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Elizabeth Royte is a contributing writer for Outside magazine. A recent Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow, she has written for The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, National Geographic, The New Yorker and Rolling Stone. Over the years, Elizabeth has poked around maggot masses in pig carcasses, attended clandestine cockfights, worked the mosh pit at a Biohazard concert, chased African hunting dogs in Botswana, contracted scabies in Lesotho, mediated between warring growers of giant pumpkins, and she once walked into a Texas cave just as six million Mexican freetail bats were flying out.

Royte's work has been included in The Best American Science Writing 2004 (Ecco/HarperCollins), and her second book, Garbageland: On the Secret Trail of Trash, will be published by Little, Brown in the spring of 2005. You can read some of her garbage scraps at POV: Borders, PBS's Webby Award-winning website. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and their daughter, who likes messing around with animals almost as much as her mother does.