Joan Naviyuk Kane is Inupiaq with family from King Island and Mary’s Igloo, Alaska. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Harvard College and her MFA from Columbia University. She was a 2006 semi-finalist for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and a finalist for the Poetry Foundation’s 2009 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. She received a 2004 John Haines Award from Ice Floe Press, a 2007 individual artist award from the Rasmuson Foundation, the 2009 Connie Boochever Fellowship from the Alaska State Council on the Arts, a 2009 National Native Creative Development Program grant, and the 2010 Alaska Conservation Foundation’s Native Writers on the Environment award. She received a 2009 Whiting Writers’ Award for her first poetry collection, The Cormorant Hunter’s Wife, published in its first edition by NorthShore Press Alaska and in its second edition by the University of Alaska Press. Hyperboreal, her second book, was selected for the 2012 Donald Hall Poetry Prize from AWP and is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Along with her husband and toddler sons, she lives in Anchorage, Alaska.

Seth Kantner is a commercial fisherman, writer and wildlife photographer. He was born and raised in northern Alaska and his art reflects his love for this land and the animals who live on it, and his belief in the importance of wildness left wild.

In 2004 his debut novel, Ordinary Wolves, was released to literary acclaim. Publisher's Weekly called it "A tour de force." The Los Angeles Times named the book "A rare thing of beauty." The novel won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and Kantner received a Whiting Award naming him one of the nation's top ten emerging writers. Since that time, he has had to incorporate national book tours and other publicity into a life previously focused on the land, sea, and daily weather conditions and movements of animals. 

Kantner was nominated in 2006 for the position of Alaska State Writer Laureate, which he turned down to pursue work on his newly released book, Shopping for Porcupine. He lives in northwest Alaska with his wife, Stacey, and his daughter, China.