Obi Kaufmann

Growing up in the East Bay as the son of an astrophysicist and a psychologist, Obi Kaufmann spent most of high school practicing calculus and breaking away on weekends to scramble around Mount Diablo and map its creeks, oak forests, and sage mazes. Into adulthood, he would regularly journey into the mountains, spending more summer nights without a roof than with one. He is the author of The California Field Atlas (2017, #1 San Francisco Chronicle Best Seller), The State of Water: Understanding California’s Most Precious Natural Resource (2019), and The Forests of California: A California Field Atlas (2020), all published by Heyday. When he is not backpacking, you can find the painter-poet at home in the East Bay, posting trail paintings at his handle @coyotethunder on Instagram. His website is coyoteandthunder.com. 

Greg Sarris

Greg Sarris is currently serving his sixteenth term as Chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and his first term as board chair for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. His publications include Keeping Slug Woman Alive (1993), Grand Avenue (1994, reissued 2015), Watermelon Nights (1998, reissued 2021), How a Mountain Was Made (2017, published by Heyday), and Becoming Story (2022, published by Heyday). Greg lives and works in Sonoma County, California. Visit his website at greg-sarris.com.

Deborah A. Miranda

Deborah A. Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area in California. Deborah lives in Eugene, Oregon with her wife, writer Margo Solod, and a variety of rescue dogs. She is Professor of English emerita at Washington and Lee University, where she taught literature of the margins and creative writing as the Thomas H. Broadus, Jr. Endowed Chair.

Her mixed-genre memoir Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir received the 2015 PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, a Gold Medal from the Independent Publishers Association, and was short-listed for the William Saroyan Literary Award. She is also the author of four poetry collections: Indian Cartography, The Zen of La Llorona, Raised by Humans, and Altar for Broken Things. She is the co-editor of Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature and contributing editor of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through. Photo by Margo Solod.

Jack Gedney

Jack Gedney was born in California, bounced around the United States in his youth, and returned to his home state to study literature and natural history at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the author of a compact field guide to the trees of the San Francisco Bay Area and co-owner of a wild bird feeding and nature shop in Novato, California. 

Alex Harris

Alex Harris, born and raised in Berkeley, California, is an artist interested in using art and technology to look at how humans interface with the natural world. He has a BA in environmental studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and previously worked as the web editor and electronic communications manager at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. He lives and works in Oakland, California.