Peggy Shumaker's newest book is Toucan Nest: Poems of Costa Rica. Her memoir is Just Breathe Normally. A former Alaska State Writer Laureate, she edits the Alaska Literary Series and Boreal Books, publishing literature and fine art from Alaska. She teaches at the Rainier Writing Workshop and the MFA at Pacific Lutheran University.

Gary Snyder, best known as a poet, is an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. He is the author of over twenty books, including Turtle Island, winner of the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He served for many years as a faculty member at the University of California, Davis, and has been a translator of ancient Chinese and modern Japanese literary texts into English.

Eva Saulitis, a writer and marine biologist, has studied the killer whales of Prince William Sound, Alaska for twenty-five years. She is the author of a book of essays Leaving Resurrection: Chronicles of a Whale Scientist, the poetry collection Many Ways to Say It, and Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss among Vanishing Orcas. She has received fellowships from the Rasmuson Foundation and the Alaska State Council on the Arts and is an associate professor in the University of Alaska Low-Residency MFA program.

Robert Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He is the author of many books of poetry, including Sun Under Wood, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Time and Materials, which won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He has also written several volumes of criticism, including Twentieth Century Pleasures, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has translated many of Czeslaw Milosz’s works into English. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.