Who We Are

Q&A GUEST

Adrian Arleo studied Art and Anthropology at Pitzer College (B.A. 1983) and received her M.F.A. in ceramics from Rhode Island School of Design in 1986. She was an Artist in Residence at Oregon College of Art and Craft in 1986-87, at Sitka Center For Art and Ecology in 1987-88 and in 2012, was an invited artist for the Jordan Schnitzer Printmaking Residency, also at Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. Adrian’s work is exhibited nationally and internationally, and is in numerous public and private collections. She received awards from the Virginia A. Groot Foundation in 1991 and 1992, and in 1995, was awarded a Montana Arts Council Individual Fellowship. Her work has been widely published in books, magazines, and on the internet. Adrian is a frequent workshop instructor across the US and abroad, and enjoys teaching courses on figurative ceramic sculpture.

LAB FACILITATOR

Heidi Barr is a writer and wellness coach whose work is founded on a commitment to cultivating ways of being that are life-giving and sustainable for people, communities, and the planet. She is the author of several books of creative nonfiction, including Collisions of Earth and Sky and Woodland Manitou, and co author of 12 Tiny things. She’s also authored two other poetry collections, one cookbook, and is managing editor of Wayfarer Magazine. Her next poetry collection, Just Wild Enough, is forthcoming in April 2024. She lives with her family in rural Minnesota, where they tend a large vegetable garden, explore nature, and do their best to live simply.

LAB FACILITATOR

Elizabeth Bradfield’s most recent books are Toward Antarctica and Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. Bradfield’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Sun, and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner Fellowship. Based on Cape Cod, Liz works as a naturalist, teaches at Brandeis University, and runs Broadsided Press.

WORKSHOP TEACHER + 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.

SPECIAL GUEST

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.

WORKSHOP TEACHER

Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award. She is also the author of the essay collections Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023) and Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Dungy has also edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry and From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great. A 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, her honors include NEA Fellowships in poetry (2003) and prose (2018), an American Book Award, two NAACP Image Award nominations, and two Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominations. Dungy’s poems have been published in Best American Poetry, The 100 Best African American Poems, the Pushcart Anthology, Best American Travel Writing, and over thirty other anthologies. She is University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.

Q&A GUEST

Debra Magpie Earling is the author of the novels Perma Red and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. She is the recipient of the Montana Governor’s Arts Award, and has received both a Guggenheim and NEA fellowship. She is Bitterroot Salish.

WORKSHOP TEACHER

Haleh Liza Gafori is a translator, vocalist, poet, and educator. Born in New York City, she grew up hearing recitations of Persian poetry. Her translations of contemporary Persian poets such as Sohrab Sepehri and Omran Salahi, along with a selection of original work, earned her an Academy of American Poets Prize and the Goodman Grant for Poetry. Her book, Gold (New York Review Books Classics/Penguin Random House, 2022), offers translations of poems by Rumi, the 13th century sage and mystic. Gafori’s work has been published by Columbia University Press, Literary Hub, Hyperallergic, The Marginalian, the Marquaz Review, and Rattapallax. In current and past musical projects, including Haale and The Mast, Gafori has toured across the US and in Europe. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

LAB FACILITATOR

Adam Himebauch is a Manhattan-based artist who is best known for his multifaceted approach to painting and performance art. A fixture on the Lower East Side, he first found success under the moniker Hanksy. Using a pseudonym inspired by the famous British street artist, Banksy, Himebauch embarked on a six-year-long performance that utilized irony and viral imagery to satirize American politics and popular culture in the public sphere. The past five years have marked a departure from Himebauch’s early work, revealing a new sensibility that merges public performance with art historical references. Himebauch’s solo exhibition, ‘Retrospective’, opened in November 2022 at Trotter&Sholer, and his work has also been presented at GR Gallery, Moberg Gallery, and Agnes B. Galerie, and in numerous private collections worldwide. Himebauch has been profiled in the New York Times and Rolling Stone, among other publications. As a commercial artist, Himebauch collaborated with Comme des Garçons, Nike, and more. In 2019, Taschen named him one of the top illustrators in the world.

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.

Q&A GUEST

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.

Q&A GUEST

Teddy Macker is the author of the collection of poetry This World (White Cloud Press, 2015; foreword by Brother David Steindl-Rast). His writing appears in the Antioch Review, New Letters, the Seneca Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Sun, Tin House, and various anthologies. He lives with his wife and daughters on a farm in Carpinteria, California, where he maintains an orchard.

LAB FACILITATOR

Samantha Martin-Bird is a citizen of Peguis First Nation, living on Treaty 1 Territory in Winnipeg. Her poetry is included in Carving Space: The Indigenous Voices Awards Anthology, published by Penguin Random House Canada in 2023. She was a 2022 Northern Ontario Writers Workshop (NOWW) poetry contest winner, a 2021 winner of the Indigenous Voices Awards and was shortlisted for the Malahat Review’s Open Season award in 2022. Her work has appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, Room, The Puritan, Canthius, The Hopper, Filling Station, the Ontario Native Women’s Association annual poetry book, and the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD) 2022 program. Samantha works as a political staffer in Manitoba. Outside of work and writing, she enjoys skiing, canoeing, road trips, playing piano and continuously learning anishinaabemowin.

