Who We Are

READING & INTERVIEW GUEST

Linnea Axelsson is a Sámi-Swedish writer, born in the province of North Bothnia in Sweden. In 2009, she earned a Ph.D, in art history from Umeå University. In 2018, she was awarded the August Prize for the epic poem Ædnan. She lives in Stockholm, Sweden.

WORKSHOP TEACHER

Writer/Naturalist Elizabeth Bradfield’s recent books are Toward Antarctica, Once Removed, and the anthologies Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, co-created with CMarie Fuhrman and Derek Sheffield and winner of the 2024 Pacific Northwest Book Award, and Broadsided Press: Fifteen Years of Poetic/Artistic Collaboration, co-created with Alexandra Teague and Miller Oberman. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Sun, and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize in Lesbian Poetry and a Stegner Fellowship. Liz works as a naturalist and field assistant at home on Cape Cod, teaches creative writing at Brandeis University, and is Editor-in-Chief of Broadsided.

LAB FACILITATOR

Simmons Buntin is the author of Satellite: Essays on Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far, publishing in March 2025 by Trinity University Press. He is also the author of two collections of poetry published by Ireland’s Salmon Poetry—Bloom and Riverfall—and, with Ken Pirie, a collection of sustainable community case studies, Unsprawl: Remixing Spaces as Places. With Elizabeth Dodd and Derek Sheffield, he is co-editor of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy. Simmons is the founding editor-in-chief of Terrain.org and president and director of the board of Terrain Publishing. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

ZINE DESIGNER

Leah Renee Chambers is a poet and strategic consultant based in Houston, Texas. She specializes in guiding governments and organizations towards better collaboration with their communities—centered on co-creation, humanity, and joy. She can be found posting On the Fly Poetry on instagram (@leahreneechambers), scootering to coffee shops around her neighborhood, or dreaming of hiking in the redwoods.

LAB FACILITATOR

Kaitlin Curtice is an award-winning author, poet-storyteller, and public speaker. As an enrolled citizen of the Potawatomi nation, Kaitlin writes on the intersections of spirituality and identity and how that shifts throughout our lives. She also speaks on these topics to diverse audiences who are interested in truth-telling and healing. As an inter-spiritual advocate, Kaitlin participates in conversations on topics such as colonialism in faith communities, and she has spoken at many conferences on the importance of inter-faith relationships. Her new book, Living Resistance: An Indigenous Vision for Seeking Wholeness Every Day, examines the journey of resisting the status quo of hate by caring for ourselves, one another, and Mother Earth. Besides her books, Kaitlin has written online for Sojourners, Religion News Service, Apartment Therapy, On Being, SELF Magazine, Oprah Daily, and more. Her work has been featured on CBS and in USA Today. She also writes at The Liminality Journal. Kaitlin lives in Philadelphia with her family.

READING & INTERVIEW GUEST

Geffrey Davis is the author of three full collections of poetry: One Wild Word Away (2024), Night Angler (2019), and Revising the Storm (2014), winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Finalist. He is also the author of the chapbook Begotten (URB Books, 2016), coauthored with F. Douglas Brown. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Mississippi Review, New England Review, New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Davis teaches for the University of Arkansas’s MFA in Creative Writing & Translation and for The Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program.

TBD

David James Duncan is the author of the classic novels The River Why and The Brothers K, the story collection River Teeth, the nonfiction collection and National Book Award finalist, My Story as Told by Water, the best-selling collection of “churchless sermons," God Laughs & Plays, and, this August 8th, the novel legendary editor Michael Pietsch “will immodestly call David’s magnum opus” and writer William deBuys calls “one of the greatest imaginative achievements I’ve encountered in a lifetime of reading," Sun House. David’s work has won three Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, two Pushcart Prizes, a Lannan Fellowship, the Western States Book Award, inclusion in Best American Sports Writing, Best American Catholic Writing, two volumes of Best American Essays, five volumes of Best American Spiritual Writing, an honorary doctorate from University of Portland, the American Library Association's 2004 Award for the Preservation of Intellectual Freedom (with co-author Wendell Berry), and other honors. David lives on a charming little trout stream in Missoula, Montana, in accord with his late friend Jim Harrison’s advice to finish his life disguised as a creek.

