Alexander (Sasha) Zemlianichenko was, born May 7, 1950, in Saratov, Russia. He has been a photo-journalist with the Associated Press in Moscow since 1990.

Annie Wells, 42, has worked as a photographer for The Press Democrat for eight years.

Her assignments have included the 1996 World Cup, national elections in Mexico and the 1989 Bay Area earthquake.

Her work is included in the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.

Before coming to the newspaper, she worked as a photographer for Associated Press in San Francisco, the Greeley Tribune in Greeley, Colorado, and the Herald Journal in Logan, Utah.

She received a B.A. from UC Santa Cruz in science writing and studied photojournalism at San Francisco State University where she was part of a group that won the RFK public service award for a series of stories and photographs on people who help those with AIDS.

Byron Acohido is the aerospace reporter for The Seattle Times, where he has worked for the past ten years.

From 1985 to 1987 he worked at the Dallas Times Herald as an editor and business reporter. Prior to that, he worked as a business and general assignment reporter specializing in the criminal justice system at the The Herald in Everett, Washington.

In 1993 he won the Avaiation and Space Writers Association Premier Award for "Jet-engine pins: how big a risk?," and "Flight 811: terror in the sky."

He has a B.S. in journalism from University of Oregon and enjoys coaching youth sports, running and gardening.

Eileen McNamara was born in Cambridge, MA, on May 30, 1952. She was named a Boston Globe columnist last year after nearly 20 years as a reporter, covering everything from the night police beat to the United States Congress.

She has won many national public service awards, including citations by the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation and Sigma Delta Chi, for her reporting on conditions in the women's prison in Massachusetts, the racial disparity in Boston's infant mortality rates, the abusive treatment of battered women by state judges and the juvenile justice system's approach to teenage killers.

In 1987, McNamara was cited by Boston Magazine as The Best Reporter In Boston and by Esquire Magazine as one of the year's most promising young Americans.

McNamara is a lecturer in the journalism program at Brandeis University, where she teaches a course on Media & Public Policy. Her first book, on the malpractice case against Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Margaret Bean-Bayog, was nominated for an Edgar Award in 1995.

A graduate of Barnard College and the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, she was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1988.

She is married to Boston Globe sportswriter Peter May and is the mother of three young children.

Ric Nadler is chief investigative reporter at The Seattle Times.

Among some 50 journalism awards, he shared a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories about oil tankers and a 1993 Investigative Reporters and Editors award for an expose on a U.S. senator. That expose was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the Public Service category. His book Tankers Full of Trouble won the 1995 Investigative Reporters and Editors book award.

He has been with The Times for 14 years and has worked as a reporter for 25 years. He was employed previously at the Seattle Post-lntelligencer and Everett Herald.

He has a journalism degree from the University of Washington, has a grown daughter and lives in Seattle with his wife.

Deborah Nelson has been a member of The Seattle Times investigative team since 1995.

She was an investigative reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times from 1985-1995. Prior to that, she worked as a staff reporter for the Daily Herald in suburban Chicago and for the Daily Chronicle in rural Illinois.

Her work has earned more than two dozen first-place honors in national, regional and local contests. She is chair and past president of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a national educational organization for journalists. I.R.E. received the John Peter and Catherine Zenger Award for its efforts on behalf of press freedom in 1995 during her tenure as president.

She has a B.S. in journalism from Northern Illinois University and a law degree from DePaul University in Chicago. She lives in Seattle with ther husband and two daughters.

Alex Tizon is a special projects writer for The Seattle Times, where he has worked for the past ten years. He has been a news and features reporter, as well as a staff writer for Pacific, The Times' Sunday magazine. He has done freelance work for CBS News and Newsweek magazine and has been published in numerous literary journals, including a literary anthology (Choosing to Emerge) published by HarperCollins in 1993.

The Times nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for his coverage of youth gangs and street subcultures. His work on diversity issues has been widely recognized. Last year, he was the lead writer in a series that won the Penney-Missouri Multicultural Journalism Award.

He has a bachelors degree from the University of Oregon and a master's degree from Stanford University. He lives in Seattle with his daughter.

Frank McCourt was a writing teacher at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan for many years and performed with his brother Malachy in A Couple of Blaguards, a musical review about their Irish youth.

He lives in New York City.

Jack N. Rakove is Professor of History at Stanford University and the author of The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress and James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic.

John F. Burns became chief of The New York Times bureau in New Delhi in 1994. He was previously based in Sarajevo and, before that, Belgrade. In 1993 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for courageous coverage of the strife and destruction in Bosnia.

Mr. Burns was bureau chief in Toronto from 1987 to 1991. From 1984 to 1987, he served as chief of the Peking bureau. In July 1986, he was incarcerated by the Chinese Government for six days on charges of espionage. After an investigation, all charges were dropped, but he was expelled from the country.

From 1981 to 1984, Mr. Burns was bureau chief in Moscow. Between 1976 and 1981, he was assigned to the Johannesburg bureau.

In 1979, Mr. Burns and two other Times correspondents shared the George Polk Award for their reporting from Africa.

Mr. Burns joined The Times in 1975 after covering the life and politics of mainland China from his base in Beijing from 1971 to 1975 for The Toronto Globe and Mail. Before that he was a local and parliamentary reporter for The Globe and Mail.

Mr. Burns was born on Oct. 4, 1944, in Nottingham, England. His family moved to Canada when he was a boy, and he was educated at McGill University in Montreal. In 1980 and 1981 he studied Russian at Harvard, and in 1984 he studied Chinese at Cambridge University. He also speaks French and German.

He is married to Jane Scott-Long; they have two sons and a daughter.

Lisa Pollak has been a general assignment features writer for The Sun since July. She has worked for the Charlotte Observer and the (Raleigh) News & Observers. She holds a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University and a bachelor's degree in American Culture from the University of Michigan. In 1995, she received the Ernie Pyle award for human interest writing. The award recognized six stories about ordinary people dealing with grief, love and everyday life.

She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

A native of Germany and now a U.S. citizen, Lisel Mueller was born on February 8, 1924. She earned a B.A. in sociology at the University of Evansville and did graduate work in comparative literature, with an emphasis on folklore and mythology, at Indiana University. She has been a visiting writer at a number of institutions, including the University of Chicago and Washington University in St. Louis.

Mueller is the author of seven books of poetry: Dependencies (1965); The Private Life (1976), which was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; Voices from the Forest (1977); The Need to Hold Still (1981), which received the National Book Award; Second Language (1986); Waving from Shore (1989), which received the Carl Sandburg Prize and Alive Together: New and Selected Poems (1996). She has also translated several works from the German.

In addition to the National Book Award and the Lamont prize, Mueller has received the Emily Clark Balch Prize, the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize, the English-Speaking Union Prize, the Jacob Glatstein Translation Award, the Theodore Roethke Prize, and a Pushcart Prize.

Mueller lives in Lake Forest, Illinois.

photo: Lucy Mueller