Kim Barnes is the author of  In the Kingdom of Men, named a best book by San Francisco Chronicle, The Seattle Times, and The Oregonian, and long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her second novel, A Country Called Home, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction, was named a best book by The Washington Post, The Kansas City Star, and The Oregonian. She is a recipient of the PEN/Jerard Award in nonfiction for her first memoir, In the Wilderness, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The New York Times, WSJ online, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Fourth Genre, The Oprah Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She is a University of Idaho Distinguished Professor of English Emerita.

Mark Doty is the author of nine books of poetry, including Deep Lane (April 2015), Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, which won the 2008 National Book Award, and My Alexandria, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the T.S. Eliot Prize in the UK. He is also the author of four memoirs: the New York Times-bestselling What Is the Grass, Dog Years, Firebird, and Heaven’s Coast, as well as a book about craft and criticism, The Art of Description: World Into Word. Doty has received two NEA fellowships, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Byner Prize.

Pam Houston is the author of the memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, which won the 2019 Colorado Book Award, the High Plains Book Award and the Reading The West Advocacy Award and more recently, Air Mail: Letters of Politics Pandemics and Place coauthored with Amy Irvine.  She is also the author of Cowboys Are My Weakness, Contents May Have Shifted, and four other books of fiction and nonfiction, all published by W.W. Norton. She lives at 9,000 feet above sea level on a 120-acre homestead near the headwaters of the Rio Grande and teaches creative writing at UC Davis and at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is cofounder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing by Writers and fiction editor at the Environmental Arts Journal Terrain.org. She raises Icelandic Sheep and Irish Wolfhounds and is a fierce advocate for the Earth. 

A finalist for the 2017 PEN/Faulkner award, Sunil Yapa’s debut novel Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist was named one of the best books of 2016 by Amazon, Time Magazine, The Washington Post, Bustle, and others. Set during one day of the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, the novel was described as “fast-paced and unflinching” by The New Yorker, “a genuine tour-de-force” by the Seattle Times, and “protest poetry, pure and simple” by MacLeans. Yapa has been a frequent guest on NPR, appearing on Morning Edition, as well as public radio in San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and Australia. He also appeared on NBC as a guest on Late Night with Seth Meyers. The winner of the 2010 Asian American short story award, Yapa’s fiction and non-fiction have appeared in American Short Fiction, Guernica, O Magazine, Poets & Writers, The Margins, Hyphen, Slice, LitHub and others. Yapa received his MFA in Fiction from Hunter College in New York City. He currently divides his time between New York City and Montreal, and teaches in the low-residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College in Lake Tahoe.