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.

Scott Russell Sanders lives in the hill country of southern Indiana, where he has written more than twenty books of fiction and nonfiction, including A Conservationist Manifesto (Indiana University Press, 2009) and Hunting for Hope (Beacon Press, 1998). His most recent books (also from IU Press) are Stone Country: Then & Now (2017), a documentary narrative made in collaboration with photographer Jeffrey Wolin, and Dancing in Dreamtime (2016), a collection of eco-science-fiction stories. He is currently finishing his portion of Ordinary Wealth, fifty brief tales written in response to photographs by Peter Forbes.