Brenda Miller is the author of five essay collections, most recently An Earlier Life (Ovenbird Books, 2016), and co-author of Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction (originally published by McGraw-Hill in 2003 and with a third edition coming out this year) with Suzanne Paola and The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World (Skinner House Books, 2012) with Holly J. Hughes. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, Sweet, Bellevue Literary Review, and Psaltery and Lyre. Recipient of six Pushcart Prizes, she is a professor of English at Western Washington University and an associate faculty member at the Rainier Writing Workshop.

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.

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.

Albert Goldbarth is the author of more than twenty-five books of poetry, most recently Selfish (2015), Everyday People (2012), and The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972–2007 (2007), all from Graywolf Press. He has twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.

Judith Ortiz Cofer (1952–2016), as a young girl, emigrated with her family from Puerto Rico to Paterson, New Jersey; when she was a teenager her family relocated to Augusta. Ortiz Cofer was the author of several novels, including If I Could Fly (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), Call Me Maria (2004), and The Line of the Sun (1989); poetry collections such as A Love Story Beginning in Spanish (2005), Reaching for the Mainland (1995), and Terms of Survival (1987); a memoir, The Cruel Country (UGA Press, 2015); two essay collections, Lessons From a Writer’s Life (Heinemann Books, 2011) and Woman in Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer (2000); and many other works, including three children’s titles with Piñata Books / Arte Público Press—¡A Bailar! (2011), The Poet Upstairs (2012), and Animal Jamboree / La fiesta de los animales (2012). Ortiz Cofer’s work appeared in The Georgia Review, Southern Review, the Kenyon Review, Glamour, and many other periodicals, as well as in numerous textbooks and anthologies. Ortiz Cofer, who in 2010 was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, was the Regents’ and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.

Naomi Shihab Nye’s most recent books are Famous (Wings Press, 2015), illustrated by Lisa Desimini, and The Turtle of Oman (Greenwillow, 2014). Nye has held Lannan, Guggenheim, and Witter Bynner fellowships, and she has won a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, the Robert Creeley Prize, “The Betty Prize” from Poets House for service to poetry, and two Jane Addams Children’s Book Awards.