READING & INTERVIEW GUEST

Iris Jamahl Dunkle's poetry and nonfiction critically engage with the Western myth of progress by exploring the profound impact of agriculture and overpopulation on the North American West, both historically and in contemporary times. Embracing an ecofeminist perspective, her writing challenges the predominantly male-centric narrative of the American West's recorded history, delving into the often-overlooked lives of women. Dunkle earned her MFA in poetry from New York University and her PhD in American Literature from Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of two biographies, Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and the bestselling Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (University of California Press, forthcoming), and four collections of poetry, including West : Fire : Archive, published by The Center for Literary Publishing. Dunkle curates Finding Lost Voices, a weekly blog dedicated to resurrecting the voices of women who have been marginalized or forgotten. She has garnered recognition through awards and fellowships from esteemed institutions such as Biographers International, Millay Arts, and Vermont Studio Center, and her writing has appeared in publications like Orion, Electric Lit, Liber, Pleiades, Tin House, Calyx, Fence, The Los Angeles Review, and Split Rock Review. Notably, her work was featured on The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and showcased on one hundred buses during the Muni Art 2020 campaign.

LAB FACILITATOR

Jamie Ford is the great grandson of Nevada mining pioneer Min Chung, who emigrated from Hoiping, China, to San Francisco in 1865, where he adopted the western name “Ford,” thus confusing countless generations. Jamie’s debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, spent two and a half years on the New York Times bestseller list and won the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. It was also named the #1 Book Club pick in 2010 by the American Bookseller Association and is now read widely in schools across the country. This multi-cultural tale was adapted by Book-It Repertory Theatre and has been optioned for a stage musical in NYC, and for film, with George Takei serving as Executive Producer. An award-winning short-story writer, his work has been published in multiple anthologies, from Asian-themed steampunk set in Seattle in the Apocalypse Triptych, to stories exploring the universe of masked marvels and caped crusaders from an Asian American perspective in Secret Identities: The first Asian American Superhero Anthology. He’s also written in other genres: speculative, dystopian, crime noir, and middle-grade horror. His latest novel, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy was named the #1 IndieNext list pick for August 2022 and was a Today Show book club pick. He currently lives in Montana with his wife, two dogs, and his imaginary friends.

PANELIST

John Freeman is the author and editor of thirteen books including the poetry collection Wind, Trees, the book-length essay, Dictionary of the Undoing, and the anthology, Tales of Two Planets. The former editor of Granta and the literary annual Freeman's, his work has been translated into twenty languages. He lives in New York where he is an executive editor at Alfred A. Knopf. Each month he hosts Alta magazine's California Book Club, a discussion of a new classic of Golden State Literature. His next book is a new installment of the Akashic series, Sacramento Noir.

WORKSHOP TEACHER

CMarie Fuhrman is a poet and author whose work is inspired by the Western landscape. She is the author of the poetry chapbook Camped Beneath the Dam, as well as the co-editor of two significant anthologies, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. She has poetry and nonfiction published or forthcoming in a variety of publications, including Terrain.org, Emergence Magazine, Platform Review, Northwest Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Poetry Northwest, and various anthologies. CMarie is the director of the Elk River Writers Workshop and an award-winning columnist for the Inlander. She is the Associate Director and Poetry Director for Western Colorado University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing, where she teaches Nature Writing. CMarie is the host of Terra Firma, a Colorado Public Radio program. She is a former Idaho Writer in Residence and lives in the Salmon River Mountains of Idaho.

