The Editors

Terrain.org is composed of two editorial bodies: editors, who assemble the magazine, and our editorial board, made up of leaders in the literary and environmental arenas from across the U.S. and beyond, who serve in an advisory capacity. Contributing editors include regular writers and content contributors. Terrain.org is an endeavor of Terrain Publishing, a fiscally-sponsored nonprofit organization.

Editors

Stephanie Amargi
Assistant Fiction Editor

Stephanie Amargi lives a walk away from the Willamette River in Eugene, Oregon. She is a part-time nonprofit office manager and part-time freelance editor. She holds BAs in English and Women Studies from Seattle University and a Certificate in Editing from the University of Washington. Stephanie loves writing flash fiction and dabbles in poetry. Her writing has appeared in Gravel Magazine, Dogzplot, Vector Magazine, Foundling Review, and other places on the web.

Allen Braden
Assistant Poetry Editor

Allen Braden was the last generation to work his family’s farm outside White Swan, Washington, on the Yakama Indian Reservation. He is the author of A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood (University of Georgia) and Elegy in the Passive Voice (University of Alaska/Fairbanks). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and from Artist Trust of Washington State as well as the Emerging Writers Prize from Witness magazine, the Grolier Poetry Prize, the Midnight Sun Chapbook Prize, the Dana Award in Poetry, the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and other honors. His poems have been anthologized in The Bedford Introduction to Literature, Poetry: An Introduction, Best New Poets, and Spreading the Word: Editors on Poetry. He has published in Virginia Quarterly Review, The New Republic, Orion, Georgia Review, Colorado Review, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, Threepenny Review, and Southern Review. A former editor of Literary Salt, he teaches at Tacoma Community College and volunteers for AWP’s Writer-to-Writer Mentorship Program.

Simmons B. Buntin
Editor-in-Chief

Though Simmons Buntin’s terrain has varied from the scrub oak hammocks of central Florida to the thorny scarps of the Sonoran Desert, his path seems always directed by the pursuit of an elegant balance between the built and natural environments. He has published poetry, essays, and technical articles in publications as varied as Edible Baja Arizona, North American Review, Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society, Kyoto Journal, and Orion. He has a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Colorado Denver, concluded by an award-winning thesis on sustainable suburban downtown redevelopment, and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona. Simmons migrated from energy services program manager for the U.S. Department of Energy to web program manager for the University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management, and lives in Tucson, Arizona.

He has won an Academy of American Poets Prize, Colorado Artist’s Fellowship for Poetry, and grants from the U.S. Forest Service, Arizona Commission on the Arts, and the Tucson-Pima Arts Council. His first book of poetry, Riverfall, was published in 2005 and his second, Bloom, was published in 2010, both by Ireland’s Salmon Poetry. His book Unsprawl: Remixing Spaces as Places (co-authored with Ken Pirie) was published by Planetizen Press in 2013. Simmons also serves as a contributing editor of Shenandoah and as a member of the Arts, Environment, and Humanities Network at the University of Arizona. Catch up with him at www.SimmonsBuntin.com.

Jennifer Case
Assistant Nonfiction Editor

Jennifer Case grew up along the river valleys of Minnesota, in a family that took weekend backpacking trips on the Superior Hiking Trail. The North Shore’s red rock, pine, and lichen have continued to resonate with her even after moving to Nebraska, upstate New York, and Arkansas.

Jennifer’s poetry and prose have appeared in journals such as ISLE, Zone 3, Poet Lore, Hawk & Handsaw, and Stone Canoe, where her work was awarded the 2014 Allen and Nirelle Galson Prize in Fiction. She earned a master’s degree in poetry from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a Ph.D. in creative writing from Binghamton University. A writer and teacher of writing, Jennifer lives with her husband and daughter in central Arkansas, one mile from the Arkansas River. Her annual summer goal is to harvest enough zucchini for a winter’s worth of zucchini bread.

