PAIGE ACKERSON-KIELY is the author of In No One’s Land, judged by DA Powell as winner of the Sawtooth Poetry Prize. She has also received awards and fellowships from Poets & Writers, Vermont Community Foundation, The Willowell Foundation and The Jentel Artist Residency Program, among others. Her second book of poems, The Misery Trail, is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press. Paige lives in rural Vermont, where she edits the poetry magazine A Handsome Journal, and manages her family band, The Blonde Sorrows.

PHILIP BARUTH is a novelist and award-winning commentator for Vermont Public Radio. His latest novel, The Brothers Boswell (Soho Press), tracing the famous friendship between James Boswell and Samuel Johnson, was selected as one of the Best Books of 2009 by The Washington Post. His novel, The X President was selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of 2003. Referred to as a member of "the new generation of up-and-coming writers" by the Washington Post, Philip teaches Vermont Literature and creative writing at the University of Vermont, where he has served on the Faculty senate and is currently Associate Chair of the English Department.

DIANNE BENEDICT'S stories have been included in numerous anthologies and magazines, including The Best American Short Stories of 1984. Her story, "Shiny Objects,” published in The Atlantic Monthly, was later anthologized in The Best Stories of The Atlantic in the Last Ten Years. Her book of short stories, Shiny Objects, won the Iowa short Fiction Award in 1982, judged that year by Raymond Carver. Shiny Objects was subsequently published by the Iowa University Press. An electronic edition and a new paperback edition of that collection will be coming out in 2011. She has taught in several MFA writing programs, and is a recipient of a grant from The National Endowment of the Arts, an individual artist grant from the Ohio Arts Counsel, and two individual artist grants from the Counsel for the Arts in Maine. She teaches creative writing at The University of Maine, and lives in passive solar house near a large saltwater marsh in Brunswick, Maine.

KATHRYN BLUME is an actor, writer, environmental activist, and award-winning solo performer who has toured her work to over 50 cities in the US, Canada, and Europe. She co-founded the Lysistrata Project, the first worldwide theatrical event for peace, and received her BA from Yale with a self-designed degree in environmental studies and theater.

AUDREY BOHANAN has taught poetry and writing for The Johns Hopkins University, the University of New England, and Champlain College's Writers' Conference. Her work has been widely published, and her first book, Lime, received the Gerald Cable Book Award in 2004. She has been the recipient of a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship and a finalist for a "Discovery"/The Nation award. Her second book, in progress, was a finalist for The National Poetry Series and the Carolina Wren Poetry Award in 2009. She lives off the grid in Maine, where she and her husband own and manage a small commercial tree farm.

TIM BROOKES is the author of nine books, including Guitar, The End of Polio, and Thirty Percent Chance of Enlightenment. He was born in a small house in London, of parents who were poor, honest and liked going for very long walks, preferably in the rain. My education consisted of being forced to take written exams every five or six weeks, and eat school lunches of liver and onions-until I got to Oxford, where we had written exams every eight weeks and had lunches of pickled onions and Guinness.

This was quite enough to make me flee the country and seek gainful employment in Vermont, where I have lived for 29 years, writing a great deal and trying to grow good raspberries. Only one of my books has been translated into another language; it appeared in Dutch as "Geen plek om een koe kwijt te raken." My favorite color is russet. If I had my life all over again, I would take more risks, like smuggling the liver out of the dining hall wrapped in my handkerchief.

MICHAEL CHORNEY is a self-taught musician, composer, and arranger who has lived and worked in Vermont for 30 years. He has been called "one of the Green Mountains' most inventive musician-composers." As a bandleader, Michael has created and led viperHouse, Magic City, Orchid, 7 Deadly Sins, and his newest ensemble, the Michael Chorney Sextet.

Michael has also produced fellow Vermonter Anais Mitchell's albums Hymns for the Exiled and The Brightness. Over the past three years they have collaborated on Mitchell's folk opera, Hadestown (Righteous Babe, 2010). Michael's arrangements feature the playing of producer/bassist Todd Sickafoose, Jim Black, Josh Roseman, Tanya Kalmanovich and Marika Hughes. Guests singers include Justin Vernon, Ani DiFranco, Greg Brown and the Haden Triplets.

In 2009, Michael received a New Works Grant from the Vermont Community Foundation, as well as a commission from the Flynn Theater, for his new works for sextet.

EUGENIE DOYLE, author of two novels for young adults, Stray Voltage and According to Kit (Frontstreet/ Boyds Mills Press) and many short stories, is a graduate of the VT College MFA in Writing program. She teaches frequently at the New England Young Writers conference at Breadloaf. She and her family operate The Last Resort, an organic berry, vegetable, and hay farm in Monkton, VT.

