ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING is the author of Science and other Poems (LSU Press, 1994), selected by Gerald Stern for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence (LSU, 1997), and Temporary Homelands: Essays on Nature, Spirit and Place (Picadore USA, 1996). A new nonfiction book, The Edges of the Civilized World, will be published in fall 1998 by Picadore. She has received a Stegner Fellowship from Stanford university, two NEA fellowships, and awards from the Arizona Council on the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, and a Pushcart prize. Since 1990 she has been Director of the University of Arizona Poetry Center.

WILLIAM KITTREDGE grew up on the MC Ranch in southeastern Oregon and managed farming there until he was 35. Since 1969, he has been a creative writing teacher at the University of Montana in Missoula. His works have appeared in Atlantic, Harpers, Esquire, Outside, and Paris Review. He has received the Montana Governor's Award for the Humanities, and the NEW Charles Frankel Prize. His books include Owning It All (1987), Who Owns the West (1997), We Are Not in This Together (1984), Hole in the Sky (1993), and The Portable Western Reader (1998).

STEPHANIE MILLS is an author and ecologist who for more than twenty-five years has been writing and speaking about the tragic devastation of the natural world, and the hope for the restoration of our bioregions. Her articles and book reviews have appeard in Whole Earth Review, Utne Reader, E magazine, Raise the Stakes, and numerous anthologies. Mills is the author of Whatever Happened to Ecology? and In Service to the Wild: Restoring and Reinhabiting Damaged Land. She is the editor of In Praise of Nature and Turning Away from Technology: A New Vision for the 21st Century. Stephanie Mills lives on the Leelanau Peninsula of Michigan.

PATTIANN ROGERS is the author of seven books; the most recent, Eating Bread and Honey, was published in the fall of 1997 by Milkweed Editions. Her sixth book, Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems, also from Milkweed Editions, was chosen by Publishers Weekly as one of the Best Books Published in 1994 and was one of five finalists for the Lenore Marshall Award given by the Academy of American Poets for the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States in 1994. She has received two NEA Grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Poetry Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation.

SCOTT RUSSELL SANDERS is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Indiana. He has published twenty books, including novels, collections of stories and essays, personal narratives, and storybooks for children. His work appears regularly in Orion, The Georgia Review, and North American Review, and has been reprinted in Best American Essays and many other anthologies. His prize-winning collections of essays include The Paradise of Bombs, Staying Put, and Writing from the Center. He has received NEA and Guggenheim fellowships and was honored in 1995 with a Lannan Literary Award for his collected works in nonfiction. His next book, Hunting for Hope, will be published by Beacon Press in the fall of 1998.

ANNICK SMITH is a freelance writer and filmmaker who lives in western Montana. Her collection of essays, Homestead, was published by Milkweed Editions in 1995. She is co-editor with William Kittredge of a Montana anthology, The Last Best Place, and her latest book, Big Bluestem: A Journey Into the Tall Grass, won the 1997 Oklahoma Book Award. Her work has appeared in Outside, Travel & Leisure, National Geographic Traveler, and numerous anthologies. A founding board member of the Sundance Film Institute, her credits include the feature films Heartland (Executive Producer) and A River Runs Through It (Co-Producer). She is director of the Yellow Bay Writers Workshop at Flathead Lake.

Co-sponsors: City of Ann Arbor, Ecology Center, Great Lakes Literary Alliance, Huron River Watershed Council, Huron Valley Group-Sierra Club, Mosaic Foundation, Washtenaw Audubon Society, Washtenaw County. Co-hosts: Huron Valley Greens, National Wildlife Federation, Potawatomi Land Trust, Wild Ones. With the College of Literature, Science and the Arts, the School of Natural Resources and Environment, UM Housing Office, YoHA.