Who We Are

COLLABORATING ARTIST

Abby Sunde is an artist whose work centers around our relationships with nature and predominantly works in glassworking, drawing, sound art, and installations. She was raised on Anishinaabe ceded territory of Northcentral Wisconsin and is currently living in Rhode Island. She is a direct descendant of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and is also of Scandinavian/European-American descent. Sunde's practice explores the ways in which we might reconnect to the ancestral, embodied knowledge of nature that our minds may have forgotten. Societally, we have become deeply removed from our connections with the land - Sunde seeks to explore this undoing. Informed by decolonial theory, indigenous epistemologies of relationality and belonging, and land-based pedagogies, she is interested in the cycles of the earth and how those cycles act as tethering points to our histories and the natural phenomena around us. Sunde earned her BA in Biology and Environmental Sciences from the University of Minnesota - Morris in 2013. Recently returning to school, she received here AFA in Studio Art at Normandale Community College in 2022, her BFA in Studio Art from University of Wisconsin Madison in 2024 and is currently pursuing her MFA in Glass at the Rhode Island School of Design as a Society of Presidential Fellow and LoveFrom Scholar.

READING & INTERVIEW GUEST

Annie Wenstrup (Dena’ina) is the author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories (Wesleyan University Press March 2025). She is the recipient of a 2025 Whiting Award in poetry. In 2023, she received the Alaska Literary Award and support from the Rasmuson Foundation. Annie was an inaugural and returning Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow in 2022 and 2023. Her poems have been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, The New England Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska with her family. 

WORKSHOP TEACHER

Camille T. Dungy is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden. Soil was named book of the month by Hudsons Booksellers, received the 2024 Award of Excellence in Garden and Nature Writing from The Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries, and was on the short list for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. Dungy has also written four collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, the first anthology to bring African American environmental poetry to national attention. She also co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology and served as assistant editor for Gathering Ground: Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, 100 Best African American Poems, Best American Essays, The 1619 Project, All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, over 40 other anthologies, plus dozens of venues including The New Yorker, Poetry, Literary Hub, The Paris Review, and Poets.org. You may know her as the host of Immaterial, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise. A University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, Dungy’s honors include the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, an Honorary Doctorate from SUNY ESF, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry.

READING & INTERVIEW GUEST

Chip Blake is an independent writer, editor, book coach, writing instructor, ghostwriter, and publishing and strategic planning consultant. From 1992 until 2003 he was the managing editor of Orion, a nonprofit magazine that focuses on nature and environment. In 2003 he became the editor-in-chief of Milkweed Editions, a nonprofit book publisher. In 2005 he returned to Orion, where he served as editor-in-chief until 2020. Books and articles he has edited have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, the PEN Literary Award, PEN-New England Discovery Prize, the John Oakes Award in Environmental Journalism, the John Burroughs Medal, the Minnesota Book Award, the Oregon Book Award, and The New York Times Notable Book of the Year. For many years he served as a judge for the National Magazine Award and as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, and he currently serves with the board of directors of the Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers, the Barry Lopez Foundation, and The Thoreau Society. In 2016 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry. He was the founder of the Orion Writing Workshop, which was established at Sterling College in Vermont in 2005 (and subsequently moved to the Bread Loaf Writers Workshop, and then to the Omega Institute). Writers he has worked directly with over the course of his career include Wendell Berry, Carol Bly, Joseph Bruchac, Brian Doyle, David James Duncan, Jane Goodall, bell hooks, Bill Holm, Pico Iyer, Barbara Kingsolver, William Kittredge, Drew Lanham, Barry Lopez, Kathleen Dean Moore, Mary Oliver, Scott Russell Sanders, Gary Snyder, Rebecca Solnit, Kim Stafford, Katrina Vandenberg, and Terry Tempest Williams. He is also a lifelong birdwatcher and has led birding trips throughout the U.S., Europe, and Central America. His book, The Birds of the Berkshire County, will be published later this year by Cornell University Press and the Nuttall Ornithological Club. He lives in Red Hook, New York. 

