Barry Lopez’s essays and fiction have been appearing in The Georgia Review since 1993; he was the keynote speaker at our third annual Earth Day Program in 2011, and for this year’s eleventh edition he will be our first repeat presenter. His Of Wolves and Men (1978) won the John Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing and was a finalist for the National Book Award—which his Arctic Dreams (1986) won. Lopez’s numerous short-story collections include Outside (Trinity University Press, 2015) and Resistance (Vintage, 2004); also among his more than a dozen volumes are the novella-length fable Crow and Weasel (1990) and (with Debra Gwartney) Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape (Trinity University Press, 2006). A world traveler to more than seventy countries, Barry Lopez has lived for decades on the upper McKenzie River in Oregon.

René Houtrides’ stories have appeared in The Georgia Review (Spring 2007), New Ohio Review, and Mississippi Review. Her play Calamity Jane was produced at New York City’s Wonderhorse Theater, nearly a dozen of her essays have aired on WAMC Northeast Public Radio, and her freelance work has appeared in the New York Times. Born and raised near Manhattan’s Little Italy and Chinatown, she has an MFA in writing from Bard College and is on the faculty of the Juilliard School’s drama division.

Mary Hood, 2014 inductee to the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, is the author of the novel Familiar Heat (1995) and the short-story collections And Venus Is Blue (1986) and How Far She Went (1984). A new collection of stories, A Clear View of the Southern Sky, is forthcoming from the University of South Carolina Press in 2015.

Jim Heynen’s short-short stories have appeared frequently in The Georgia Review. A new collection of his short-shorts, Ordinary Sins: After Theophrastus, is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2014. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

William Gay’s “I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down” was his first-ever publication when it appeared in The Georgia Review in Fall 1998. It became the title piece of his short-fiction collection, published by the Free Press in 2002, and it inspired a feature film—titled That Evening Sun—written and produced in 2009 by Georgia native Scott Teems and starring Hal Holbrook. Gay is also the author of three novels and is at work on others in his Hohenwald, Tennessee, home.

Jack Driscoll’s latest collection, The Goat Fish and the Lover’s Knot (Wayne State University Press, 2017), received the 2018 Michigan Library Foundation Award for fiction. His forthcoming “New & Selected” will include eleven stories previously published in The Georgia Review and dating back to 1987. He currently teaches in Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program in Oregon.

Phil Condon is the author of the short-story collections Nine Ten Again (2009), winner of the 2008 Elixir Press Fiction Award, and River Street (Southern Methodist University Press, 1994); he has also published a novel, Clay Center (Eastern Washington University Press, 2004), and an essay collection, Montana Surround (Johnson Books, 2004). The recipient of an NEA Fellowship in fiction (1993) and a Best Novel Award from the New Orleans Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society (2001), Condon teaches writing and literature in the environmental studies program at the University of Montana.

Robert Olen Butler has published twelve novels—most recently Hell (Grove Press, 2009)—and six volumes of short stories, including A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (Henry Holt, 1992), which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. “This is Earl Sandt” was created in full, from first conception to final story, in seventeen two-hour episodes on a live webcast, which can be downloaded for free by searching for “Inside Creative Writing” at iTunes. Butler teaches creative writing at Florida State University.

Frederick Busch (1941–2006) was a prolific short-story writer and an award-winning novelist. Professor of literature at Colgate University from 1966 to 2003, he authored twenty-seven books and more than one hundred short stories and essays. His many honors include an American Academy of Arts and Letters award for fiction in 1986 and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction in 1991.