Janine DeBaise
Education Editor

Janine DeBaise, who has lived in upstate New York her whole life, writes poetry and creative nonfiction that reflect her involvement with ecofeminism and her connection to place. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Southwest Review, The Hopper, and Orion. Her poetry includes the chapbook Of a Feather and the upcoming book Body Language. She teaches at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in upstate New York. In the summer, you can find her sailing Melonseed #153 in the Thousand Islands region of the St. Lawrence River. You can find out more at www.JanineDeBaise.com.

Elizabeth Dodd
Nonfiction Editor

Elizabeth Dodd was born in Boulder, Colorado, and grew up in Athens, Ohio. For over two decades she has lived in eastern Kansas in the Flint Hills region, where she is an award-winning professor of creative writing and literature at Kansas State University. She has team-taught courses with scientists, philosophers, and historians and she has led students on field trips in conjunction with their readings in environmental literature.

Elizabeth is a poet and nonfiction writer. Her newest book, Horizon’s Lens: My Time on the Turning World, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2012. Catch up with her at ElizabethDodd.com.

Nancy Geyer
ARTerrain Editor

Nancy Geyer is an essayist and former art critic. Born in Boston, she grew up in multiple places, including a town in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, a suburb of New York City, a suburb of Chicago, and—unhappily for a teenager who had come to love cities—a village in rural upstate New York. Since then she has lived mostly in Washington, D.C., though there have been lengthy escapes to Denver and Ithaca, New York, perhaps her favorite home and geography of all.

She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction, Iron Horse Literary Review’s Discovered Voices Award, Chautauqua’s Flash Writing Prize, and Terrain.org’s Nonfiction Prize. Her essays have appeared most recently in The Georgia Review and the anthology Brief Encounters: A Collection of Contemporary Nonfiction, among other places. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop

Elizabeth Jacobson
Reviews Editor

Elizabeth Jacobson, originally from New York, found her way to New Mexico over thirty years ago and remains captivated by the diversity of its wide-ranging national forests and expanses of open land. She lives in a river canyon at the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in Santa Fe. Her most recent book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019). Her work has been published in The American Poetry Review, On the Seawall, Orion, Ploughshares, Plume, Zocalo Public Square, and elsewhere. She is the founding director of the WingSpan Poetry Project, a not-for-profit that conducts weekly poetry classes in battered family and homeless shelters in New Mexico. She has received residencies from Atlantic Center for the Arts, Herekeke Arts Center, Key West Literary Seminar, and Mable Dodge Luhan House, where she was the 2018 writer-in-residence. Elizabeth teaches a community poetry class in conjunction with the Santa Fe Railyard Art Project, and she is Santa Fe’s Poet Laureate. Catch up with her at elizabethjacobson.wordpress.com.

Photo by Arthur Jacobson.

Amy Knight
Fiction Editor

Amy Knight is a lawyer by day, writer/reader/editor by night. She has lived in Berkeley, California; San Carlos, California; the suburbs of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Poughkeepsie, New York; Washington, D.C.; Tucson, Arizona; Palo Alto, California; San Jose, California; Helena, Montana; and Tucson, again.

She has an undergraduate degree in English and cognitive science from Vassar College, an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Arizona, and a law degree from Stanford.

Check out her website (amypknight.com) and follow her on Twitter: @amypknight.

Lisa Levine
Assistant Fiction Editor

Common in deserts and mountains, especially granite, limestone, sandstone, and plastic rock walls. Rare visitor to New York, Chile, and Germany; recorded year-long in Southern Arizona. Usually solitary, but sometimes travels in small groups. Forages on fiction in varied locales, from Manifest West, The Furious Gazelle, Bird’s Thumb, and Cutbank to a personal blog, Alluvial Dispositions. Distinguished by 2014 Pushcart nomination (for the short story “Shelter”). Aesthetics shaped by the University of Arizona MFA program, The Maine Review, Kore Press, and friends. Flocks in classrooms at Presidio School, the University of Arizona, Southern New Hampshire University, and elsewhere.

