Ada Limón is the twenty-fourth U.S. Poet Laureate as well as the author of The Hurting Kind and five other collections of poems.

Gaia Vince is the author of Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made, which received the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, the largest international prize celebrating science writing for non-specialist audiences. Her work has been featured on the BBC and in the Guardian, Scientific American, Science, and elsewhere.

Larry Tremblay is a writer, director, actor, and Kathakali specialist. He is the author of thirty books, including The Orange Grove, and more than twenty plays, which have been translated and produced in more than a dozen languages. He lives in Montreal.

James P. Lenfestey is the author of Seeking the Cave: A Pilgrimage to Cold Mountain, a Minnesota Book Award finalist, and multiple collections of essays and poems, including A Marriage Book. He is chair of the Literary Witnesses poetry series, teaches at the Mackinac Island Poetry Festival, and lives in Minneapolis with his wife.

Karen Leona Anderson is the author of Receipt and a previous collection, Punish honey. She received a PhD from Cornell University with a dissertation on poetry and science. She is an associate professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

Richard Wagamese (1955-2017) was one of Canada’s foremost writers, and one of the leading indigenous writers in North America. He was the author of several acclaimed memoirs and more than a dozen novels, including Indian Horse, Medicine Walk, and Dream Wheels.

Chris Dombrowski is the author of The River You Touch: Making a Life on Moving Water. He is also the author of Body of Water: A Sage, A Seeker, and the World’s Most Elusive Fish, and of three acclaimed collections of poems. Currently the Director of the Creative Writing program at the University of Montana, he lives with his family in Missoula.

Max Ritvo (1990-2016) wrote Four Reincarnations in New York and Los Angeles over the course of a long battle with cancer. He was also the author of The Final Voicemails, edited and introduced by Louise Glück, and co-authored Letters from Max with Sarah Ruhl; both books were published posthumously. Ritvo’s poetry has appeared in the New Yorker and Poetry, among many other publications.