JOHN RICHARD JEFFERIES (6 November 1848 - 14 August 1887) was a British novelist and essayist who helped pioneer the field of modern nature writing. Jefferies described the English countryside with an intimate vividness and expansive passion that inspired both his contemporaries and later writers.

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS is the author of fourteen books including Erosion: Essays of Undoing, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, and When Women Were Birds. Recipient of John Simon Guggenheim and Lannan Literary Fellowships in creative nonfiction, she is the Provostial Scholar at Dartmouth College. Her work has been anthologized and translated world-wide.

BROOKE WILLIAMS has spent thirty years advocating for wildness, most recently with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance and as the Executive Director of the Murie Center in Moose, Wyoming. He holds an MBA in Sustainable Business from the Bainbridge Graduate Institute and a Biology degree from the University of Utah. He has written four books including Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness, and dozens of articles. He is involved in The Great West Institute, a think tank exploring expansion and innovation in the conservation movement and is currently working on a book about ground-truthing.

Brooke and Terry have been married since 1975. They live with their dogs in Jackson, Wyoming, and Castle Valley, Utah.

SCOTT SLOVIC is professor of literature and environment and chair of the Department of English at the University of Idaho. He served as founding president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment from 1992 to 1995, and since 1995 has edited ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. The author of more than 200 articles in the field of ecocriticism, he has also written, edited, and co-edited twenty-one books, including Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing and Going Away to Think.