Kim Barnes spent her childhood in the logging camps and small towns along the North Fork of Idaho's Clearwater River. Her first memoir, In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award for Nonfiction. In addition to two memoirs, she is the author of three novels, including A Country Called Home, winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Fiction; and In the Kingdom of Men, a story set in the 1960s oil camps of Saudi Arabia, which was long-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her essays, poems, and stories have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including The New York Times, WSJ, The Georgia Review, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Oprah Magazine, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. A recipient of the Idaho Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts and a University of Idaho Distinguished Professor Emerita, she lives with her husband in the mountains of northern Idaho.

Peter Ho Davies’s most recent books are the novel A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself, long-listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize, and The Art of Revision: The Last Word, his first work of non-fiction. His previous novel, The Fortunes, a New York Times Notable Book, won the Anisfield-Wolf Award and the Chautauqua Prize, and was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. His first novel, The Welsh Girl, a London Times Best Seller, was long-listed for the Booker Prize. He has also published two short story collections, The Ugliest House in the World (winner of the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize, and the Oregon Book Award) and Equal Love (finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a New York Times Notable Book).Davies’ work has appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Washington Post and TLS among others, and been anthologized in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. In 2003 Granta magazine named him among its “Best of Young British Novelists.”Davies is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts and a winner of the PEN/Malamud and PEN/Macmillan Awards.Born in Britain to Welsh and Chinese parents, he now makes his home in the US. He has taught at the University of Oregon, Northwestern and Emory University, and is currently on faculty at the University of Michigan.

Pam Houston is the author of the memoir, Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, which won the 2019 Colorado Book Award, the High Plains Book Award and the Reading The West Advocacy Award and more recently, Air Mail: Letters of Politics Pandemics and Place coauthored with Amy Irvine. She is also the author of Cowboys Are My Weakness, Contents May Have Shifted, and four other books of fiction and nonfiction, all published by W.W. Norton. She lives at 9,000 feet above sea level on a 120-acre homestead near the headwaters of the Rio Grande and teaches creative writing at UC Davis and at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is cofounder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing by Writers and fiction editor at the Environmental Arts Journal Terrain.org. She raises Icelandic Sheep and Irish Wolfhounds and is a fierce advocate for the Earth.