CORNELIUS EADY is the author of seven books of poetry including, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets;The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; You Don’t Miss Your Water; Brutal Imagination, nominated for a 2001 National Book Award; and Hardheaded Weather. His most recent collection, New and Selected Poems, published in 2008 by Putnam, was nominated for the 2008 NAACP Image Award. He is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Literature, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, and The Prairie Schooner Strousse Award. With poet Toi Derricote, he is co-founder of Cave Canem, a summer workshop/retreat for African American poets. At present he is Associate Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame.

ROBERT HASS is a poet, translator and essayist. His recent books include his collection of poems, Time and Materials (Ecco/ HarperCollins), which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and Now & Then, a collection of his Washington Post columns, which was published by Shoemaker & Hoard in 2007. His other books of poetry include Sun Under Wood: New Poems, Human Wishes, Praise, and Field Guide. He has also co-translated many volumes of the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz and is the author or editor of several other collections of essays and translations, including The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa, and Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. Awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Book Critics Circle Award twice, he is a professor of English at UC Berkeley and directs the Poetry Program of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley.

BRENDA HILLMAN is the author of eight collections of poetry, all published by Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are Pieces of Air in the Epic and Practical Water (forthcoming, 2009). Hillman has also published three chapbooks: Coffee Three A.M, Autumn Sojourn, The Firecage; has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poetry for Shambhala Publications; and with Patricia Dienstfrey, co-edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood. Hillman is involved in anti-war activism with CodePink and teaches at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, California where she is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry.

SHARON OLDS's most recent book, One Secret Thing, was published by Knopf in 2008. Her previous collection, a selected poems, Strike Sparks, appeared in 2004. Her other books of poetry include The Unswept Room; Blood, Tin, Straw; Dead and the Living; The Wellspring; Satan Says; The Father; and The Gold Cell. Her work has been a finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award and was the Lamont Poetry Selection by The Academy of American Poets, and received the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University, and for 22 years has helped run a writing workshop at the Sigismund Goldwater Memorial Hospital, a 900-bed state hospital for the severely physically challenged. From 1998-2000 she was New York State Poet Laureate. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

EVIE SHOCKLEY is a poet and literary scholar. Her poetry collections include a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press, 2006) and two chapbooks: 31 words * prose poems (Belladonna* Books, 2007) and The Gorgon Goddess. Her poems also appear widely in journals and anthologies. Currently, she co-edits jubilat and, in 2007, guest-edited QUEST, a special issue of MiPoesias featuring the work of contemporary African American poets. Her literary criticism has appeared in African American Review, Center: A Journal of the Literary Arts, Jacket, Mixed Blood, Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry, Talisman, and elsewhere. Shockley is completing a book on black aesthetics and formal innovation in African American poetry, supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is on the faculty of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where she teaches African American literature and creative writing.

GALWAY KINNELL is a former MacArthur Fellow and has been state poet of Vermont. His Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1982. His many other books of poetry include, The Book of Nightmares, Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone, Imperfect Thirst, and A New Selected Poems which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2000. He has also published translations of Rainer Maria Rilke and other poets. His most recent collection, Strong Is Your Hold, was published by Mariner (Houghton Mifflin) in 2006. For many years he was the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University. He is currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He founded the Poetry Program of the Community of Writers in Squaw Valley.

DAVID LUKAS is a naturalist and writer whose writings have appeared in Audubon, Orion, Sunset, Wild Bird and his weekly column in the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of Watchable Birds of the Great Basin and Wild Birds of California. He revised the classic guidebook Sierra Nevada Natural History (UC Press, 2004). He leads an morning walks and informative hikes up Shirley Canyon through meadows and forests, with vistas of Squaw Valley for the participants and staff.