Since the publication of his first books of poem, the Porcine Legacy in 1974, David Lee’s unique force has touched and inspired people from a variety of locations, background and ages, including hundreds of students and aspiring writers.  A Texas native, Dave studied in the seminary for the ministry, was a boxer, is a decorated Army veteran, played semiprofessional baseball as the only white player to ever play for the Negro League Post Texas Blue Stars and was a knuckleball pitcher for the South Plains Texas League Hubbers, he raised hogs, worked as a laborer in a cotton mill, earned a Ph.D. with a specialty in the poetry of John Milton and retired after 32 years of teaching at Southern Utah University, serving for many of those years as the Chairman of the Department of Language and Literature. 

Dave was named Utah’s first Poet Laureate in 1997 serving in this capacity until 2002.  Hi 1999 collection News From Down to the Café was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.  In 2001, he was chosen as a finalist for United States Poet Laureate.  Dave has written 22 books, the most reason, Rusty Barbed Wire, a book of his selected poems. 

Peggy Shumaker is the daughter of two deserts—the Sonoran desert around Tucson and the subarctic desert of Interior Alaska. Shumaker was honored by the Rasmuson Foundation as its Distinguished Artist, served as Alaska State Writer Laureate, and received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the author of ten books of poetry, including Cairn, her new and selected. Her newest book is Still Water Carving Light, a collection of elegiac poems. Her lyrical memoir is Just Breathe Normally. Professor emerita from University of Alaska Fairbanks, Shumaker taught in the Rainier Writing Workshop MFA at Pacific Lutheran University. She serves on the Advisory Board for the Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prizes and for the Kachemak Bay Writers Conference. Shumaker is editor of the Boreal Books series (an imprint of Red Hen Press), editor of the Alaska Literary Series at University of Alaska Press, and contributing editor for Alaska Quarterly Review. 

Jon D. Lee is an award-winning educator, folklorist, poet, and writer. He serves as a poetry editor for Salamander, and has been a national reviewer for poetry and fiction for the National YoungArts Foundation, and a contributor to NPR’s Cognoscenti and CommonHealth blogs. In 2015 he was a Visiting Professor at Utah State University, and is currently an Instructor at Suffolk University. Jon D. Lee has a Ph.D. in Folklore, and is the author of the collection of poems Ode to Brian: The Long Season, and the academic monograph An Epidemic of Rumors: How Stories Shape our Perceptions of Disease and These Around Us.   His most recent book is IN/DESIDERATO.  Jon lives in Boston with his wife and children.

(Photo by Jaq Chen)