Alison Hawthorne Deming is the author of three books of nonfiction — Writing the Sacred into the Real, The Edges of the Civilized World, and Temporary Homelands — and the author of three books of poetry: Genius Loci, The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence, and Science and Other Poems, winner of the Academy of American Poet’s Walt Whitman Award. Alison is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona.

David Gessner is assistant professor of creative nonfiction at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he also edits the literary journal of place, Ecotone. He is the author of six books of literary nonfiction, including Sick of Nature, Return of the Osprey, and Soaring with Fidel. David’s essay, “Learning to Surf,” which appeared in Orion magazine, won the John Burroughs Award for Best Nature Essay of 2006.

Lauret Savoy writes across threads of cultural identity to explore their shaping by relationship with, and dislocation from, the land. She is a woman of mixed African-American, Euro-American, and Native-American heritage, and is a photographer and professor of geology and environmental studies at Mount Holyoke College.  Lauret edited The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World and Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology; and co-authored Living with the Changing California Coast.