Christine Byl is the author of Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods.  Byl received her MFA in fiction from the University of Alaska Anchorage; her prose has appeared in Glimmer Train, The Sun, and Crazyhorse, among other journals.  Byl has also received awards from Alaska State Council on the Arts, Rasmuson Foundation, Breadloaf, and Fishtrap.  She lives with her husband and an old sled dog north of Denali National Park outside of Healy, Alaska, where she owns and operates a small trail design and construction company.

Carolyn Kremers writes creative nonfiction and poetry, and is a dedicated teacher and lifelong musician.  Her books include Place of the Pretend People: Gifts from a Yup'ik Eskimo Village (memoir), The Alaska Reader: Voices from the North (anthology), and Upriver (poetry).  Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies, and her piece, "John Haines and the Dream Place," was named a "Notable" essay in Best American Essays 2012.   Kremers designed and implemented the MFA creative nonfiction program at Eastern Washington University in Spokane and currently teaches part-time at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.  She has been artist-in-residence at Gates of the Arctic National Park and Denali National Park and is a founding member of the Alaska artists and scientists group, In a Time of Change.  In 2008-09, she was a US Fulbright Scholar at Buryat State University in Ulan Ude, Russia.

Trained initially as a marine biologist, Eva Saulitis received her M.S. from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1993. Since 1986, she has studied the killer whales of Prince William Sound, Kenai Fjords and the Aleutian Islands and is the author and co-author of numerous scientific publications.

Dissatisfied with the objective language and rigid methodology of science, she turned to creative writing – poetry and the essay – to develop another language with which to address the natural world, receiving her MFA from the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1996.

Her essay collection, Leaving Resurrection, was a finalist for the Tupelo Press Non-Fiction Prize and the Foreword Book Award, and was published by Boreal Books/Red Hen Press in 2008. A poetry collection, Many Ways To Say It, will be published by Red Hen Press in September 2012, and a memoir, Into Great Silence: Discovery and Loss Among Vanishing Orcas will be published by Beacon Press in January 2013.

Her essays and poems have appeared in numerous literary journals, including Crazyhorse, Prairie Schooner, Quarterly West, Northwest Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Carnet de Route, Seattle Review and Kalliope. They have also appeared in several anthologies, including Homeground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez; she has read essays she contributed to that volume on the PBS radio series Living on Earth.

She lives in Homer, Alaska, where she teaches creative writing at Kenai Peninsula College, at the Kachemak Bay Writers’ Conference, and in the Low-Residency MFA Program of the University of Alaska Anchorage. She continues to spend summers studying killer whales in Prince William Sound with her partner, biologist Craig Matkin, through their non-profit research, conservation and educational organization, the North Gulf Oceanic Society.

David Abrams' debut novel about the Iraq War, Fobbit, was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2012 and a Best Book of 2012 by Paste Magazine, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Barnes and Noble.  It was also featured as part of B&N's Discover Great New Writers program.  One of his short stories, "Roll Call," was included in the anthology Fire and Forget (Da Capo Press, 2013) and another appears in Home of the Brave: Somewhere in the Sand (Press 53).  His short stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and have appeared in Esquire, Narrative, Electric Literature, Consequence, Salamander, The Literarian, Connecticut Review, Five Chapters, The Missouri Review, and many other places. His work has also appeared in the New York Times and Salon.  He regularly blogs about the literary life at The Quivering Pen.  Abrams retired in 2008 after a 20-year career in the active-duty Army as a journalist.  He was named the Department of Defense's Military Journalist of the Year in 1994 and received several other military commendations throughout his career.  His tours of duty took him to Thailand, Japan, Africa, Alaska, Texas, Georgia and The Pentagon.  In 2005, he joined the 3rd Infantry Division and deployed to Baghdad in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.  The journal he kept during that year formed the blueprint for the novel which would later become known as Fobbit.  David Abrams was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in Jackson, Wyoming.  He earned a BA in Engliksh from the University of Oregon and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska Fairbanks (in 2004).  He now lives in Butte, Montana with his wife.

Camille T. Dungy is the author of Smith Blue, Suck on the Marrow, and What to Eat, What to Drink, What to Leave for Poison. She edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, and co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology. Her honors include an American Book Award, two Northern California Book Awards, a California Book Award silver medal, and a fellowship from the NEA. Dungy is currently a Professor in the English department at Colorado State University.

David Dodd Lee has published seven previous full-length books of poems, including Orphan, Indiana (Akron, 2010), The Nervous Filaments (Four Way Books, 2010), Abrupt Rural (New Issues, 2004) and Downsides of Fish Culture (New Issues, 19979). Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere, The Ashbery Erasure Poems (BlazeVox, 2010) appeared as well in 2010. His newest book, The Coldest Winter On Earth, Poems 1998-2011, appeared in 2012 from Marick Press. His eighth book, Animalities, will be published by Four Way Books in 2014. Lee now lives and fishes just south of the Michigan border, on a river in northern Indiana, where he is Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University South Bend.

Louise Mathias was born in Bedford, England, and grew up in a small village in Suffolk, England, and later, Los Angeles. She was educated at public schools and received her B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. Her first book, Lark Apprentice, won the 2003 New Issues Poetry Prize, selected by Brenda Hillman, and was published in 2004 by New Issues Press. A chapbook, Above All Else, the Trembling Resembles a Forest, was selected by Martha Ronk for the Burnside Review Chapbook contest, and was published in 2010. Her new book, The Traps, was released in 2013 from Four Way Books. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Denver Quarterly, Triquarterly, Massachusetts Review, Crazyhorse, Epoch, Octopus, The Journal, The Offending Adam, Green Mountains Review, Slope, Verse Daily, and many others. She splits her time between Joshua Tree, California and Northern Indiana. For a living, she works as a consultant in the federal grants and health policy fields.

Luis Alberto Urrrea is a prolific and award-winning writer.  He is a master of laanguage and a gifted storyteller who uses his dual-culture life experiences to explore greater themes of love, loss and triumph.

Born in Tijuana, Mexico to a Mexican father and an American mother, Luis grew up in San Diego, California.  Like so many great writers, Luis got his start in literature writing poems to impress girls in junior high school.  His early heroes were all rock stars, but not being especially musically gifted Luis chose to follow in the steps of his literary role models.  A fanatical hunger for reading pushed him over the edge at the age of 13, "I just had to do what my heroes were doing" he has said.

As a young man Luis served as a relief workler amongst people living in the Tijuana garbage dumps prior to receiving a teaching Fellowship to Harvard University.  "The border" has defined his life and colored much of his writing.  Regarding this point he once said "the border is simply a metaphor that makes it easier for me to write about the things that separate people all over the world, even when they think there is no fence."