This April David Gessner won the John Burroughs award for Best Natural History Essay, confirming his place at the forefront of a new generation of writers who meld the techniques of memoir and New Journalism with writing about the natural world. Far from the staid, hushed-voiced nature writing of the past, this new work abandons cobwebbed environmental clichés and uses humor, scene, and science to present a vibrant intertwining of the human and so-called natural worlds. Over the past six years, Gessner has published four important books of literary nonfiction, beginning with Return of the Osprey in 2001. The Boston Globe chose Osprey as one of the top ten nonfiction books of 2001 and called it a "classic of American Nature Writing," but Gessner responded with Sick of Nature, which attempted to break new ground for the nature essay and overturn old verities. Of Sick of Nature, renowned eco-critic Michael Branch wrote that Gessner, "has positioned himself as a sort of Woody Allen of environmental writers,"and that "Like Emerson, who observed that the ‘dead forms’ of institutional practice must be revivified through radical new acts of intellectual, aesthetic and moral imagination, Gessner rails against the narrowness of environmental literature to open the field to new (if less earnest) approaches."

In his latest book, Soaring with Fidel, Gessner continues to push the genre, following the entire 7,000 mile migration of the osprey from New England to Cuba and Venezuela, while refusing to reach for easy wonder or old language. He attempts to convey the sheer excitement of linking one’s life to the natural world, believing, as John Muir put it, that,"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." Gessner’s passion for finding new writing about place and the natural world is also reflected in Ecotone, the literary journal he founded in 2004, which has published the work of young unknown writers besides that of Wendell Berry, Joy Williams, and Gerald Stern.
David Gessner is the author of six books of literary nonfiction, and his essays have appeared in many magazines and journals including The Georgia Review, American Scholar, Orion, The Boston Sunday Globe, The Harvard Review, and the 2006 Pushcart Prize Anthology, for which the essay "Benediction" was selected. He has taught Environmental Writing as a Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard, and is a Professor of creative nonfiction at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He is currently at work on a novel of place about Cape Cod and several nonfiction projects

Derrick Jensen is an activist, author, small farmer, bee-keeper, teacher, and philosopher whose speaking engagements in recent years have packed university auditoriums, bookstores, churches - you name the place. His acclaimed book, A Language Older Than Words, has been said to accomplish the rare feat of both breaking and mending the reader’s heart, as well as energizing the mind.

A typical Jensen event is multidimensional and feels a bit like traveling beneath the earth among tree roots, as they twist their way into soil, rock, river beds and accompany fish, insects, discarded tires, cellophane wrappers, animal minds, history, and human instinct on strange and interlocking journey.

Speaking in an almost improvisational style, Jensen explores the nature of injustice, of what civilizations do to the natural world and how, in the face of the resulting horror that is one of the all too apparent consequences of grave injustice, civilized human beings create intricate systems of denial, silence, abnegation, deception and self-hatred to keep it at bay.

He also reaches back to our collective childhoods, to the reality of magic in life, to discuss how nature has spoken to us and to how we must remember all the conversations we’ve had with her and renew them. It’s his antidote to cynicism and apocalypse. That there is a language much older than the lying language we use daily, without being aware, to dispel the horrors of modern living and dying.

If there is a connection between Tiger Woods, newspaper journalism, the bad moods of trees, child abuse, amnesia, school, language, and salmon, Jensen finds those connections in a most personal way and exploits them so that the listener can actually experience the intricacies of Jensen’s point of view.

It is indeed a heart rending, mind expanding, and ultimately healing exercise to explore Jensen’s root system, with him not so much as a guide, but an experienced fellow traveler.

Other books include: Welcome to the Machine: Science, Surveillance, and the Culture of Control; Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution; Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests; The Culture of Make Believe; A Language Older than Words; Listening to the Land

Gretel Ehrlich was born on a horse ranch in California and  educated at Bennington College and UCLA film school. She is the author of 13 books including three books of narrative essays, a novel, a memoir, three books of poetry, a biography, a book of ethnology/travel, and a children’s book, among others. They are: The Solace of Open Spaces; Heart Mountain; Islands, The Universe, Home; A Match to the Heart; Questions of Heaven; A Blizzard Year; John Muir, A Biography; This Cold Heaven; and The Future of Ice.

She has published in Harper’s, the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, Time, Life, National Geographic Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, National Geographic Traveler, Architectural Digest, Orion, Shambala Sun, Tricycle, Antaeus, and Outside, among many others.

Her work has been anthologized in Best Essays of the Century, Best Essays of 1988, Best Spiritual Essays, Best Travel Essays, The Nature Reader, Nature Writing, and many others. She is a correspondent for NPR’s Day to Day and has reported from Kosovo, the Arctic, and Africa. She wrote and recorded a poem cycle in collaboration with the Shioban Daives Dance Company at the South Bank Theatre in London. She contributed to Cape Farewell’s “THE SHIP” at the British Museum of Natural History in London on issues of climate change.

She is the winner of many awards, among them, a Bellagio Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the Harold B. Vurcell Award for distinguished prose from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, and two grants from the Expeditions Council of the National Geographic Society.

Two forthcoming books: Farthest North about indigenous Arctic Peoples and climate change; and a novel, Gin Chow’s Book of Predictions.

Ehrlich has spent much of the last 13 years traveling in Greenland and the Arctic, and otherwise divides her time between California and Wyoming.