WORKSHOP TEACHER

CMarie Fuhrman is a writer and educator whose work explores the connections between place, beings, culture, and the human experience. She is the author of the essay collection Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return, the poetry collection Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems, and the co-editor of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. CMarie has published poetry, nonfiction, and fiction in prominent publications such as Terrain.org, Emergence Magazine, and Poetry Northwest, as well as various anthologies. An award-winning columnist for the Inlander, CMarie also directs the Elk River Writers Workshop. She is the Associate Director of the low residency Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Western Colorado University, where she teaches poetry and nature writing. CMarie is the host of Colorado Public Radio's Terra Firma podcast. A former Idaho Writer in Residence, she finds inspiration in the rugged beauty of her home in the Salmon River Mountains of Idaho. CMarieFuhrman.com

READING & INTERVIEW GUEST

Dr. Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guam. He has edited nine anthologies and authored seven collections of poetry and the academic monograph, Navigating Chamoru Poetry: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization. 

LAB FACILITATOR

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 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.

COLLABORATING ARTIST

David Legrand (b. 1995) is a Haitian-American artist who earned his BFA in Fine Arts from Cornell University in 2023, where he was honored with the Faculty Medal of Art. He graduated with his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, supported by the prestigious Society of Presidential Fellows scholarship. His art practice is interested in how rest, in its simplest form, is a biological necessity. For Black communities, rest has historically been weaponized as a site of struggle, a luxury denied through systems of racial capitalism, anti-Black violence, and colonial labor exploitation. His current practice positions rest as a radical act of resistance and reclamation within the context of Black artmaking, drawing on frameworks from Black feminist theory and critical race studies. By interrogating the politics of rest—its denial, reimagining, and aesthetic possibilities—this thesis argues that rest is not merely a personal indulgence but a collective, liberatory praxis that destabilizes Western notions of productivity and labor.

READING & INTERVIEW GUEST

Elizabeth Bradfield’s seven books include SOFAR: Poems, which includes poems published in The Atlantic Monthly, The Sun, and Orion; Interpretive Work, which won the Audre Lorde Prize in Lesbian Poetry; Toward Antarctica: An Exploration; and the co-created Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, winner of a Pacific Northwest Book Award.  Editor-in-chief of Broadsided and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow, Liz teaches creative writing at Brandeis University, directs the Poetry Concentration for Western Colorado University’s MFA program, and works as a naturalist and field assistant at home on Cape Cod.  www.ebradfield.com

LAB FACILITATOR

Felicia Zamora is the author of eight books of poetry including, Murmuration Archives, Akrilica Series, Noemi Press (2026), Interstitial Archaeology, Wisconsin Poetry Series (2025), I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize (2021) and the 2022 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, Body of Render, Benjamin Saltman Award winner (2020), and Of Form & Gather, Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize winner (2017). She’s won the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, C.P. Cavafy Prize, Wabash Prize, Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and two Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards (2024 & 2022). She has been supported by a Tin House Next Book Residency, Yaddo Residency, Ragdale Fellowship, and CantoMundo Fellowship. Her writing appears in Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Alaska Quarterly Review, The American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2022, Boston Review, Brevity, Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Lit Hub, The Missouri Review, Orion, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, and others. She is a poetry editor for Colorado Review, a contributing editor for West Branch, and an associate professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati where she is a 2025-2026 Taft Research Center Fellow.

READING & INTERVIEW GUEST

Dr. Gavin Van Horn is the executive editor of Humans and Nature Press Books, the author of The Way of Coyote, and the co-editor of City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness, Wildness: Relations of People and Place, the award-winning five-volume series Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, and the five-volume series Elementals. He currently resides in the ancestral lands of the Northern Chumash people in San Luis Obispo, California, where you can find him wandering the nearby hills and shores, senses awakened by sage, Anna’s hummingbirds, and ocean funk. More about Gavin and his work can be found at www.storyforager.com.

LAB FACILITATOR

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.

WORKSHOP TEACHER

Heather Swan, MFA and PhD, is a poet and nonfiction writer. She is the author of the nonfiction books Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection and Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field (Penn State Press) the latter of which won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in such journals as The Sun, Emergence, Catapult, Aeon, and Minding Nature. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Cold Mountain, The Hopper, One Art, Poet Lore, Phoebe, The Raleigh Review, and Terrain. Her book of poems, A Kinship with Ash (Terrapin Books), published in 2020, was a finalist for the ASLE Book Award and long-listed for the Julie Suk Award. A second collection, Dandelion, was published in 2023. She is also a recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, the Maud Weinschenk Award, the August Derleth Prize for Poetry, the John Tigges Poetry Award, A Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Chapbook Award, and an honorable mention for the Lorine Niedecker Award. She teaches environmental literature and writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

