THOMAS LOWE FLEISCHNER
Thomas Lowe Fleischner is the founding director of the Natural History Institute at Prescott College. He has conducted field studies from Alaska to Antarctica and co-founded the North Cascades Institute in Washington State. A naturalist and conservation biologist, he is the author of two books—Singing Stone: A Natural History of the Escalante Canyons and Desert Wetlands, and editor of a third, The Way of Natural History. He is editing a new anthology, tentatively titled Nature Love Medicine.
CHIP WARD
Chip Ward drove a bookmobile, led campaigns to make polluters accountable, co-founded HEAL Utah, became the assistant director of the Salt Lake City Library System, served on the board of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, and then retired to Torrey, Utah, where his journey began. His book, Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West, describes his political adventures in grassroots empowerment. His essays on conservation and ecological citizenship appear at Tomdispatch.com and across the web.
Lauret Savoy
Tracing memory threads Lauret Edith Savoy's life and work: unearthing what is buried, remembering what is fragmented, shattered, eroded. A woman of African American, Euro-American, and Native American heritage, she writes about the stories we tell of ourselves in this land. Her books include Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape; The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity and the Natural World; Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology.
mark udall
Mark Udall was a United States Senator for the state of Colorado from 2009 to 2015. He has proposed legislation to support renewable energy, expand national parks, and protect natural resources.
charles wilkinson
Prior to joining the faculty of Colorado Law School, Charles Wilkinson practiced law with private firms in Phoenix and San Francisco and then with the Native American Rights Fund. In 1975, he became a law professor, teaching at the law schools of the University of Oregon, Michigan and Minnesota before moving to Colorado in 1987. His primary specialties are federal public land law and Indian law. In addition to his many articles in law reviews, popular journals, and newspapers, his fourteen books include the standard law texts on public land law and on Indian law.
BROOKE WILLIAMS
Brooke Williams is the author of four books including The Story of My Heart (by Richard Jefferies as rediscovered by Brooke Williams and Terry Tempest Williams), and Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness. His work has been published in Outside, The Huffington Post, Orion, and Saltfront. He has spent the last thirty years advocating for wilderness, most recently with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance in Moab, Utah. He and Terry Tempest Williams have been married for forty years and divide their time between Utah and Wyoming.
KEVIN T JONES
is an archaeologist and writer in Salt Lake City. He served as state archaeologist of Utah for seventeen years. His anthropological novel The Shrinking Jungle is set among the Ache, hunter-gatherers of eastern Paraguay, with whom he lived and studied as part of his dissertation research. Jones plays mandolin and sings in the bluegrass band The Lab Dogs. His favorite color is clear.
JANA RICHMAN
Jana Richman is the author of a memoir, Riding in the Shadows of Saints: A Woman’s Story of Motorcycling the Mormon Trail, and two novels, The Last Cowgirl, which won the 2009 Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction, and The Ordinary Truth. Jana’s provocative prose has been compared to that of Pam Houston, Barbara Kingsolver and Pat Conroy.
JIM ENOTE
Jim is the director of the Colorado Plateau Foundation and the director of the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center. He serves on the boards of the Grand Canyon Trust and Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation and he is a senior advisor for Mountain Cultures at the Mountain Institute. He is a National Geographic Society Explorer; a New Mexico Community Luminaria; and an E.F. Shumacher Society Fellow.
Anne terashima
Anne Terashima is from Salt Lake City, and holds a degree in English and Creative Writing from Westminster College. As associate editor and publicist at Torrey House Press, she has enjoyed nurturing the words of others by helping bring their books to publication. Anne loves to hike, bike, and run in Utah's mountains and red rock. She is pursuing graduate studies at DePaul University.
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS
Terry Tempest Williams has been called "a citizen writer," a writer who speaks and speaks out eloquently on behalf of an ethical stance toward life. A naturalist and fierce advocate for freedom of speech, she has consistently shown us how environmental issues are social issues that ultimately become matters of justice.
