Barbara Hurd is an author, essayist, and teacher in the M.F.A. writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her essays have appeared in Audubon, Best American Essays, The Georgia Review, Orion, and The Yale Review, among many others, and her books include Listening to the Savage/River Notes and Half-Heard Melodies (Georgia, 2016), Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains (Georgia, 2008), Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling through the Dark (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), which won a Library Journal Best Natural History Book of the Year, and Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination (Beacon Press, 2001), a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001. In 2015, she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in General Nonfiction.
Stephen E. Strom spent forty-five years as a distinguished research astronomer at Harvard University, SUNY Stony Brook, the University of Massachusetts, and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO). At the time of his retirement in 2007, he was Associate Director for Science at NOAO (now NOIR Lab). In 1978, Strom also began to make fine-art photographs of the American West. His work has been exhibited widely throughout the U.S. and is in the permanent collections of the Center for Creative Photography and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others. For all of his books of photography, Strom has collaborated with distinguished poets, writers, scientists, and curators: Bears Ears: Views from a Sacred Land (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2018), Tidal Rhythms: Change and Resilience at the Edge of the Sea (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2016), Death Valley: Painted Light (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2016), Earth and Mars: A Reflection (Arizona, 2015), Sand Mirrors (Polytropos, 2012), Earth Forms (Dewi Lewis, 2009), Otero Mesa: Preserving America's Wildest Grasslands (New Mexico, 2008), Sonoita Plain: Views from a Southwestern Grassland (Arizona, 2005), Tseyi / Deep in the Rock: Reflections on Canyon de Chelly (Arizona, 2005), and Secrets from the Center of the World (Arizona, 1989).