WORKSHOP TEACHER

Born and raised in Milledgeville, Georgia, Sean Hill is the author of two poetry collections, Dangerous Goods, awarded the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, (Milkweed Editions, 2014) and Blood Ties & Brown Liquor, named one of the Ten Books All Georgians Should Read in 2015 by the Georgia Center for the Book, (UGA Press, 2008). Hill has received numerous awards including fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Region 2 Arts Council, the Bush Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, The Jerome Foundation, The MacDowell Colony, the University of Wisconsin, a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Hill’s poems and essays have appeared in Callaloo, Harvard Review, New England Review, Orion, Oxford American, Poetry, Tin House, and numerous other journals, and in nearly three dozen anthologies including Black Nature and Villanelles. His poems have also been featured as part of the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series and on The Slowdown podcast when hosted by former U.S. Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith. And a volume of poems selected from Blood Ties & Brown Liquor and Dangerous Goods has been translated and published in Korean. Hill has served as the director of the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference at Bemidji State University since 2012. He is a consulting editor at Broadsided Press, a monthly broadside publisher. He has taught at several universities, including at the University of Alaska – Fairbanks and Georgia Southern University as an Assistant Professor. Hill lives with his family in southwest Montana and is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana.

WORKSHOP TEACHER

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.

CREATIVE PROMPT CO-WRITER

Stephanie Jenkins is a soul companion, sacred space holder, ritual weaver and storyteller. Through ceremonies around the wheel of the year, online courses, and 1:1 soul tending, Stephanie holds space for women+ to deepen into their own inner wisdom, connect to body and soul, and participate more deeply in the dance of the sacred earth and divine mystery. When she is not banging on her drum or making big creative messes, Stephanie can be found exploring the wild edges of Los Angeles, ancestral lands of the Tongva and Chumash people.

COLLABORATING ARTIST

Obi Kaufmann is an award-winning author of many best-selling books on California's ecology and geography, including the California Field Atlas, The Forests of California, The Coasts of California and The Deserts of California. Obi’s signature style is as artful as it is analytic, combining wildlife renderings, hand-painted maps, and data-driven storytelling to present a hopeful and integrated vision of California’s future. An avid conservationist, Obi Kaufmann regularly travels around the state, presenting his work and vision of ecological philosophy from the Klamath-Siskiyou Wildland Center to the Mojave Desert Land Trust. Most recently, Obi was the artist-in-residence for the National Park Service at Whiskeytown National Recreation Area. You can catch him every month in conversation with author and tribal chairman Greg Sarris in their podcast called Place and Purpose. A lifelong resident of California, Obi Kaufmann makes his home base in Oakland and is currently working on Field Atlases to come.

ZINE EDITOR

Caroline Kessler is a poet, editor, and facilitator currently based in Berkeley, CA, on the uncededed lands of the Lisjan Ohlone people. She is co-founder of The 18 Somethings Project, a virtual writing adventure and co-creator of Index/Fist, a women-led collective that curates and publishes independent handmade magazines. She is also the co-founder of Ashreinu, a St. Louis-based spiritual community rooted in Jewish tradition. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Louis and a BA in Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University. Her poetry and prose has been published in The McNeese Review, Superstition Review, Rivet, Susquehanna Review, Neutral Spaces, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Ritual in Blue, was published by Sutra Press.

LAB FACILITATOR

Michael Kleber-Diggs is a poet, essayist, and literary critic. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions, 2021), won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize. Among other places, Kleber-Diggs’ writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Poem-a-Day, Poetry Daily, Poetry Northwest, Potomac Review, Hunger Mountain, Memorious, and various anthologies. Since 2016, Michael has been an instructor with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. He also teaches Creative Writing in Augsburg University’s low-res MFA program and at Saint Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists. He lives in Minneapolis.

WORKSHOP TEACHER

Chris La Tray is a Métis storyteller, a descendent of the Pembina Band of the mighty Red River of the North and an enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians. His third book, Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home, will be published by Milkweed Editions on August 20, 2024. His first book, One-Sentence Journal: Short Poems and Essays from the World at Large won the 2018 Montana Book Award and a 2019 High Plains Book Award. His book of haiku and haibun poetry, Descended from a Travel-worn Satchel, was published in 2021 by Foothills Publishing. Chris writes the weekly newsletter "An Irritable Métis" and lives near Frenchtown, Montana. He is the Montana Poet Laureate for 2023–2025.