Anne Haven McDonnell
Assistant Poetry Editor

Anne Haven McDonnell grew up exploring mountains from her home in Boulder, Colorado. Now she explores the high desert and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains from Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she lives and teaches as an associate professor of English and creative writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts. In addition to English and Creative Writing classes, Anne teaches a course on climate justice and has worked with students on several sustainability projects on campus. In 2018, Anne also taught poetry for the Orion Environmental Writing Workshop.

Her poetry has been published in Orion, The American Journal of Poetry, The Georgia Review, Nimrod Journal, Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, About Place Journal, Tar River, Terrain.org, Whitefish Review, Fourth River, and elsewhere. Her poems won Terrain.org’s 5th Annual Contest in Poetry, have been nominated for a Pushcart prize and Best of the Net, and are included in Nature and Environmental Writing: A Craft Guide and Anthology. Anne has been a writer-in-residence at the Andrews Forest Writers’ Residency and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology.

Nick Neely
Assistant Nonfiction Editor

Nick Neely grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and now lives in Hailey, Idaho, with his wife, the painter Sarah Bird. His first book, Coast Range: A Collection from the Pacific Edge (Counterpoint Press, 2016), was a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal for Natural History Writing and CLMP’s Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction. His nonfiction is published in journals including Kenyon Review, The Georgia Review, and Orion, and he is the recipient of the 2015 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award, an AAAS-Kavli Science Journalism Award, and the PEN Northwest Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency. His next book, Alta California (Counterpoint Press, 2019), recounts the 12-week trek he made from San Diego to San Francisco retracing the first overland Spanish expedition through the territory.

Miranda Perrone
Podcast Editor

Miranda Perrone is a writer, philosopher, map-maker, and outdoor educator with an MS in Environmental Science and Policy from Northern Arizona University and a BA in Philosophy and Environmental Ethics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. As a Wyss Scholar, she focuses on applying these diverse skills to conservation in the American West. Issues related to climate change, animal rights, and the preservation of wild places are of particular interest to Miranda, whose work seeks to connect and inspire those alive today to advocate for socioecological change.

Melissa L. Sevigny
Interviews Editor

Melissa L. Sevigny grew up in Tucson, Arizona. She has worked as a science writer in the fields of Western water policy, planetary science, and sustainable agriculture, and was a member of NASA’s Phoenix Mars Scout Mission during its operations on the surface of Mars. Her books are Mythical River, a work of nonfiction (University of Iowa Press, 2016), and Under Desert Skies: How Tucson Mapped the Way to the Moon and Planets (The University of Arizona Press, 2016).

She has a BS in environmental science from the University of Arizona and an MFA in creative writing and environment from Iowa State University. She currently lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, where she is the Science & Technology Reporter for KNAU. She enjoys hiking, fishing, and taking road trips.

Derek Sheffield
Poetry Editor

Derek Sheffield was born in Portland, Oregon, and grew up there and in Gig Harbor, Washington. Since 2003, he has been a professor of English at Wenatchee Valley College in central Washington, where he formed the Sustainability Task Force to design and implement a college-wide recycling program. With help from the Washington Center at Evergreen State University, he continues to work at infusing sustainability across the curriculum. With the region’s preeminent ornithologist, Dr. Dan Stephens, he created WVC’s first learning community—Northwest Nature Writing—which, in a fit of consilience and contextual education, blends field ecology and creative nonfiction. What that means is they lead their students into the woods, meadows, and shrub-steppe with notebooks, field guides, and binoculars and let wilderness shape their essays. Sheffield has presented widely at conferences around the West on the interaction between science and poetry. His own work often explores this topic and has appeared in Orion, Wilderness, Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Ecotone, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Southern Humanities Review, and several anthologies, including New Poets of the American West, The Ecopoetry Anthology, Nature and Environmental Writing: A Guide and Anthology, and The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins.

He has won the Sparrow Prize in poetry and the James Hearst Poetry Prize judged by Li-Young Lee, and one of his poems published in the Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review was given special mention in the 2016 Puschart Anthology. Sheffield’s chapbook, A Revised Account of the West (Flyway/Iowa State U., 2008), won the inaugural Hazel Lipa Environmental Chapbook Award judged by Debra Marquart. His first full-length collection, Through the Second Skin (Orchises, 2013), was the runner-up for the Emily Dickinson First Book Award and a finalist for the Walt Whitman Award and the Washington State Book Award.

