May 24, 2025
Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder is the author of Mother, Creature, Kin. She grew up in the Great Plains of Nebraska and Oklahoma. After receiving her masters of theological studies at Harvard Divinity School, her writing became focused on the confluence of relationship to place with experiences of the sacred. From 2017-2022, she worked as a staff writer and editor for Emergence Magazine, an online and print publication exploring the intersection of culture, ecology, and spirituality. Her writing can also be found in The Atlantic, The Common, and other publications and in the edited poetry collection Writing the Land, and in Katie Holten’s The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape. She lives with her family in Rochester, Vermont.
May 19, 2025
Helen Whybrow is an Editor-at-Large for Milkweed Editions. She was the publisher of an imprint of W. W. Norton for many years before becoming a freelance editor and Editor-at-Large for Orion Magazine. With a focus on creative nonfiction, Helen has worked with dozens of well-known writers over the years, including Barry Lopez, Lauret Savoy, Robin Kimmerer, Pico Iyer, Andrew Lam, and many others. She has authored two books, Dead Reckoning and A Man Apart and edited several anthologies, including Hearth. Her new book is The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd’s Life. Helen studied literature at Amherst College and journalism at Harvard. Also an organic farmer and co-founder of a nonprofit that nurtures leaders working for land justice, she lives with her family in Vermont.
May 19, 2025
Sebastian Smee is a Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic at the Washington Post and the author of The Art of Rivalry. Formerly the chief art critic at the Boston Globe and national art critic for the Australian, he has also written for the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Financial Times, and the Independent, among other publications. His newest book is Paris in Ruins, is a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, a Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2024 and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2024. He lives in Boston.
May 19, 2025
Laurie Gwen Shapiro is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and journalist whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, New York Magazine, The Daily Beast, Slate, and others. Shapiro is the 2021 winner of the Damn History Award for “The Improbable Journey of Dorothy Parker’s Ashes” for The New Yorker and gold medallion winner in the People Profiles category for the Silurian Press Club’s 77th annual Excellence in Journalism Awards. She is the author of The Stowaway a best seller and an Indie next selection. She is an adjunct professor of journalism at The NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute in the graduate program. Her new book,The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon will be published in July
May 19, 2025
Adam Plunkett is a a literary critic, has received fellowship support from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Leon Levy Center for Biography. His new book is Love and Need: the Life of Robert Frost’s Poetry, is a demanding and rewarding biography of Frost in which Plunkett threads together Frost’s life with an analysis of his poetry. He lives in New York.
