Mary Odden’s essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, Nimrod, and Northwest Review, and have been anthologized in Under Northern Lights: Writers and Artists View the Northern Landscape and elsewhere. She owned and ran a community newspaper in Glennallen, Alaska, the Copper River Record, for five years; she now works as an aviation dispatcher for the National Park Service during the summers and in the winter teaches English at Prince William Sound Community College.

Thomas Aslin holds a BA from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Montana, where he studied with the late Richard Hugo, Madeline DeFrees, and William Kittredge. Aslin’s most recent publications include a second edition of the poetry collection A Moon Over Wings (Tebot Bach, 2013) and a chapbook, Sweet Smoke (2006). Currently he is working on a collection of essays and memoir writing and is nearly finished with a book of poems titled “This, That, and the Other.”

Richard Hugo’s twenty-odd books (two of them posthumous) include The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir (1973), The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (1979), The Right Madness on Skye (1980), and The Real West Marginal Way: A Poet’s Autobiography (1986). Born in White Center, Washington, on 21 December 1923, Hugo served as a bombardier in the Mediterranean during World War II. When he returned home he enrolled at the University of Washington, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in creative writing. After working as a technical writer at Boeing for thirteen years, Hugo was hired at the University of Montana, where he taught for almost eighteen years. He died on 22 October 1982, at the age of fifty-eight.

Thomas Aslin holds a BA from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Montana, where he studied with the late Richard Hugo, Madeline DeFrees, and William Kittredge. Aslin’s most recent publications include a second edition of the poetry collection A Moon Over Wings (Tebot Bach, 2013) and a chapbook, Sweet Smoke (2006). Currently he is working on a collection of essays and memoir writing and is nearly finished with a book of poems titled “This, That, and the Other.”

Rebecca Emlinger Roberts’ essays, short stories, and poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including the Massachusetts Review, the Antioch Review, and (three times previously) the Georgia Review. One of her GR essays, “The Art of Looking Down” (Fall 2008), was listed as a notable essay in the 2009 edition of Best American Essays.