He has presented and taught at many conferences and universities, including the Skagit River Poetry Festival, the Beargrass Writing Retreat, Gonzaga University, Central Washington University, and the University of Washington. He has also been a guest faculty member of the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts low-residency MFA program.

Juniper White
Broadside Editor

Juniper White cultivates handwork, as a mom, writer, teaching artist, and letterpress printer. Known to hit the road visiting colleges and school-age camps with co-conspirator Traveling Duende (her 200-pound table top letterpress), she believes in the power of art and handwork to change the world one hand-pulled print at a time. From the Willamette Valley to the Salish Sea, she walks trails and streets with her mini Aussie, Tara, unearthing “home” where the inner and outer worlds meet. The heart of her handwork—writing, carving, drawing, hand-setting type, letterpress printing—beats by the push-pull progression of contrarieties. By defining space and creating through handwork, she identifies and harnesses these life forces as a creative advocate who summons duende and creates a space for the ordinary and ecstatic simpatico on the page.

She has been recognized by numerous fellowships, residencies, and exhibits across the country. Her handwork includes broadsides for poets Alison Hawthorne Deming, Wendell Berry, Jane Hirshfield, and Sam Hamill. Her poems have appeared in Gods, Goddesses, Myth: Regional Women Poets, Floating Bridge Review, City Arts and the Tacoma Arts Museum 20/20: Tacoma in Images and Verse broadside show, and Vox Populi. A graduate of the Evergreen State College, she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. She is a community college professor and founded Dwell Press in 2010.

Contributing Editors

Zoë Calhoun

Zoë Calhoun was raised in the desert of Tucson, Arizona. In May 2014, she graduated from Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas as a double major in Spanish and digital writing and photography. A few months later, she permanently relocated to Madrid, Spain to teach English and travel. She discovered her passion for Spanish culture and bicycles, both of which fill her everyday life. Zoë writes for Volata, a bicycle magazine based out of Barcelona, and works as a freelance translator. When she’s not pedaling through pueblos, she can be spotted in a plaza in Madrid sipping on Spanish vermouth with friends.

Hannah Fries

Hannah Fries is the author of the poetry collection Little Terrarium and the book Forest Bathing Retreat. She grew up in New Hampshire, went to Dartmouth College, and later got an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College. From 2005 to 2014 she worked as an editor—including poetry editor—at Orion magazine before moving on to be a project editor for Storey Publishing, where she has edited books about, among other things, timber framing, tiny houses, tea blending, nature journaling, chocolate, creativity, and dreams. Her poetry and prose have appeared in such places as American Poetry Review, Massachusetts Review, Drunken Boat, Water~Stone Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and she is the recipient of a Colorado Art Ranch residency and a Bread Loaf scholarship.

Hannah is currently a freelance editor and writer living with her family in western Massachusetts. In the springtime you’ll find her in the garden, in the wintertime on cross-country skis, and in summer and fall in her hiking boots as much as possible. She also bakes a mean pie. Visit her online at hannahfries.com.

Paulina Jenney

Paulina Jenney was born and raised in Flagstaff, Arizona. Since her 2016 graduation from the University of Arizona with degrees in environmental studies and creative writing, she has worked as a farmhand, builder, bartender, and caretaker across the Americas. Now, she is fulfilling a Fulbright year in Gijón, Spain. When not in front of a book or a blank page, she can be found paragliding, practicing yoga, and running races for which she is terribly under-prepared.

Paulina’s blogs have been published by Terrain.org and Conservation International.

Joshua Foster

The manicured farmland coupled with the bleak desert and mountainous terrain of southeastern Idaho have influenced Joshua Foster all of his life. He grew up working on his father’s commercial grain and potato farm driving truck, irrigating, working the ground, spending time in the sun.

Joshua earned degrees in English and creative writing from BYU-Idaho and the University of Arizona. After schooling, he returned to the farm, and since has moved to Houston to earn his Ph.D. in creative writing. His work—both short stories and personal essays—have appeared in various literary journals, zines, and magazines. They most often deal with rural culture and habitat. He appreciates those intersections in literature that teach him how good it is to be alive.

