Elizabeth Arnold is a graduate of the MFA program at the Rainier Writing Workshop. Her work has previously appeared in such places as The Gettysburg Review, The Whitefish Review, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. Her essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and been listed as notable in The Best American Essays. She lives on a working farm in Central Pennsylvania with her husband, horses, chickens, and dogs.

Jacqueline Haskins is a biologist of watery wilds, from cypress swamps to cirque swales. Her nonfiction has received a Pushcart nomination and been a finalist in Oregon Quarterly’s Northwest Perspectives Contest. Jacqueline received her Masters in Biostatistics from U. of Washington, and her MFA from NW Institute of Literary Arts. Her nonfiction, poetry, or fiction appear in Cordite Poetry Review, Raven Chronicles, Cirque Journal, Meadowland Review, The Collapsar, Shark Reef Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. Visit her at JacquelineHaskins.com.

Hannah Hindley is a field educator and wilderness guide with a B.A. in English from Harvard University. She is a published writer of both truthful and fictional stories and is the recipient of the Thomas Wood Award in Journalism and the winner of the New Conrads Writing Contest for Jack Tar Magazine. She currently works as a naturalist aboard a small adventure boat and is daily witness to Alaska’s ice melt—and the changes that come with it—during her long summer seasons spent in Glacier Bay National Park and the Alexander Archipelago.

Sydney Lea’s most recent collection of nonfiction is A North Country Life: Tales of Woodsmen, Waters, and Wildlife (Skyhorse, 2013), and his latest volume of poetry is I Was Thinking of Beauty (Four Way Books, 2013). He is poet laureate of Vermont.

Britt Leach was an actor for thirty-odd years and at the end of that career started writing. He co-published, co-edited and wrote for Country Connections, a nationally distributed, award-winning magazine nurtured in the mountains north of Los Angeles. He also wrote and published two websites: Impertinent Information and Veritas—Any Day Now featuring his satire, poetry and essays toward memoir. He is married to Catherine Roberts Leach, a fine art photographer. Without whom, nothing. He now lives in Los Angeles.

Nancy Lord, a former Alaska Writer Laureate, is the author of several books including Early Warming: Crisis and Response in the Climate-changed North (Counterpoint Press, 2011). In 2013 she was an artist-in-residence in Alaska’s Chugach National Forest as part of the Voices of the Wilderness Program.

Lee Martin is the author of the novels, The Bright Forever, a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction; Break the Skin; River of Heaven; and Quakertown. He has also published three memoirs, From Our House, Turning Bones, and Such a Life; and a short story collection, The Least You Need to Know. He teaches in the MFA program at The Ohio State University, where he is a past winner of the Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award.

Melissa Matthewson’s essays have appeared in Numero Cinq, Pithead Chapel, Defunct, Under the Gum Tree, Terrain.org, and Prime Number among others. She is currently an MFA candidate at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Melissa, along with her family, owns and operates an organic vegetable farm in the Applegate Valley of southwestern Oregon. She also broadcasts a weekly alternative radio show from a tiny station in the remote hills of the Siskiyou Mountains.

Anne Panning’s novel, Butter, was published in October 2012 by Switchgrass Books. Her short story collection, Super America, won The Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction and was selected as a New York Times Editor’s Choice. She has also published a book of short stories, The Price of Eggs. Four of her essays have received notable citations in The Best American Essays series. She has also published poetry in 32 Poems, Hotel Amerika, Fugue, and Room Magazine. She has recently completed a memoir, Dragonfly Notes; her next book project is a novel about a competitive food eater. She lives in upstate New York with her husband, Mark, and two children, Hudson and Lily, and teaches creative writing at SUNY-Brockport.

Pamela Schmid is the creative nonfiction editor at Sleet, an online magazine. Before receiving a 2013–14 Loft Mentor Series award in nonfiction, she spent nearly a decade as an award-winning staff writer  for the Star Tribune of Minneapolis. Her work has appeared in Sliver of Stone magazine, Sleet, and Sweet: A Literary Confection. She holds an MFA degree from Hamline University and is currently completing a memoir about the power of silence and words. Her website is www.pamelaschmid.com.

Ron Clinton Smith is a writer of stories, songs, poetry, screenplays, and the novel Creature Storms, published in 2012. He is also a theater and film actor recently appearing in HBO’s True Detective as Sheriff Tate, and in the Sundance Channel’s Rectify. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia where he balances his time between writing and acting. Follow him on Twitter @ronclintonsmith for upcoming publications.

Jonathan Starke is a former bodybuilder and boxer. He tends to write about the loss of things. You can find more of his lost work in The Sun, Missouri Review, Threepenny Review, Brevity, and North American Review, among others. He works as a creative writing coach and editor at www.jonathanstarke.com.

Ira Sukrungruang is the author of Talk Thai: The Adventures of Buddhist Boy, Southside Buddhist, and the poetry collection In Thailand It Is Night. His essays have appeared in Shambhala Sun, Creative Nonfiction, and Fourth Genre. He teaches at University of South Florida and the City University Hong Kong low-residency MFA.