MARY ELLEN HANNIBAL
Mary Ellen Hannibal is a Bay Area writer and editor focusing on science and culture. Hannibal’s book The Spine of the Continent is about a social, geographical, and scientific effort to save nature along the Rocky Mountains. A “thoroughly satisfying gem,” The Spine of the Continent chronicles landscapes, people, critters, and issues along the Spine. Hannibal’s other books include Evidence of Evolution, Leaves & Pods, and Good Parenting Through Your Divorce. A former book review and travel editor, Hannibal is Chair of the California Book Awards.
SAM RUSHFORTH
Sam Rushforth has been a university professor and dean for more than forty-five years, teaching and researching terrestrial and aquatic biology and ecology, especially in the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau. His work has changed environmental policies and enhanced oversight through active participation in the political process and through his many committed students, now engaged in environmental and conservation work in venues across Earth. He lives in Orem, Utah.
STEPHEN TRIMBLE
Stephen Trimble tells stories—in words and photographs—about the land and people of the West. Trimble teaches writing in the Honors College at the University of Utah and spent a year as a Wallace Stegner Centennial Fellow at the University of Utah's Tanner Humanities Center. As writer, editor, and photographer, Trimble has published more than twenty award-winning books in a career that spans nearly four decades.
PHYLLIS BARBER
Phyllis Barber has published eight books, as well as short stories and essays in many periodicals, including Agni, Missouri Review, North American Review, Weber:The Contemporary West, among others.
bruce babbitt
Bruce Babbitt served as the 16th governor of Arizona from 1978 - 1987, and as the United States Secretary of the Interior from 1993 - 2001.
simon ortiz
A leading figure in the Native American literary renaissance that emerged in the 1960s, Simon J. Ortiz has published short fiction and non-fiction prose in addition to poetry. Whatever form his writing takes, though, it is concerned with modern man’s alienation from others, from himself, and from his environment—urging as a solution our meaningful re-connection with the wisdom of ancestral spirits and with our Mother Earth.
BROOKE LARSEN
Brooke Larsen is an organizer of Uplift, a climate action community for young people across the Colorado Plateau. She worked as program coordinator at State of the Rockies after graduating from
Colorado College in environmental policy and is an incoming student at the University of Utah Environmental Humanities Graduate Program. She lives in Salt Lake City.
DAVID GESSNER
"David Gessner has been a font of creativity ever since the 1980s, when he published provocative political cartoons in that famous campus magazine, the Harvard Crimson. These days he’s a naturalist, a professor and a master of the art of telling humorous and thought-provoking narratives about unusual people in out-of-the way-places. To his highly original body of work, he brings a sense of awe for the untamed universe and a profound appreciation for the raucous literature of the West. “All the Wild That Remains” ought to be devoured by everyone who cares about the Earth and its future." - The San Francisco Chronicle
JUAN PALMA
Juan Palma was Utah' BLM director for over a decade, and was known for his ability to build bridges between public land constituents. He currently works as the Nevada Director of The Nature Conservacy.
REGINA lopez WHITESKUNK
Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk is the head councilwoman of Ute Mountain Ute Tribe and a member of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition. She lives in Towaoc.
Alastair Lee Bitsoi
Alastair Bitsoi (Navajo) is a freelance writer from Naschitti, New Mexico. He worked as a reporter for the Navajo Times from 2011 to 2015, and is pursuing a graduate degree in public health from New York University’s College of Global Public Health.
DAVID LEE
David Lee, officially retired but still guest teaching, splits his time between Mesquite, Nevada; Boulder, Utah; and Seaside, Oregon, where he scribbles and wanders available trails and byways, all
at about the same rate and pace. His new book, Bluebonnets, Firewheels, and Brown Eyed Susans: Women of Bandera 1948-1962, is forthcoming. He served as Utah’s first poet laureate from 1997-2002 and was a finalist for United States poet laureate.
JEN J QUINTANO
Jen Jackson Quintano made her home in the desert for a decade, finding stories and strength in the sweep of southern Utah's Canyon Country. Her landscape-inspired essays have been widely published, and her debut book, Blow Sand in His Soul: Bates Wilson, the Heart of Canyonlands, tells the story of the “father of Canyonlands National Park.” She now lives with her family in Sandpoint, Idaho, where she runs an arborist business with her husband and is writing her next book.