SCIENCE ADVISOR & EDITOR

Rick Lindroth, Ph.D., is a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of Ecology (Emeritus) and former Associate Dean for Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Distinguished Fellow of The Lumen Center (Madison, WI). His research focused on the ecology of temperate forest ecosystems, with emphases on global environmental change, chemical ecology, and trophic dynamics. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Ecological Society of America, the Entomological Society of America, and the American Scientific Affiliation. Rick has authored nearly 250 scientific articles and book chapters, and has served as an editor for multiple ecological journals. As a dean for research, he functioned as the Chief Research Officer for the UW-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. Rick speaks and writes to public and faith-based groups about environmental stewardship, climate change, biodiversity, and science denialism/communication. He serves on the Board of Directors for A Rocha USA and is a member of the BioLogos Voices speaker’s bureau. Rick and his wife live in Madison, Wisconsin, where they raised two daughters and now host, too infrequently, four grandchildren. Rick is most at home on a Driftless Region spring creek, parsing the fine differences between theology and flyfishing.

READING & INTERVIEW GUEST

Laura Pritchett is the author of seven novels. Known for championing the complex and contemporary West and giving voice to the working class, her books have garnered the PEN USA Award, the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, the WILLA, the High Plains Book Award, several Colorado book awards, and others. She’s also the author of two nonfiction books, one play, and was editor of three environmental-based anthologies. She directs the MFA in Nature Writing at Western Colorado University and when not writing or teaching, she’s generally found exploring the mountains of her home state of Colorado.

PANELIST

Meg Reid is the Executive Director of the Hub City Writers Project in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and the Publisher of Hub City Press, where she finds and champions new and overlooked voices from the American South, including Carter Sickels, Drew Lanham, Ashley M. Jones, and Anjali Enjeti. She is outspoken about the need for transparency and accountability in book publishing and advocates for a decentralized model, grounded in local communities. She routinely visits workshops, MFA programs, and conferences to speak about independent publishing and also teaches annually at the Denver Publishing Institute.

DESIGNER & SKETCHNOTER

Kate Rutter is an avid nature journaler, sketchnoter, graphic facilitator, and designer who helps people make creative connections with nature through observation, curiosity, and wonder. A lifelong sketcher with an experimental and rambunctious visual practice, she creates visual explanations that make complex ideas simple, memorable, and shareable. Kate’s education work spans online teaching, corporate and nonprofit trainings and conferences, and nature journal workshops at public & private gardens and nurseries. Kate is a board member of the Wild Wonder Foundation and holds a B.A. in Studio Art from Wellesley College. She instas at @katerutter and blogs at www.intelleto.com.

COLLABORATING ARTIST

Abby Sunde is a Midwest-based visual artist born and raised on Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) ceded territory in Northcentral Wisconsin. She is a direct descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe and is also of Scandinavian/European-American descent. Informed through her previous education/work in environmental science and remediation, and through her previous work supporting food-security in Native communities, Sunde’s practice is an exploration of the complex societal challenges therein. Sunde graduated in 2013 with a Bachelor of Arts in Biology and Environment Sciences from the University of Minnesota - Morris. She has been selected for group exhibitions across the country, and her work has been a part of the First International Festival of Manuports at Kohta in Helsinki, Finland. In recent years, she has fully shifted her focus towards art and has since graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art from University of Wisconsin Madison in 2024. In Fall 2024, she is continuing her studio practice through an MFA in Glass at the Rhode Island School of Design.