J.C. ELLEFSON is the director of the YVWC and is currently Poet-In-Residence at Champlain College. His poems have been published throughout the United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, and Japan, and he has taught writing and literature at Shanghai University, the Universidade Dos Acores, and now at Champlain, where he chairs the committee for verbal insurrection. Jim and his wife, Lesley Wright, own and operate Stoney Lonesome Farm.

LUCAS FARRELL is the author of two chapbooks: The Blue-Collar Sun (Alice Blue Books, 2009) and Bird Any Damn Kind (Caketrain Press, 2010). His first collection of poems, The Many Woods of Grief, won the 2010 Juniper Prize for Poetry and will be published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2011. His writing has appeared in Strange Machine, Jubilat, DIAGRAM, Cannibal, Zero Ducats, Mid-American Review and elsewhere. He co-edits the poetry journal Slope and currently lives and works on a goat farm in Vermont.

GEOF HEWITT lives in Calais, Vermont. Vermont's slam champion, Geof has been teaching, editing, writing, performing, and passing out wolf calls for forty-five years. This makes him sound like an oracle, and he is. His latest books are Only What's Imagined (poems) and Hewitt's Guide to Slam Poetry and Poetry Slam, which comes with a DVD and won the Mom's Choice award for poetry in 2008. His collection of selected and new poems, The Perfect Heart, is due from Mayapple in the fall. (Photo credit to Jeb Wallace-Brodeur)

JENNY LAND studied creative writing at Dartmouth College and at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. She writes and publishes poetry and children's fiction. A true Vermonter, Jenny teaches at St. Johnsbury Academy.

DANIEL LUSK is author of Kissing the Ground: New & Selected Poems, The Cow Wars, Poems, 1982, and Wild Onions, (chapbooks), O, Rosie, a novel, Homemade Poems: A Handbook, and several anthologies of poetry, most recently Onion River: Six Vermont Poets. His poems, stories and essays have appeared in dozens of literary journals and anthologies, among them Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Chariton Review, American Poetry Review, New Letters, and The North American Review.

His weekly reviews and commentaries on books have been broadcast by 160 affiliate stations of National Public Radio, and have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Chicago Sun-Times. He has been awarded grants and literary fellowships from the Vermont Arts Council, Vermont Arts Endowment and Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, as well as residencies at Yaddo and The MacDowell Colony. Daniel teaches poetry and creative writing at University of Vermont.

KERRIN McCADDEN's poems have appeared or will soon in Best American Poetry 2012, American Poetry Review, Green Mountains Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Failbetter, Hunger Mountain, PANK and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for Best New Poets. Her manuscript, Landscape with Plywood Silhouettes, was recently runner up for BOA Editions’ A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and for other prizes. She lives in Plainfield, Vermont in a yellow house, and teaches English and Creative Writing at Montpelier High School.

MARK NASH has worked for over 20 years as an actor, director, playwright, teacher, and producer in Los Angeles, Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis, New York and Vermont. He served as Vermont Stage Company's Producing Artistic Director from 2000-2011, in which time he directed thirteen of the company's productions and acted in nine. For four years Mark served as Artistic Director of Camel's Hump Radio, Vermont Public Radio's family literature program.

TOM PAINE is the author of The Pearl of Kuwait (a novel about a Vietnamese marine who falls in love with a Kuwaiti princess during the Gulf War and goes AWOL with his surfer dude buddy to rescue her ), and Scar Vegas-- a book of ten stories set around the globe. His stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, The New England Review, Playboy and in the O. Henry Award and Pushcart Award anthologies. Scar Vegas was a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway award. He teaches at The University of New Hampshire, and is a graduate of Princeton and the Columbia MFA program.

ERIC RONIS is a Vermont-based actor, director and playwright. He teaches various Communicaton and Theatre classes at Champlain College, where he also serves as the Assistant Dean for the Communication and Creative Media Division. Eric holds degrees from Harvard University and Boston University's School for the Arts. His most recent one-man show, "Things I'm Not Supposed to Say," premiered in Burlington, VT in Fall of 2008.

ANNE SANOW is the author of the story collection Triple Time, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for Fiction, and chosen as a 2010 “Must Read” title by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. Her awards include fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Anne teaches fiction workshops at several writing programs, arts organizations, and writing conferences, and is also a nonfiction editor. She lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

CATHARINE WRIGHT, MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, brings research and experience in the arts, social justice education, and contemplative practice to her teaching in the writing and creative writing programs at Middlebury College. She has been involved with numerous projects, boards and programs that engage issues of race, class, gender and sexuality in higher education and currently coordinates a Mellon-funded faculty writing project called Writing Beyond Borders. Her publications include fiction in literary magazines, non-fiction articles on contemplative practice and the arts, articles on teaching in academic journals, and two books: Vermonters At Their Craft (New England Press, 1987), and (co-edited) Social Justice Education: Inviting Faculty to Transform Their Institutions (Stylus, 2010). She lives in Middlebury with her partner and their three teenagers.