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.

Deidre Schipani 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.

Marion Sullivan is culinary programs specialist at the Culinary Institute of Charleston. She also writes about food and travel and consults on cookbook production.

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.