Ken Pirie

Ken Pirie has been an urban designer and planner for 24 years. As a principal with Walker Macy Landscape Architects and Planners, he enjoys work that aims to carefully mesh human and natural communities across the West, with socially and ecologically responsible town and campus planning. Rooted in Portland, Oregon, he likes to explore the Northwest by hiking, mountaineering, and driving aimlessly. With Simmons B. Buntin, he co-authored Unsprawl: Remixing Spaces as Places (Planetizen Press, 2013).

Editorial Board

Taylor Brorby

Taylor Brorby is contributing editor at North American Review. An award-winning essayist and poet, Taylor’s work has appeared in The Huffington Post, High Country News, and North American Review and has been supported by the MacDowell Colony, the National Book Critics Circle, Mesa Refuge, the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, and the North Dakota Humanities Council. He’s the author of Crude: Poems and Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience, and co-editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. He’s at work on books related to the Bakken oil boom, family trauma, and diabetes.

Scott Calhoun

Scott Calhoun explores backroads and backcountry in search of plants, gardens, architecture, and food. Scott has written and provided photographs for five critically acclaimed gardening books. His first book, Yard Full of Sun,received the 2006 American Horticultural Society Book Award; his second title, Chasing Wildflowers, was awarded the Garden Writers Association 2008 Silver Book Award. Scott’s most recent titles include Designer Plant Combinations; The Hot Garden; and Hot Pots. Scott is a Contributing Editor to Horticulture magazine, writes a monthly garden column for Sunset magazine, and freelances for numerous print publications including American Gardener, Country Gardens, and Wildflower. Based in Tucson, Arizona, Scott designs gardens, writes, and lectures across the United States. Currently, he is working on a book about agave plant exploration and cuisine. Catch up with Scott at www.zonagardens.com.

Rob Carney

Rob Carney is originally from Washington state, 22 years in Puyallup/Tacoma and four in Spokane. He has a BA in English from Pacific Lutheran University, an MFA from Eastern Washington University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He is the author of five books of poems, most recently The Book of Sharks (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), which was named a finalist for the 2019 Washington State Book Award. His work has appeared in Cave Wall, The Dark Mountain Project, Sugar House Review, and many other journals, as well as the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward (2006). In 2013 he won the Terrain.org Poetry Award and in 2014 he received the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Prize for Poetry. He is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University and lives in Salt Lake City.

Follow his Terrain.org series Old Roads, New Stories.

Miriam Marty Clark

Miriam Marty Clark is an Associate Professor of English at Auburn University in Alabama. A native Midwesterner, she has lived in the small-town South for more than twenty years. She teaches courses in American literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and has a special interest in American poetry from Whitman and Emerson to the present. She has published essays on a number of twentieth century writers including poets A. R. Ammons and Howard Nemerov and short story writers Alice Munro, William Trevor, Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Grace Paley. She has also published poems.

At present she is working on a book about the twentieth-century American philosopher and rhetorician Kenneth Burke and his influential friendships with several American poets including John Crowe Ransom, Theodore Roethke, Howard Nemerov, and A. R. Ammons. Along with Burke’s writings, many of which address the relationship between nature and human action in culture and technology, she is studying his extensive correspondence with poets and critics.

Miriam is married to Drew Clark, who teaches Renaissance literature at Auburn. They have two daughters.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

Alison Hawthorne Deming was born and grew up in Connecticut. Her most recent book is Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit. She is the author of Science and Other Poems, selected by Gerald Stern for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, and three additional poetry books, The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence, Genius Loci, and Rope. Two new poetry books will be out in 2016: Death Valley: Painted Light, a collaboration with astronomer/photographer Stephen Strom, and Stairway to Heaven. Alison’s earlier nonfiction books are Temporary Homelands, The Edges of the Civilized World, and Writing the Sacred Into the Real. She edited Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology and co-edited with Lauret E. Savoy The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World. Her work has won numerous awards, including a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pablo Neruda Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the Bayer Award in Science Writing from Creative Nonfiction for the essay “Poetry and Science: A View From the Divide.” Her poems and essays have been widely published and anthologized, including in The Georgia Review, Orion, Sierra, OnEarth, Verse and Universe: Poems on Science and Mathematics, The Norton Book of Nature Writing, and Best American Science and Nature Writing. She currently is Agnese Nelms Haury Chair of Environment and Social Justice in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona. She is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow.

