Brian Laidlaw is the author of The Stuntman and The Mirrormaker. An accomplished musician, he has toured widely in the United States and Europe. He is a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s MFA program in poetry and is currently pursuing a PhD in creative writing at the University of Denver.

Melissa Kwasny is the author of seven collections of poems, including The Cloud Path, Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today, Pictograph, and The Nine Senses, which contains a set of poems that won the Poetry Society of America’s 2008 Cecil Hemly Award.

Rosa Alice Branco is the prizewinning author of Cattle of the Lord and numerous collections of poems in her native Portuguese, which have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, and Arabic. She teaches at the Institute of Art and Design in Porto, Portugal.

Chris Santiago is the author of Tula, winner of the 2016 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, selected by A. Van Jordan. He teaches literature, sound culture, and creative writing at the University of St. Thomas.

Beth Dooley is the author of In Winter’s Kitchen: Growing Roots and Breaking Bread in the Northern Heartland, a Minnesota Book Award finalist. She has also written six cookbooks, including, with Lucia Watson, Savoring the Seasons of the Northern Heartland (a James Beard Nominee).

Justin Boening is the author of Not on the Last Day, But on the Very Last, a 2015 National Poetry Series winner. He is currently a senior associate editor at Poetry Northwest, and is a founding editor at Horsethief Books.

Deni Ellis Béchard is the author of eight previous books of fiction and nonfiction, including Vandal Love, winner of the 2007 Commonwealth Writers Prize, and Into the Sun, winner of the 2016 Midwest Book Award for Literary Fiction and selected by CBC/Ra

Shawn Otto is an award-winning science advocate, author, and educator. He is the author of The War On Science: Who’s Waging It, Why It Matters, What We Can Do About It and the cofounder of ScienceDebate.org. His novel, Sins of Our Fathers, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and his film House of Sand and Fog was nominated for three Academy Awards.

A native of Edgefield, South Carolina, J. Drew Lanham is the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. He is a birder, naturalist, hunter-conservationist, and an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University.

Eric Pankey is the author of numerous books of poems, most recently Augury and Crow-Work. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in such journals and anthologies as the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and Best American Poetry. He is a professor of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University and resides in Fairfax, Virginia.