Barry Holstun Lopez was an American author, essayist, nature writer, and fiction writer whose work is known for its humanitarian and environmental concerns. In a career spanning over 50 years, he visited more than 80 countries, and wrote extensively about a variety of landscapes including the Arctic wilderness, exploring the relationship between human cultures and nature. He won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for Arctic Dreams (1986) and his Of Wolves and Men (1978) was a National Book Award finalist. He was a contributor to magazines including Harper's Magazine, National Geographic, and The Paris Review.
George Saunders is an American writer of short stories, essays, novellas, children's books, and novels. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, McSweeney's, and GQ. He also contributed a weekly column, "American Psyche", to The Guardian's weekend magazine between 2006 and 2008.
Mark Doty is an American poet and memoirist best known for his work My Alexandria. He was the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008.
Carl Safina is an American ecologist and author of books and other writings about the human relationship with the natural world. His books include Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace; Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel; Song for the Blue Ocean; Eye of the Albatross; The View From Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World; Alfie and Me; and others. He is the founding president of the Safina Center, and is inaugural holder of the Carl Safina Endowed Chair for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University. Safina hosted the PBS series Saving the Ocean with Carl Safina.
Diane Ackerman is an American poet, essayist, and naturalist known for her books and films.
Mary Ruefle is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She has published many collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Dunce, was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. Ruefle's debut collection of prose, The Most Of It, appeared in 2008 and her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, in 2012, both published by Wave Books. She has also published a book of erasures, A Little White Shadow (2006).
Linda K. Hogan is an American poet, storyteller, academic, playwright, novelist, environmentalist and writer of short stories. She previously served as the Chickasaw Nation's writer in residence. Hogan is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
Laila Lalami is a Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor. After earning her licence ès lettres degree in Morocco, she received a fellowship to study in the United Kingdom (UK), where she earned an MA in linguistics.
Peter Orner is an American writer. He is the author of two novels, two story collections and a book of essays. Orner holds the Professorship of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and was formerly a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University. He spent 2016 and 2017 on a Fulbright in Namibia teaching at the University of Namibia.
Meghan O'Rourke is an American nonfiction writer, poet and critic.
Richard Shelton was an American writer, poet and emeritus Regents Professor of English at the University of Arizona.
Alison Hawthorne Deming is an American poet, essayist and teacher, former Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice and currently Regents Professor Emerita in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. She received a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship. She has two books out in 2025: the poetry collection "Blue Flax & Yellow Mustard Flower" and the anthology "The Gift of Animals: Poems of Love, Loss, & Connection". She received a 2021-24 Fellowship from the Borchard Foundation.
Victoria Chang is an American poet, writer, editor, and critic. She has experimented with different styles of writing, including writing obituaries for parts of her life, including her parents and herself, in OBIT, letters in Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief, and a Japanese form known as waka in The Trees Witness Everything. In all of her poems and books, Chang has several common themes: living as an Asian-American woman, depression, and dealing with loss and grief. She has also written three books for children.
Adrian Matejka is an American poet. He was the poet laureate of Indiana for the 2018–2019 term. Since May 2022, he has been the editor of Poetry magazine.
A. Van Jordan is an American poet. He is a professor at Stanford University and was previously a college professor in the Department of English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan and distinguished visiting professor at Ithaca College. He previously served as the first Henry Rutgers Presidential Professor at the Rutgers University-Newark. He is the author of four collections: Rise (2001), M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A (2005), Quantum Lyrics (2007), and The Cineaste (2013). Jordan's awards include a Whiting Writers Award, a Pushcart Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Shane McCrae is an American poet, and is currently Poetry Editor of Image.
John D'Agata is an American essayist. He is the author or editor of six books of nonfiction, including The Next American Essay (2003), The Lost Origins of the Essay (2009) and The Making of the American Essay—all part of the trilogy of essay anthologies called "A New History of the Essay". He also wrote The Lifespan of a Fact, "Halls of Fame", and "About a Mountain".
David George Haskell is a British and American biologist, writer, and William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Biology and Environmental Studies at Sewanee: The University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist in General Nonfiction. In addition to scientific papers, he has written essays, poems, op-eds, and the books The Forest Unseen, The Songs of Trees, Thirteen Ways to Smell a Tree, and Sounds Wild and Broken.
Monte Reel is an American author and journalist. His narrative nonfiction books include The Last of the Tribe (2010), Between Man and Beast (2013), and A Brotherhood of Spies (2018). From 2004 to 2008, he was the South America correspondent for The Washington Post and previously, he wrote for The Washington Post in Washington and Iraq.
Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic is 2012 non-fiction book by David Quammen. The book, written in narrative form, tells through the personal experiences of the author, who interviewed numerous pathologists and virologists globally to trace the evolution of some of the major pathogens that have affected the human species following a species leap (spillover), a natural process by which an animal pathogen evolves and becomes able to infect, reproduce and transmit within the human species, in a process called zoonosis. Spillover received positive reviews.
