carmina Santos
Carmina Santos was born in the Philippines and trained as an architect at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila. She briefly entered the fashion industry in 2008 after finishing her studies at Parsons at the New School for Design. She is currently pretending to work for the United Nations.

Vania Scharbach
Vania Scharbach is a dressmaker and the founder of Lavai Maria, a boutique in Brooklyn, New York. She began selling dresses in Sâo Paulo, Brazil, before relocating her store in 2007.

Stephen M. Silverman
Stephen M. Silverman is a writer and editor whose books include David Lean; Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His Movies and The Fox That Got Away: The Last Days of the Zanuck Dynasty at 20th Century Fox. He is currently working on a history of the Catskills region of New York for Alfred A. Knopf, to be titled American Eden.

Adam Sisman
Adam Sisman is the author of Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, A.J.P. Taylor: a Biography, The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge, and, most recently, Hugh Trevor-Roper: The Biography. He lives in Bath, England.

Lucy Sisman
Lucy Sisman has designed products ranging from magazines to fragrances. Her most recent project is MiddleBlue, a line of special everyday things, including colourful clothes and items for the home.

Ian Smith
Ian Smith was an RAF glider pilot and gliding instructor; in his flying days, he piloted a Skylark 2. Since then, he has become an antique dealer and now divides his time between his many passions: gardening, building, milling, photography, music and the odd bit of flying.

Steven Smith
Steven Smith is a graduate of the SVA MFA Design program and the sole proprietor of Nerd Elite, a many-armed monster that specializes in design and video production for non-profit clients and cultural institutions. He likes to learn, listen, read and design things that elicit laughter and mild discomfort.

Trey Speegle
Trey Speegle‘s diverse career has been a unique mix of commercial and fine art. As a working artist today, he uses his huge collection of vintage paint-by-number paintings as inspiration for his paintings. Previously, he was a designer and art director for such publications as Vogue, Vanity Fair, US Weekly and Allure, where he worked for wwword.com’s co-founder Lucy Sisman.

Alan Stennett
Alan Stennett is a farming journalist based in Lincolnshire on the east coast of England. He is the author of Nobbut a Yellerbelly!, a book about Lincolnshire dialect, and The Lost Railways of Lincolnshire, both published by Countryside Press. He is currently working on a book about changes in agriculture over the 20th century.

Juliet Sydenham
Juliet Sydenham is a former teacher and copy editor. She lives in Sussex, in England, and reads a lot.

Bethany Tarbell
Bethany Tarbell writes grants for a non-profit organization during the day, but in the evening she can be found working on a novel or in the dressage ring in Concord, New Hampshire, where she lives and works.

Michael M. Thomas
Michael M. Thomas is a journalist and the author of eight novels, most recently Love & Money, published by Melville House. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Cynthia van Elk
Cynthia van Elk is a Dutch photographer who lives in New York City and eastern Pennsylvania. Her work is predominantly portraiture, but she has worked as a photo journalist in Afghanistan and Pakistan and also continues to do still lifes, especially food and interiors.

Joshua van Praag
Joshua van Praag is an award-winning filmmaker and photographer. His shorts and pictures have been exhibited in a wide range of venues, from the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York to the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, and at film festivals like London’s Raindance and the New York Independent Film and Video Festival. During his 10 years as a lighting technician, he traveled the world and worked on more than 40 feature films under directors such as Martin Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci, Wong Kar Wai, Woody Allen and Jonathan Demme.

Véronique Vienne
Véronique Vienne is a former magazine art director who now calls herself a “self-taught” design critic and writes essays and articles about designers and their work. She is also the author, with Erica Lennard, of a quirky little bestseller titled The Art of Doing Nothing: Simple Ways to Make Time for Yourself.

Matthew Waldman
Matthew Waldman is a designer and artist obsessed with universal communication and bringing a techno-progressivist set of expectations to the world of ordinary objects. He lives in New York City, where his brand, Nooka, is based.

Noah Waldman
Noah Waldman is a student at Hunter College in New York City, where he was born and raised. His favorite games are Tetris, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Batman: Arkham City and anything with “Mario” in the title. He urges anyone interested in more about video games to check out Destructoid.com and Extra Credits

Karen Wilkin
Karen Wilkin is an independent curator and critic specializing in 20th-century modernism. She has written monographs on Stuart Davis, David Smith, Anthony Caro, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, Georgio Morandi and Hans Hofmann, and has organized and contributed to exhibitions of their and others’ work. She teaches in the New York Studio School’s MFA program, is contributing editor for art at the Hudson Review and writes regularly for the New Criterion and the Wall Street Journal. Current projects include Revelation: the Major Paintings of Jules Olitski and a touring exhibition, American Vanguards: Graham, Davis, Gorky, de Kooning and Their Circle, 1927–1942.

Ralph Williamson
The Reverend Ralph Williamson is the college chaplain at Christ Church, Oxford, and editor of its website. He is married, has two daughters and preaches regularly to students, retired professors, Japanese tourists and Anglican nuns. He has been a rural vicar and a curate in London. He is a keen photographer and has had a lifelong interest in India, especially working to support the Saakshar school for slum children in Delhi.