Read Terrain.org’s 2010 interview with Alison.

Deborah Fries

Deborah Fries spent her childhood in western Pennsylvania, where she was determined to see beyond the Alleghenies. Living along the shores of Lake Michigan for 24 years gave her the big, curving horizon she always wanted to know. Returned to Pennsylvania, she lives and writes in suburban Philadelphia, where she is also a printmaker. She is the author of two books of poetry—Various Modes of Departure (2004) and The Bright Field of Everything (2014)—and is currently working on a third book, along with a series of multicultural screenplays with a partner.

Deborah has been a contributor to Terrain.org since 2000. Learn more about her projects and the writing workshops she teaches at www.deborahfries.net.

Renata Golden

Originally from the South Side of Chicago, Renata Golden discovered the American Southwest at age 18 when she stuck out her thumb on the Stevenson Expressway and ended up in Phoenix. Now the owner of an international technical writing company, Renata has authored several books on data center and cloud computing published by HP/HPE Press. Somewhere along the way she earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Houston, where she studied with Junot Diaz, Mary Gaitskill, Lucy Greeley, Adam Zagajewski, and Mark Doty. Renata is active in the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) in addition to the always exciting Association of Test Publishers (ATP). Renata currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she has taught at the Institute for American Indian Arts (IAIA) and is working on a collection of essays about the Chiricahua Mountains in Southeastern Arizona.

Charles Goodrich

Charles Goodrich is the author of two volumes of poems, Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden (Silverfish Review Press, 2010) and Insects of South Corvallis (Cloudbank Books, 2003), and a collection of essays about nature, parenting, and building his own house, The Practice of Home (Lyons Press, 2004). He has also co-editedIn the Blast Zone: Catastrophe and Renewal on Mount St. Helen (OSU Press, 2008). A number of his poems have been read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac.

After working for 25 years as a professional gardener, he presently serves as director of the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word at Oregon State University. Charles has an MFA in creative writing from OSU. For more information, visit www.charlesgoodrich.com.

Andrew C. Gottlieb

Born in Canada and raised outside of Boston, Massachusetts, Andrew C. Gottlieb now lives in Irvine, California, and has been on the West Coast since 1998. He studied writing at Iowa State University, getting his MA in English, and then at the University of Washington, earning his MFA in fiction writing.

His own work has appeared in many journals both online and in print including the American Literary Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, DIAGRAM, Ecotone, ISLE, and Poets & Writers, and a chapbook of poems, Halflives, came out from New Michigan Press in 2005. Along with his wife and two stepteens, he’s often trying to escape to a national or state park, the Central Coast, a beach, the deserts of Arizona, or some other popular or obscure wilderness location in order to hike, fish, gaze, write, or simply enjoy the outdoors.

Julian Hoffman

Julian Hoffman was born in England and grew up in Canada. In 2000 he moved with his wife Julia to live beside the Prespa Lakes in northern Greece. Julian’s writing and photography explore the connections between people, place, and nature. His book, The Small Heart of Things: Being at Home in a Beckoning World, was chosen by Terry Tempest Williams as the winner of the 2012 AWP Award Series for Creative Nonfiction, going on to win a National Outdoor Book Award in 2014 for Natural History Literature. His latest book, Irreplaceable: The Fight to Save Our Wild Places, was published in 2019. Along with winning the 2011 Terrain.org Nonfiction Prize and two Pushcart Prize nominations, his writing has appeared in EarthLines, Among Animals, Lush Times, Southern Humanities Review, Kyoto Journal, Flyway, and The Redwood Coast Review. You can find out more about Julian at julian-hoffman.com/.

