Laina Dawes (“Hardcore Persona”) is an author, freelance music and cultural critic, and concert photographer from Toronto, Canada. A former writer for Metal Edge magazine, her writing and photography can be found in the journal Coon Bidness, the anthology Marooned: The Next Generation of Desert Island Discs, and print and online publications and radio programs such as NPR, Toronto Star, Exclaim!, Metal Underground.com, Hellbound.ca, CBC Radio, her blog Writing Is Fighting, and Blogher.com, where she is a contributing editor for the Race & Ethnicity section. You can get more information on her book at whatareyoudoingherebook.com.

Katherine Cross (“Game Changer”) is currently a research assistant in Hunter College’s sociology department, and is preparing to do her doctoral research on gender-identity formation in virtual worlds. She is committed to the empirical study of gender and believes that theory should reflect the lives of those it purports to describe. She is also very committed to pizza. She’s written for Feministing, Kotaku, Questioning Transphobia, and the Border House, where she is also a coeditor.

Marianne Kirby (“Co-opting the Coop”) lives, works, and gardens in Orlando, Florida, the land of year-round produce. A longtime fat-acceptance activist, she blogs about fat bodies at therotund.com and is the coauthor of Lessons from the Fat-O-Sphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce with Your Body. Marianne is a regular contributor at xoJane.com, where she writes about being obsessed with nail polish, class war from a personal perspective, and DIY because she just can’t sit still. She still isn’t over her goth phase, so she can be seen wearing all black in the summertime while writing zombie novels on her laptop.

Seth Kershner (“Navy Steals”) When he’s not trying to track links between the U.S. military and public education, Seth Kershner teaches college Spanish in Western Massachusetts. His articles and interviews have appeared in such journals as Sojourners, Fellowship, and Z Magazine. With Scott Harding, he is coauthor of “Just Say No: Organizing Against Militarism in Public Schools,” which was published in 2011 in the Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare. He and Harding are among a handful of researchers examining the grassroots “counter-recruitment” movement in the United States and are currently writing a book on the topic.

Yina Kim (illustrations) is a San Francisco–based artist and illustrator who loves to observe people’s faces on the street. See more of her work at yinakim.com.