Ken Burger is a native of Allendale, S.C., and a graduate of the University of Georgia. He joined The Post and Courier in 1984 and served as the paper's Washington, D.C., correspondent in the mid-1980s. From 1988 until 2008, Burger was executive sports editor and wrote an award-winning sports column. He was hailed as one of the country's best sports columnists by the Associated Press three times. He won numerous writing awards in South Carolina and was honored as S.C. Journalist of the Year in 1996. Burger published his first novel, "Swallow Savannah," in 2008. He began writing a metro column for The Post and Courier in January 2009.

Brian Hicks is a senior writer with The Post and Courier. In his 10 years with the paper, he has covered a wide variety of subjects, including politics and news of the weird (also known as politics). His reporting has won 20 S.C. Press Association Awards, including Journalist of the Year in 1998. He is also the author or co-author of four books, including the local history yarn "Raising the Hunley," which was so popular it was even translated into Czechoslovakian. Really.

Warren Peper is one of the best-known and most trusted faces in the Lowcountry. He is a graduate of North Charleston High School and Charleston Southern University. During his 35 years as a local TV news and sports anchor, he received many awards, including a Peabody award for his coverage of Hurricane Hugo, an Emmy for Broadcast Excellence - Local News, and Sportscaster of the Year for South Carolina multiple times. His sports coverage has included the Super Bowl, the Final Four and the Masters, as well as play--by-play for both Southern Conference basketball and S.E.C. football. He also has interviewed such well-known people as Muhammad Ali and former President George Bush. He covered five presidential debates in 2008. His broadcasting excellence continues on postandcourier.com through his Man on the Street interviews, his half hour news show "In the News" on Comcast Cable, and through his work with Lowcountrymarketplace.com.

Frank Wooten, a Charleston native, is a graduate of St. Andrews High School, Trident Technical College (chemical engineering technology) and Clemson University (history major, German minor). His newspaper experience includes stints at The Post and Courier (1979-81, 82-84, 90-present), the now-defunct Baltimore News-American (1984-1985) and the now-defunct Dallas Times Herald (1986-90). He has worked at newspapers as a photographer, sportswriter, sports copy editor, sports layout man, sports editor and TV/Radio columnist. He became associate editor of The Post and Courier in 1998 and assistant editor in 2009. He writes editorials and a weekly Commentary Page column.

Robert Behre graduated from Dartmouth College in 1985 with a degree in English and spent five years writing for the Greenville (S.C.) Piedmont before moving to Charleston in 1990. He has covered city and county government for The Post and Courier and also has served as an assistant city editor. His weekly column on architecture and preservation began in 1996. The column looks at the people and decisions involved in saving old buildings, and designing new ones that people will want to save, all with an eye toward what gives the Lowcountry its unique sense of place.

Dottie Ashley reviews theater and dance and writes about local arts organizations. She is the winner of the 2003 Elizabeth O'Neill Verner Award given to the outstanding arts writer in the state, and twice won a National Partners of the Americas Journalist Fellowship to Cali and Bogota, Columbia. She worked for The State newspaper in Columbia for 15 years, where she won the 1985 American Dance Festival Critics Award. Ashley has covered the Spoleto Festival USA since its founding in 1977. She has a master's degree from the University of South Carolina.

Tony Bertauski, who lives in Summerville, has been sharing his gardening expertise with Post and Courier readers since August 2004. A horticulture instructor at Trident Technical College, he has a master's degree in horticulture from the University of Illinois and a bachelor's degree in plant and soil science from Southern Illinois University. Bertauski is the author of two textbooks, "Plan Graphics for the Landscape Designer" and "Designing the Landscape."

Rebekah Bradford is a former columnist for Romantic Times magazine, a member of Romance Writer's of America, an avid reader of romantic fiction and a novelist in search of a publisher. She is a 1993 graduate of Columbia College and recently moved to Charleston from Boston where she lived for a decade. Her column for The Post and Courier was launched in 2006.

Bryce Donovan is the humor columnist for The Post and Courier. According to his mother, his weekly column is "easily the fifth or sixth best thing in the Thursday newspaper." Each week he ventures outside the building to try out new, weird and exciting things. When he's done, he sits down at a computer and writes a first-person account of just how much company time he wasted. For even more Bryce, check out his blog, The Bryce is Write.

