Alan Weisman is an award-winning journalist whose reports have appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Orion, Audubon, Mother Jones, Discover, and on NPR, among others. He is a senior producer for Homelands Productions and teaches international journalism at the University of Arizona. Aside from Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World, he is the author of four other books, The World Without Us (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2007), An Echo In My Blood (Harcourt Brace, Inc., 1999); La Frontera: The United States Border With Mexico (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986); and We, Immortals (Pocket Books, 1979).

Weisman has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Colombia, writer-in-residence at the Altos de Chavón Escuela de Arte y Diseño in the Dominican Republic, the John Farrar Fellow in Nonfiction at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Magazine. Among his radio awards shared with his Homelands colleagues are a Robert F. Kennedy Citation, the Harry Chapin/World Hunger Year award, and Brazil's Prèmio Nacional de Jornalismo Radiofônico. He has also received a Four Corners Award for Best Nonfiction Book; a Los Angeles Press Club Award for Best Feature Story; and a Best of the West Award in Journalism. His book, Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World, won the 1998 Social Inventions Award from the London-based Global Ideas Bank.