LAB FACILITATOR

Ian Ramsey is the author of Hackable Animal, finalist for the Prism Climate Prize. His writing has been featured in Terrain.org, Orion, High Desert Journal, Backcountry Journal, Ploughshares, and many other journals, as well as in collections like The Gift of Animals, Writing for Peace, and Maine Voices. Based along the New Meadows River in midcoast Maine, Ian is the founding director of the Kauffmann Program for Environmental Writing at North Yarmouth Academy, where he has taught environmental writing, expeditioning, neuroscience and human performance, creative entrepreneurship, and music for 26 years. A licensed Maine Guide, Ian is an ultrarunner and backcountry athlete, holding the highest sea kayak leadership award in the world. He has led trips and backcountry expeditions on four continents, with a special focus on Alaska. He has lectured at Hirosaki University, Universidad Nacional Agraria La Molina, Pacific Lutheran University, and been an artist-in-residence at the Mount Saint Helens Science Center and Bainbridge Arts Festival, among other places.

READING & INTERVIEW GUEST

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.

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.

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 + COMMUNICATIONS CONSULTANT

Nicholas Triolois a writer, educator, long-distance runner, and editor with over twelve years of experience in the publishing industry. He holds a Master’s of Science in Environmental Studies (Creative Nonfiction) from the University of Montana. Previous editorial roles included editor-in-chief of Camas, digital strategist for Orion, and senior editor for Outside/Trail Runner. He’s currently managing editor for Ecotrust’s bioregional storytelling platform, Magic Canoe. Triolo has also been a long-time advocate and organizer for clean water and climate change, and has written and directed two documentary films, “The Crossing” and “Shaped by Fire,” that have been Official Selections for several international film festivals. He collaborated with Salomon on a film, "The Musician," about touring and training Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard. Triolo has taught at the University of Montana, Wild Rockies Field Institute, and the Freeflow Institute, and his work is featured in Orion, Outside, The Dark Mountain Project, Terrain.org, Emergence (forthcoming), the Wild & Scenic Film Festival, Patagonia’s Dirtbag Diaries, and others. His first book, The Way Around, will be published in July 2025, by Milkweed Editions. More at nicholastriolo.net.

LAB FACILITATOR + READING & INTERVIEW GUEST

Nickole Brown is author of Sister as well as Fanny Says, which won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry. Currently, she lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. Her poem “Parable” won the 2024 Treehouse Climate Action Poem Prize. Every summer, she teaches as part of the low-residency MFA Program at the Sewanee School of Letters. She’s a Fellow of the Black Earth Institute and works full-time as President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, a nonprofit organization that aims to nurture a community hellbent on finding the words that protect and repair our climate-changed world. Hellbender's first annual poetry festival is set to launch in Black Mountain, NC, in October of 2026. 

LAB FACILITATOR

Renata Golden’s essay collection Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment was published by CSU Press/UGA Press in 2024. In addition to winning the Southwest Book Award, these essays have been finalists for the River Teeth Nonfiction Contest, Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award, Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University Award, and the New Mexico/Arizona Book Award, among others. Her essays and poems have been published or are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Creative Nonfiction, True Stories, Border Crossing, About Place Journal, Chautauqua, Terrain.org, and many other literary journals. Her work has been anthologized in Dawn Songs: A Birdwatcher’s Field Guide to the Poetics of Migration by Talking Waters Press (ed: J. Drew Lanham and Jamie K. Reaser); The Nature of Our Times (Paloma Press/Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University/Poets for Science); First and Wildest: The Gila Wilderness at 100 by Torrey House Press (ed: Elizabeth Hightower Allen); and When Birds Are Near from Cornell University Press (ed: Susan Fox Rogers). She was awarded a New Mexico Writers Douglas Preston travel grant and has held residencies at Storyknife in Alaska and Write on, Door County. She currently serves as reviews editor and board member for Terrain.org. Renata earned an MFA from the University of Houston. Originally from the South Side of Chicago, she now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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.

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.

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.

LAB FACILITATOR

Sun Yung Shin was born in Seoul, Korea and was raised in the Chicago area. She is a poet, writer, and cultural worker. Shin is the author of the poetry collections Six Tones of Water (Ricochet Editions),  The Wet Hex (Coffee House Press, 2022); Unbearable Splendor (Coffee House Press, 2016), winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for poetry and finalist for the 2017 PEN USA Literary Award for Poetry; Rough, and Savage (Coffee House Press, 2012); and Skirt Full of Black (Coffee House Press, 2007), winner of the 2007 Asian American Literary Award for poetry. Her debut memoir Heart Eater: A Memoir of Immigration, Belonging, and How We Find Ourselves in Language is forthcoming with Black Lawrence Press in 2026.