SPECIAL GUEST

Amy Tan’s first book, The Joy Luck Club, became a surprise bestseller, spending over forty weeks on The New York Times Bestseller List. Her other novels are The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, Saving Fish from Drowning, and The Valley of Amazement, all New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of two memoirs, The Opposite of Fate and Where the Past Begins: Memory and Imagination, as well as two children’s books, The Moon Lady and Sagwa, The Chinese Siamese Cat. Her essays and stories have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, National Geographic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Amy served as co-producer and co-screenwriter with Ron Bass for the film adaptation of "The Joy Luck Club," for which they received WGA and BAFTA nominations. Her essays and stories are found in hundreds of anthologies and textbooks, and have been assigned as required reading in many high schools and universities. Her class on writing, memory and imagination can be found on MasterClass. Amy Tan was a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the International Orange Prize. She is the recipient of many honors, including the Commonwealth Gold Award, the Carl Sandburg Award. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in 2022, and in 2023, President Biden presented her with the National Humanities Medal. The National Endowment for the Arts chose The Joy Luck Club for its inaugural Big Read program in 2007. In 2016, Amy began taking nature journaling classes with John Muir Laws. During the pandemic shutdown, she spent long hours observing the behavior of wild birds in her backyard. Her editor, Dan Halpern, suggested she turn those pencil sketches, colored portraits and journal notes into an illustrated book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles, published in April 2024 by Knopf. Amy serves on the board of American Bird Conservancy, the National Poetry Series, and The Community of Writers. She lives with her husband and their two dogs in California and New York.

LAB FACILITATOR

Human rights activist and wilderness advocate Pamela Uschuk has howled out eight books of poems, including Refugee (Red Hen Press, 2022) which was named by Kirkus Review as one of their favorite books of 2023 and by Orion Magazine as one of their 2022 14 recommended books of poems. Refugee was a finalist for the AZ/New Mexico Book Award. RedHen Press will reprint three of her collections in 2024-2025: Crazy Love (American Book Award), Wild In the Plaza of Memory and Blood Flower. Translated into more than a dozen languages, her work appears in over three hundred journals and anthologies worldwide, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Agni Review, Parnassus Review, etc. Refugee is being translated into French and Greek. Among her awards are the 2024 Pearl S. Buck Visiting Writer Residency at Randolph College in Lynchburg, VA, a Storyknife Women Writers Residency in Homer, Alaska, Black Earth Institute Fellowship 2018-2021, War Poetry Prize from winningwriters.com, New Millenium Poetry Prize, Best of the Web, the Struga International Poetry Prize (for a theme poem), the Dorothy Daniels Writing Award from the National League of American PEN Women, the King’s English Poetry Prize and prizes from Ascent, Iris, and Amnesty International. Editor-In-Chief of Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts, Uschuk lives in Bayfield, Colorado and Tucson, Arizona. She edited the anthology, Truth To Power: Writers Respond To The Rhetoric Of Hate And Fear, 2017; Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century, Winter 2020; Through the Ash, New Leaves: Writers Respond to the Climate Crisis, 2022; and The Nature of Nature and Human Nature, 2024. Pam is a Senior Fellow and Board Member of the Black Earth Institute. Her work was featured in the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day series, chosen by U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo. She is finishing a mixed-genre memoir Hope’s Crazed Angels: An Odyssey Through the Whispering Disease.

LAB FACILITATOR

Rowen White is a Seed Keeper/farmer and author from the Mohawk community of Akwesasne and a passionate activist for Indigenous seed and food sovereignty. She is the Creative Director of Sierra Seeds, an innovative Indigenous seed bank and land-based educational organization located in North San Juan, CA. Rowen is the founder of the Indigenous Seedkeepers Network, which is committed to restoring the Indigenous Seed Commons, and currently serves as a Cooperative Seed Hub Coordinator. She facilitates creative hands-on workshops and strategic conversations in community around seed/food security around the country within tribal and small farming communities. She believes that by cultivating creative supportive learning spaces, reclaiming narratives, and practicing radical imagination, we can work together to seed the change for a more equitable and beautiful relational, kincentric food system that centers around a deep sense of belonging and connection. She weaves stories of seeds, food, culture, and sacred Earth stewardship on her blog, Seed Songs, and other distinguished publications. Follow her journeys at www.sierraseeds.org.

PANELIST

Ryo Yamaguchi (he/him) is the Publisher of Copper Canyon Press. He is the author of the poetry collection The Refusal of Suitors, published by Noemi Press. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and have been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2020 and The Best Small Fictions 2020. His book reviews and other critical writings can be found at Harriet Books from the Poetry Foundation and Michigan Quarterly Review, among other places. He lives in Santa Fe, NM. Please visit him at plotsandoaths.com.