Read Terrain.org’s 2015 interview with Julian.

Erik Hoffner

Erik Hoffner is an activist, writer, and photographer whose work appears in Earth Island Journal, The Sun, World Ark, Orion, and others. His photography has been exhibited in numerous spaces, perhaps most often in the Vermont Center for Photography, and he is also on the board of Coop Power, a member-owned renewable energy cooperative based in New England. For work, he is outreach coordinator for Orion magazine.

Besides blogging for the web’s top green news site, Grist.org, Erik is also known to grow enormous shiitake mushrooms on the seven acres of western Massachusetts forest he shares with his wife, Jenny Goodspeed. Learn more about Erik at www.erikhoffner.com.

Jessie Lendennie

Jessie Lendennie is a poet and publisher. Born in Arkansas, she lived in California and New York City before leaving the States for London, England, in 1970. She obtained a BA honours degree in Philosophy at Kings College, London, and a post-graduate degree in education from the Roehampton Institute, London. She began to publish her poetry in England during the 1970s, and in 1981, she moved to Galway, County Galway, Ireland, where she was a founder member of the Galway Writing Workshop, and founding editor of the journal The Salmon. The journal led to book publishing, and in 1984 Salmon Publishing (now Salmon Poetry) was established. Since 1986 she has run the press as its editor and managing director, commissioning, editing, and publishing over 350 books of poetry and prose. Many of these books were first collections from Irish women poets — a groundbreaking move in Irish poetry. Her own poetry explores the relationship between landscape and human ideals. Her published essays include “Holy Ground” (published in Irish Spirit, Wolfhound Press, 2001), an exploration of the spiritual dilemmas inherent in Ireland’s phenomenal growth and development over the last 15 years, and “Poets of the Burren” (The Book of the Burren, Tir Eolas Press, new edition 2002), on poets who have been influenced by the unique, desolate, limestone landscape of North County Clare, Ireland. Her books include Daughter (1988), Daughter and Other Poems (2001), and Walking Here (2011).

She has given numerous workshops, lectures, and writing courses in Ireland and abroad, including Yale University, University of Maryland, Marshall University, University of Alaska in Anchorage, University of Southern Illinois, Trinity College in Dublin, National University of Ireland, Rutgers University, University of Arkansas, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has read her poetry at dozens of venues in North America and Europe. In 1998 she was a writer-in-residence at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Jessie runs Salmon Poetry from a house on a hill overlooking the Atlantic, half a mile from the fabulous Cliffs of Moher in Co. Clare, Ireland.

Read Terrain.org’s 2001 interview with Jessie.

Carly Lettero

Carly Lettero is a mother, interdisciplinary researcher, writer, and community organizer. She directs the Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word at Oregon State University. She also manages and teaches in the MA in Environmental Arts and Humanities program at Oregon State University. She has nearly two decades of experience managing and developing programming with local and international nonprofits that are dedicated to environmental rights and action. She co-founded Communities Take Charge, a grassroots program that encourages communities and schools throughout the Pacific Northwest to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and become active in local climate change movements. She puts on her backpack whenever she gets the chance and has spent years traveling the world and listening to people’s stories.

David Rothenberg

Philosopher and musician David Rothenberg is the author ofWhy Birds Sing, published in eight languages. It was turned into a feature length BBC TV documentary. Rothenberg has also written Thousand Mile Song, about making music live with whales, Survival of the Beautiful, on evolution and beauty, and Bug Music, on insects and their million-years old music. His music, recorded on ECM, Gruenrekorder, and the Terra Nova labels, usually involves an integration with his clarinet improvisation with live and recorded natural sounds. Rothenberg has nine CDs out under his own name.

David is professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, and writes the “Bull Hill” column for Terrain.org.

Lauret Edith Savoy

Tracing memory threads Lauret Edith Savoy’s life and work: unearthing what is buried, re-membering what is fragmented, shattered, eroded. A woman of African American, Euro-American, and Native American heritage, she writes about the stories we tell of the American land’s origins and the stories we tell of ourselves in this land. Her books include Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape (2015), The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World, Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology, and Living with the Changing California Coast. Trace won the 2016 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and the 2017 ASLE Creative Writing Award. It was also a finalist for the 2016 PEN American Open Book Award and Phillis Wheatley Book Award, as well as shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and Orion Book Award.

