Jane Smiley (" Promised Land") is the author of such novels as A Thousand Acres, which won the Pulitzer Prize, Moo, and the forthcoming Good Faith, to be published this spring.

David Goodman (" Culture Change") is a contri-buting writer for Mother Jones who lives in Vermont. Some of his previous stories have looked at that state's progressive stands on gay marriage and on equal funding for wealthy and poor school districts.

Kimberlee Acquaro (" Out of Madness, a Matriarchy") will present her photographs from Rwanda at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., later this year. Acquaro was awarded a Pew Fellowship in International Journalism for her work on Rwanda's women. Landesman joined Acquaro in Rwanda to work on this story, and they married in September.

Barry C. Lynn (" Chaos and Constitution") lived and worked in Venezuela in the late 1980s during the last years of the oil boom as a staff reporter for Agence France-Presse. He is the former executive editor of Global Business magazine, where he reported on worldwide manufacturing and business issues.

Barry Yeoman (" Unhappy Meals") has written numerous articles for the magazine, including the May/June 2002 cover story, " The Stealth Crusade," about Christian missionaries who proselytize in Muslim countries, and " The Quiet War on Abortion" (September/October 2001), which reported on local "red tape" efforts to restrict access to abortion.

Naomi Harris (" Unhappy Meals") is a photographer based in New York City whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, and ESPN Magazine.

Tom Engelhardt ( War Watch contributor) is a consulting editor at Metropolitan Books, a Fellow of the Nation Institute, a Teaching Fellow of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and the creator of TomDispatch.com, a weblog of the Nation Institute. He is the author of a history of Cold War American triumphalism, The End of Victory Culture, and of the forthcoming novel, The Last Days of Publishing, to be published in June.