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Rachel Sussman is a contemporary artist based in Brooklyn. For nearly a decade, she's been developing the critically acclaimed project “The Oldest Living Things in the World,” for which she researches, works with biologists, and travels all over the world to photograph continuously living organisms 2000 years old and older. Stewart Brand calls her work "the missing science of biological longevity." She’s received numerous awards including a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship, has spoken at TED, The Long Now Foundation, and UCLA, amongst others, and appeared on the air on CNN, BBC, and various public radio programs. Her exhibition record spans more than a decade in museums and galleries in the US and Europe, and her photographs and writing have been featured on global media outlets including The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and NPR’s Picture Show. Jerry Saltz says of her work: “These stately pictures quiet the soul… Sussman brings you to the place where science, beauty, and eternity meet.”

From her 19th Century island farmhouse home on Islesboro, Maine, prize-winning food historian, contemporary food essayist, and freelance writer Sandy Oliver writes a weekly newspaper column, contributes frequently to magazines, travels widely as a nationally sought-after speaker, panelist, and food expert, writes books, gardens organically, cooks, and lives sustainably.

Howard Norman has published three collections of storytelling from *the Far North: The Wishing Bone Cycle*, winner of the Harold Morton Landon Prize in Translation from the Academy of American Poets; *Where the Chill Came From*, and *Northern Tales: Traditional Stories of Eskimo and Indian Peoples*, part of the Pantheon Folklore and Fairy Tale Library. His novels *The Northern Lights* and *The Bird Artist *were both finalists for the National Book Award. He has also written childrens' books, radio plays, and a collection of short stories. Other works include the novels *The Haunting of L.* and *The Museum Guard*, and the short story collection, *The Chauffeur: Stories*. His most recent work is the 2004 collection of nonfiction travel essays entitled, *My Famous Evening: Nova Scotia Sojourns, Diaries, and Preoccupations*. Since 1989 Norman has taught in the MFA program at the University of Maryland and in spring 2003, he was the Writer in Residence at Goucher College. He divides his time between Washington D.C. and Vermont.

K eith Lee Morris is the author of a novel and an anthology of short action as well as numer- ous short stories appearing in various journals. Morris is also a professor of creative writing at Clemson University and, presently, the only tenured member of the creative writing staff. Morris' two books to date, The Greyhound God (novel, 2003) and The Best Seats in the House and Other Stories (short story collection, 2004), were both published by the University of Nevada Press and have each received favorable reviews. Of The Greyhound God, fellow author Brock Clarke remarks that the book is smart, heartbreaking, funny, full of big ideas and dangerous because of it. Along with these two books, Morris has published short stories in New Stories from the South, The Sun, Ninth Letter, and The New England Review among many others. Morris recently won the Eudora Welty Prize in fiction by the Southern Review, published at the Louisiana State University. Morris is also fiction editor of The South Carolina Review. Currently, Morris is in the process of finishing yet another novel and of course, more short stories. ------ Morris received his MFA in Writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.He is currently an Associate Professor in creative writing in the Clemson University English Department.

Kwame Dawes is a distinguished poet in Residence, Louis Frye Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts and founder and executive director of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. He is the director of the University of South Carolina Arts Institute and the programming director of the Calabash International Literary Festival, which takes place in Jamaica in May of each year. Kwame Dawes is a regular blogger for the Poetry Foundation; his blogs can be read at www.poetryfoundation.org.