Lauret is the David B. Truman Professor of Environmental Studies and Geology at Mount Holyoke College, a photographer, and pilot. Winner of Mount Holyoke’s Distinguished Teaching Award and an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, she has also held fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution and Yale University. She is also a Fellow of the Geological Society of America.

Fred Swanson

Fred Swanson is an Emeritus Scientist with the Pacific Northwest Research Station of the U.S. Forest Service and a Senior Fellow with the privately-endowed Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word, based in the School of Religion, Philosophy, and History within Oregon State University. He represents the science side of a collaboration with poet Charles Goodrich and philosopher/writer Kathleen Dean Moore representing the humanities side as they together facilitate the engagement of writers and artists with the ancient forests of the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in the Oregon Cascades and the blast zone of Mount St. Helens in southwest Washington. Trained as a geologist and specializing in the study of disturbance agents in forest ecosystems and watersheds (fire, flood, landslide, volcanic eruptions, clearcutting, forest roads), Fred has found it natural to connect with human disturbance agents –poets and artists.

His co-authored or co-edited books include Bioregional Assessments (Island Press, 1999), Road Ecology (Island Press, 2003), Ecological Responses to the Eruption of Mount St. Helens (Springer, 2005), and In the Blast Zone (Oregon State University Press, 2008).

Read Terrain.org’s 2013 interview with Fred.

Galina Tachieva

Galina Tachieva is an expert in sustainable urbanism, urban redevelopment, sprawl repair, form-based codes, and resort towns. As a partner at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, Architects and Town Planners (DPZ), Tachieva directs the design and implementation of projects in the U.S. and around the world. Tachieva is the author of the Sprawl Repair Manual, an award-winning publication by Island Press, which focuses on the retrofit of auto-centric suburban places into complete, vibrant communities. She has written articles forDesignIntelligence, Architecture and the City International, and Planetizen, and is a contributor to The New Civic Art and the forthcoming The Transect Reader.

Tachieva is one of the leaders of the Congress for the New Urbanism Sprawl Retrofit Initiative. She is the primary author of the SmartCode Sprawl Repair Module. Galina is originally from Bulgaria, where she received her degree in architecture, and later finished her master’s degree in urban design at the University of Miami in Florida. She lectures around the world on topics of sprawl retrofit and sustainable development. Tachieva is a founding member of the Congress for European Urbanism and a board member of the New Urban Guild Foundation and the Transect Codes Council. She is certified by the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) and by the U.S. Green Building Council as a LEED-Accredited Professional.

David Wann

David Wann has now written or edited nine books, more than two hundred articles, and has produced twenty videos and TV programs about sustainable lifestyles, policies, and designs. His most recent book, The New Normal (2011), is about changing the way our civilization defines success, and what actions can help achieve it. Other books include Log Rhythms (1984) Biologic: Designing With Nature to Protect the Environment (1994), Deep Design: Pathways to a Livable Future (1996), Affluenza (2001) The Zen of Gardening in the High and Arid West (2003) Superbia! 31 Ways to Create Sustainable Neighborhoods (2003), Reinventing Communities: Stories From the Walkways of Cohousing (2005) and Simple Prosperity: Finding Real Wealth in a Sustainable Lifestyle (2007). Films include Sustaining America’s Agriculture, narrated by Raymond Burr, Building Livable Communities, produced for then-VP Al Gore’s office, and Designing a Great Neighborhood, now airing on Free Speech TV and Lime TV. Visit his website at www.DaveWann.com.

David has presented keynote talks and workshops at many conferences and college events, and loves to see the “lights come on” as he talks about creating a better, more sustainable future. He’s taught at the college level, worked more than a decade as a policy analyst for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and helped design/build the cohousing village he now lives in, to bring his sustainable vision down to Earth.

For more information, please contact us.