Andrew McCarthy is a director, an award winning travel writer, and an actor. He is an editor-at-large at National Geographic Traveler, and has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Travel+Leisure, AFAR, Men’s Journal, Bon Appetit, and many others. He has received six Lowell Thomas awards, and been named Travel Journalist of the Year by The Society of American Travel Writers.

His travel memoir, The Longest Way Home, became a New York Times Best Seller, and the Financial Times named it one of the Best Books of the year. He served as guest editor for the prestigious Best American Travel series in 2015. Just Fly Away is his debut novel published by Algonquin (March 2017).

He made his professional début at 19 in Class, and has appeared in dozens of films, including such iconic movies as Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo’s Fire, Less Then Zero, and cult favorites Weekend At Bernie’s and Mannequin.

He has starred on Broadway and on television, most recently appearing in The Family, on ABC. McCarthy is also a highly regarded television director; having helmed Orange is the New Black, The Blacklist, Grace and Frankie, and many others.

Pico Iyer is the author of twelve books, on subjects as varied as Cuba, globalism, Graham Greene and the XIVth Dalai Lama, and writes up to 100 articles a year for magazines from The New York Review of Books to Harper’s, and Vanity Fair to Wired. He delivered popular TED talks in both 2013 and 2014—his most recent book is a small TED Original on the theme of stillness, and his talk on the nature of home attracted millions of viewers—and he has written a film script for Miramax, done many liner notes for Leonard Cohen and written introductions to more than 50 other books. Born in Oxford, England, and educated at Eton, Oxford and Harvard, he has been based, since 1987, in Western Japan, while traveling widely, everywhere from North Korea to Ethiopia and Yemen to Easter Island.