Over the years, Moira Magneson has worked as a river guide, artist's model, truck driver, television writer, editor, and community college writing instructor. A Northern California native, she lives in the Sierra foothills where she has spearheaded many art actions and initiatives, including El Dorado County's Poetry Out Loud Competition, Veterans' Voices, Barbaric Yawp, and Black Lives: An American Overture. In 2024, she was the resident poet for ForestSong, a community arts project exploring solastalgia, biophilia, and resilience in the face of wildfire devastation. Magneson is the author of A River Called Home: A River Fable, an illustrated novella (Toad Road Press, 2024). In the Eye of the Elephant is her first full-length collection of poems.
 
Patrick Cahill’s The Machinery of Sleep (Sixteen Rivers Press) appeared in 2020. His poems have twice won the Central Coast Writers Award. A cofounder and editor of Ambush Review, a San Francisco–based literary and arts journal, he was also a contributing editor for the anthology Digging Our Poetic Roots: Poems from Sonoma County (WordTemple Press). He received his PhD in the History of Consciousness from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and wrote a study of Whitman and visual experience in nineteenth-century America. Portions of this work have appeared in The Daguerreian Annual and Left Curve. Cahill lives in San Francisco, where he volunteers with San Francisco Recreation and Parks in habitat restoration.
 
Ulalume González de León was born in 1928 in Montevideo, Uruguay, the daughter of two poets, Roberto Ibáñez and Sara de Ibáñez. She studied literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and at the University of Mexico. While living in Mexico in 1948, Ulalume became a naturalized Mexican citizen. She married painter and architect Teodoro González de León, and together they had three children. She published essays, stories, and poems and worked with Mexican poet and Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz as an editor of two literary journals, Plural and Vuelta. She also translated the work of H.D., Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, Lewis Carroll, and e.e. cummings. In the 1970s in Latin America, González de León was part of a generation of women writers challenging the traditional identities of women, marriage, and relationships. Her poetry earned her many awards, including the Xavier Villaurrutia Prize, the Flower of Laura Poetry Prize, and the Alfonso X Prize. Ulalume González de León died in 2009 of respiratory failure and complications of Alzheimer’s.
 
Terry Ehret, one of the founders of Sixteen Rivers Press, earned a degree in psychology from Stanford University and an MA in Creative Writing from San Francicsco State. She has published four collections of poetry, most recently Night Sky Journey from Kelly’s Cove Press. Her literary awards include the National Poetry Series, the California Book Award, the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, a Translation Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Northern California Book Award for California Poetry in Translation, and eight Pushcart Prize nominations. From 2004 to 2006, she served as the poet laureate of Sonoma County, where she lives and teaches writing.
 
Nancy J. Morales, a first-generation American of Puerto Rican parents, earned her bachelor’s degree from Rutgers College, a master’s in teaching English as a Second Language from Adelphi University, and a doctorate in education from Teachers College at Columbia University. She has taught at Dominican University, the College of Marin, Sonoma State University, and other schools, from elementary to graduate levels. She has served as a board member for the Northern California Chapter of the Fulbright Alumni Association and teaches Spanish to private clients. She has received a Northern California Book Award for California Poetry in Translation and a Pushcart Prize nomination. She lives in Napa County with her husband and son.