Reg Saner’s prose and poetry have appeared in more than a hundred and fifty literary magazines and in over sixty anthologies. Among other honors, his previous writings, all set in the American West, have won several national prizes. His poetry collection, Climbing into the Roots (1976) received the first Walt Whitman Award as conferred by the Academy of American Poets and the Copernicus Society of America. His second book, So This Is the Map (1981), was a National Poetry Series “Open Competition” winner, selected by Derek Walcott. He has won a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Creede Repertory Theater Award, the State of Colorado Governor’s Award, and has been an invited Resident Scholar at the Rockefeller Fondazione Culturale in Bellagio, Italy, and received the Wallace Stegner Award conferred by the Center of the American West.

David Wagoner has published nineteen books of poems—most recently After the Point of No Return (Copper Canyon Press, 2012)—and ten novels, including The Escape Artist (1965), which Francis Ford Coppola made into a movie in 1982. Winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and many other honors, he was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets for twenty-three years, edited Poetry Northwest from 1966 to 2002, and is professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington. He teaches in the low-residency MFA program of the Whidbey Island Writers Workshop.