With 10 cookbooks and more than 300 television episodes to her credit, Nathalie Dupree is one of America's best known experts on Southern cuisine. She has been Chef of three restaurants, one in Majorca, Spain, one in Social Circle, Georgia, and one in Richmond, Virginia. She was the Director of Rich's Cooking School, a full participation cooking school in Atlanta. Today Dupree lives in Charleston with her husband, author Jack Bass.

Fran Hawk writes the children's books column and travel stories for The Post and Courier. Her first children's book, "The Story of the H. L. Hunley and Queenie's Coin" was published by Sleeping Bear Press in 2004. She has worked at several local schools and currently serves as the librarian at Clark Corporate Academy, and magnet high school in Charleston County. She has four children and lives with her husband in Mount Pleasant.

Wevonneda Minis writes genealogy columns and lifestyle features. She has 15 years of experience researching family history in the United States, Republic of Guinea, England, Scotland and the Bahamas. She teaches workshops for the Family History Center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and serves on a Lowcountry database initiative to make 18th and 19th century records about African Americans more accessible. In addition, she is a member of the National Genealogical Society, South Carolina Genealogical Society and South Carolina Historical Society. She graduated from Regis College in Weston, Mass. and formerly covered environmental policy in Washington, D.C.

John Nelson, the curator of the Herbarium at the University of South Carolina, began offering his weekly "Mystery Plant" column to readers of The Post and Courier in 2005.

Olivia Pool began covering the Lowcountry's visual arts scene for the Preview section in 2006.

David Quick has been covering health and active outdoor lifestyles for The Post and Courier for a decade. He is an avid runner and triathlete.

Brenda Rindge has worked at a variety of reporting and editing jobs for The Post and Courier and currently covers parenting and family issues for the Thursday Family Life features section. She and her husband, Post and Courier deputy sports editor Fred Rindge, are the parents of four children, giving her plenty of ideas for column topics. For more, see Brenda's Family Life blog

Jennifer Berry Hawes was an award-winning features writer for The Post and Courier before she left full-time employment to stay home with her children. She writes about life as a "stay-at-home" Mom in the Home & Garden section on Sundays and the Family Life section on Tuesdays.

Teresa Taylor has a 26-year career in culinary arts, teaching and writing. For the past 10 years, she has been manager of culinary services for Lunds and Byerly's, a chain of 23 upscale supermarkets in the upper Midwest. She directed the company's School of Culinary Arts, managed retail culinary services and oversaw publications, resource material and a Web site. Schipani was a restaurant critic and food writer for the 70,000-circulation Minnesota Monthly magazine from 1991-96. She wrote a food and wine column for Patuxent Publishing Co., a group of weekly newspapers in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., area, from 1981-88. She was a recipe developer for "Prevention's Quick and Healthy Low Fat Cooking: Featuring All American Food" (Rodale Press, 1995) and was the editor, test kitchen manager and food writer for The Byerly Bag, a supermarket publication, from 1997 to 2006. From 1982-86, she owned and operated a full-service catering business in the Baltimore-Washington area. Schipani received a diploma, with honors, in classical French cooking from the L'Academie de Cuisine in Bethesda, Md., in 1982. She has a bachelor's degree in biology and chemistry from Rosemont College in Pennsylvania and master's degree in education, magna cum laude, from Loyola College in Baltimore. She also took courses in restaurant management from Howard Community College in Maryland, attended the International Association of Culinary Professionals Master Class Program and has earned the highest level of certification, Certified Culinary Professional, from the IACP, demonstrating competency in food safety, nutrition, food science and world and U.S. cuisines.

Teresa Taylor is an assistant features editor for The Post and Courier who oversees the Food, Home & Garden and Petc. sections. Her first love and primary responsibility is the food beat, which she took over in 2003 after more than 20 years at the newspaper in other editing positions. She writes stories for Wednesday's Food section and a recipe exchange column for home cooks called "Now We're Cooking," which appears in Sunday editions. Taylor joined the company in 1983 as a copy editor for The News and Courier, having previously worked for Gannett's Westchester-Rockland newspaper group in White Plains, N.Y. She became weekend editor in 1987, news editor of The Evening Post in 1990, and executive business editor of The Post and Courier in 1991.

Born in Asheboro, N.C., Bill Thompson is a graduate of the Universiy of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has worked as a feature writer, book review editor, film critic and columnist for The Post and Courier since 1980. A former sports writer in Virginia and in Florida, he also contributes articles on science and travel.

Marjory Wentworth, of Sullivan's Island, is South Carolina's poet laureate. Her poetry column for The Post and Courier began in 2006.