Charles Hood has published 16 books, ranging from a mammal guide to California to a book of poetry about the Spanish Conquest of Costa Rica. Charles has received several awards including a Fulbright scholarship in Ethnopoetics, the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, the Felix Pollack Prize in Poetry, the Kenneth Patchen Award for Experimental Fiction, and Best Nonfiction Book of 2019 from the Southern California Booksellers Association.

Nature study has taken him from Morocco to Mongolia, and from the Amazon to the South Pole. Charles has seen 5,000 species of birds in the wild, been lost in a whiteout in Tibet, contracted and survived bubonic plague, and published over 500 nature photographs. He is currently writing a field guide to snakes and lizards and also working on a book about nature after dark.

Dan White is the author of The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind and Almost Found Myself on the Pacific Crest Trail (Harper Collins), an NCIBA bestseller and Los Angeles Times “Discovery” selection, and Under The Stars: How America Fell In Love With Camping (Henry Holt & Co.), which Cheryl Strayed described as “the definitive book on camping in America.”  His writing has been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Outside, Poets & Writers, Catamaran literary magazine and the Washington Post. He has an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University, where he was a Dean’s Fellow and taught in the Undergraduate Writing Program. Dan was a Steinbeck Fellow at the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. He has taught writing at Columbia University and San Jose State. Before pursuing his MFA, he worked as the city reporter for the Santa Cruz Sentinel. He lives in Santa Cruz, California with his wife and daughter.