Michael Vitez was born on April 11, 1957, in Washingtion, D.C. He grew up in northern Virginia and graduated from the University of Virginia in 1979. He worked at the Virginian-Pilot/Ledger-Star, The Washington Star and The Hartford Courant before coming to The Inquirer in 1985.

Vitez has spent most of his time in Philadelphia as a general-assignment feature writer. In 1994-95, he was a Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan. Since his return to Philadelphia in the summer of 1995, he has covered aging.

Above all, Vitez loves telling stories. He tries to write stories that surprise -- that make readers grin. "I try to celebrate ordinary people around us by showing how ordinary people sometimes do extraordinary things."

Ron Cortes was born in San Antonio, Texas, March 29, 1945. He graduated from the University of Texas with a degree in math in 1966, teaching for ten years at the secondary level in Texas, California, and Tehran, Iran.

In 1978 Cores returned to the University of Texas for post graduate work in communications. He started as a staff photographer at the Wilmington (DE) News Journal in 1981, moving to The Philadelphia Inquirer six years later. Cortes has covered stories in Cuba, Bosnia, Ethiopia, and Haiti.

He is married with a 17-year-old son.

April Saul was born on May 27, 1955, in New York City, and grew up in East Brunswick, New Jersey. She received a bachelor's degree in English from Tufts University and a master's degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota.

In 1980, Saul became a staff photographer at the Baltimore Sun and the following year joined the photography staff at The Philadelphia Inquirer. In 1983 and 1984 she was named the Pennsylvania Photographer of the Year, and her picture stories in the Inquirer Magazine have been awarded the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the Budapest Award in the World Press Photo Competition, the National Headliners Award, and three first place feature picture story awards in the Pictures of the Year contest. Saul became the first recipient of the Nikon/National Press Photographers Documentary Sabbatical Grant in 1986 for her work on the Hmong refugees in America, and she has been a Pulitzer finalist twice.

She lives in Haddon Heights, New Jersey, with her two children, Amy and Nicholas.