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.

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.

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.