Lucy McCauley's life as a traveler began on her fourth birthday, when she boarded a plane with her family to Panama, where they lived three years. Now a writer of travel literature and other creative nonfiction, she has edited three essay collections for the Travelers' Tales series of books: Spain (1995); Women in the Wild (1998); and A Woman's Path (2000). Her own essays — set in such places as Latin America, Spain, Italy and Eastern Europe — have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, Harvard Review, The International Quarterly, The Los Angeles Times, Salon.com and in a number of Travelers' Tales anthologies. Once an editor at Harvard Business Review, McCauley has also worked as a freelance writer/editor of academic and business prose for more than a decade, writing case studies in Central and South America for several departments at Harvard University, working as a contributing editor to Fast Company magazine, and as a "book doctor" for publishing houses.
 In 1999, after 15 years in Cambridge, Mass., McCauley moved to Dallas, where she lives with her husband, Charles Bambach, a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Dallas. She is now at work on a book based on a journey she made to Turkey, where she followed in the footsteps of an ancestor who'd lived there a century before.