LAB FACILITATOR

Osheta Moore is a trained spiritual director living on Dakota land in Saint Paul, Minnesota. She is an appointed Moravian pastor; she and her husband shepherd a community of “misfits on a mission, finding our identity in Jesus” called Roots Moravian Church. Osheta has authored two books: Shalom Sistas and Dear White Peacemakers. In her writing, she calls us to own our belovedness and proclaim the belovedness of others (especially those marginalized and harmed by oppressive systems), so that we can become genuine expressions of the beloved community right where we are. As a spiritual director, she carves out gentle, loving spaces for quiet and listening inspired by her favorite theologian, Howard Thurman, who said, “In the stillness of quiet, if we listen, we can hear the whisper of the heart giving strength to weakness, courage to fear, hope to despair.”

WORKSHOP TEACHER

Irish poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama’s work centers around themes of language, power, conflict and religion. He is the author of several books of poetry and prose: Feed the Beast, Daily Prayer with the Corrymeela Community, In the Shelter, Sorry for your Troubles, and Readings from the Books of Exile. Ó Tuama is also the host of the popular podcast Poetry Unbound, which immerses the listener into one poem every week, and the author of the collection, Poetry Unbound, an expansion on the podcast that offers reflections on fifty powerful poems. He is splits his time between Ireland and NYC.

NATURE JOURNALER

Marley Peifer is a nature journaler, educator, YouTuber, and visual thinker. He strives for a reintegration of art, science, nature, and culture— a synthesis that he develops in his journaling. Marley believes that the nature journaling practice has the potential to revolutionize and heal our relationships with nature, ourselves, and each other.

Q&A GUEST

Dean Rader has authored or co-authored twelve books. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize. Other titles include his poetry collections Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry and Landscape Portrait Figure Form, and the anthologies Native Voices: Contemporary Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations and Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. Rader writes and reviews regularly for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Huffington Post, BOMB, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, where he co-authors a poetry review column with Victoria Chang. His new book, Before the Borderless: Dialogues with the Art of Cy Twombly, features Rader’s poems alongside corresponding images by the artist Cy Twombly. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco and a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.

NATURE JOURNALER

Kate Rutter is an avid sketchnoter, graphic facilitator, nature journaler, and a lover of all things sketchy. As principal at Intelleto, she creates visual explanations that make complex ideas simple, memorable and shareable. For 25+ years, Kate has used a broad range of visual techniques to support group communication, including sketchnoting 100s of events and leading workshops for clients such as Stanford d.school, Singularity University, and Google. A lifelong sketcher with an experimental and rambunctious visual practice, Kate’s education work spans online teaching, corporate and nonprofit trainings and conferences, nature journal workshops at public & private gardens and nurseries, and serving as adjunct professor at the California College of the Arts. 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.

Q&A GUEST and LAB FACILITATOR

Derek Sheffield is the author of Not for Luck, selected by Mark Doty for the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, and Through the Second Skin, runner-up for the Emily Dickinson First Book Award and finalist for the Washington State Book Award. He is the co-editor, with Simmons Buntin and Elizabeth Dodd, of Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy and, with Elizabeth Bradfield and CMarie Fuhrman, Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. His awards include a special mention in the 2016 Pushcart Anthology and the James Hearst Poetry Prize judged by Li-Young Lee. Derek lives with his family on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains in Central Washington and is the poetry editor of Terrain.org.

Q&A GUEST

Matthew Shenoda is the author of several books, including Tahrir Suite: Poems, winner of the 2015 Arab American Book Award; and, most recently, The Way of the Earth. He is the editor, with Kwame Dawes, of Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden, and a founding editor of the African Poetry Book Fund. Shenoda is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University.

SPECIAL GUEST

Eric Smith is a songwriter, naturalist, and interpreter in the wrinkles of the central Sierra Nevada. His collections include Daygloamer (EB Smith), and as part of the songwriting trio the White Bark Pine and the collaboration Osos Pelligrosos. Former director of Tuolumne Meadows Poetry Festival, he is interested in the way lyric and melody simultaneously enchant body and mind, and how rhythm is a way of walking homeward into a broader and deeper community of beings.

WORKSHOP TEACHER

Maggie Smith is the author of six award-winning books: You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Lamp of the Body, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, and Good Bones, named by the Washington Post as one of the Five Best Poetry Books of 2017, Keep Moving, and Goldenrod. The title poem of Good Bones was called the “Official Poem of 2016” by Public Radio International and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. Smith’s poems have appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, The Believer, The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Best American Poetry, and on the CBS primetime drama Madam Secretary. A Pushcart Prize winner, Smith has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation.

Q&A GUEST

Brian Turner is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently: The Wild Delight of Wild Things (2023), The Goodbye World Poem (2023), and The Dead Peasant’s Handbook (2023), all forthcoming with Alice James Books. His other collections include Here, Bullet to Phantom Noise, and the memoir My Life as a Foreign Country. He is the editor of The Kiss and co-editor of The Strangest of Theatres anthologies. A musician, he has also written and recorded several albums with The Interplanetary Acoustic Team, including 11 11 (Me Smiling) and The Retro Legion’s American Undertow. His poems and essays have been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic, Harper’s, among other fine journals, and he was featured in the documentary film Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, which was nominated for an Academy Award. A Guggenheim Fellow, he has received a USA Hillcrest Fellowship in Literature, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, the Poets’ Prize, and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He lives in Orlando, Florida, with his dog, Dene, the world’s sweetest golden retriever.

SPECIAL GUEST + 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.