Gary Paul Nabhan
Gary Paul Nabhan is an internationally celebrated nature writer, agrarian activist and ethnobiologist who taught tangible works on conserving the links between biodiversity and cultural diversity.
For such work, Nabhan has been honored as a pioneer and creative force in the "local food movement" and seed saving community by Utne Reader, Mother Earth News, New York Times, Bioneers, and Time Magazine.
MARY SOJOURNER
"Writing is as personal as desire – and as uncontrollable. Words are my road trip, volatile lover, relentless boss, weapon, and instant transport out of where I do not want to be. Most often when I write, I walk a lifeline between intuition and discipline. Without the first, the stories are dead on the page; without the second, my reader would be lured into lush and meaningless chaos. I am afraid – always – that when I sit down to write that the words will be gone."
KAREN SHEPHERD
A successful businesswoman and Utah state legislator, Karen Shepherd won election to the U.S. House in 1992, the “Year of the Woman.” Representing a competitive district with conservative leanings, Congresswoman Shepherd in her brief congressional career highlighted the promises and pitfalls of a period when power in the House was shifting from one political party to another.
GEORGE HANDLEY
George Handley is Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities at Brigham Young University. He co-edited Stewardship and the Environment: LDS Perspectives on Nature and is the author of the environmental memoir, Home Waters: A Year of Recompenses on the Provo River. A founding board member of LDS Earth Stewardship, he has served as a trustee of the Utah chapter of The Nature Conservancy, member of the Sustainability and Natural Resources Committee for the city of Provo, and board chair of Utah Interfaith Power & Light.
JOEL LONG
Joel Long’s book Winged Insects won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. His books Lessons in Disappearance and Knowing Time by Light were published by Blaine Creek Press in 2010. His chapbooks, Chopin’s Preludes and Saffron Beneath Every Frostwere published from Elik Press. His poems have appeared in Interim, Gulf Coast, Rhino, Bitter Oleander, Crab Orchard Review,Bellingham Review, Sou'wester, Prairie Schooner, Willow Springs, The Pinch, Quarterly West, and Seattle Review and anthologized in American Poetry: the Next Generation, Essential Love, Fresh Water, and I Go to the Ruined Place:Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights.
CHRISTOPHER COKINOS
Christopher Cokinos is the director of the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Arizona, and author of the literary nonfiction books The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars and Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds, both from Tarcher/Penguin, as well as Bodies, of the Holocene, a lyric prose collection in Truman State University Press’s Contemporary Nonfiction Series. His poetry chapbook, Held as Earth, is out from Finishing Line Press.
JACQUELINE KEELER
Jacqueline Keeler is a Navajo/Yankton Dakota Sioux writer living in Portland, Oregon. She has been published in Salon.com, Earth Island Journal and The Nation. Keeler co-founded Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry, which seeks to end the use of racial groups as mascots. She is finishing a collection of essays called Not Your Disappearing Indian and an anthology, Native Voices: At the Edge of Morning (editor).
KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE
Kathleen Dean Moore is a writer, moral philosopher, and environmental thought-leader, devoted to an unrelenting defense of the future against those who would pillage and wreck the planet. As a writer, Kathleen is best known for award-winning books of essays that celebrate and explore the meaning of the wet, wild world of rivers, islands, and tidal shores - Riverwalking, Holdfast, Pine Island Paradox, and Wild Comfort.
MICHELLE NIJHUIS
Michelle Nijhuis is an award-winning environmental and science journalist whose work appears in National Geographic and elsewhere. She is also a longtime contributing editor of High Country News.
Shonto Begay
Shonto Begay was born on a Navajo reservation sheep camp to his mother, a traditional rug weaver and his father, a respected medicine man. In addition to being a prolific painter, lecturer and author, Shonto is a spokesperson for environmental rights.
ANN WHITTAKER
Ann Whittaker is a multi-media storyteller and naturalist who writes about the power of beauty through interdisciplinary philosophies and materials. Her pulse beats deep in the mountain west, and her imagination inspires. She writes about literary soundscape ecologies, and is compiling naturalist anthologies.