The Elk River faculty is comprised of some of the finest nature writers in the country, teachers who are dedicated to providing a supportive and inclusive classroom environment.
Faculty
Faculty
Jamie Ford
Jamie Ford is the author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, which spent two-and-a-half years on the New York Times bestseller list and won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. This multi-cultural tale has been optioned for film, as well as a stage musical, and is now read widely in hundreds of schools nationwide. His other bestselling novels include Songs of Willow Frost, and more recently, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy. His work has been translated into 35 languages.
Faculty
Chris La Tray
Chris La Tray is a Métis storyteller, a descendent of the Pembina Band of the mighty Red River of the North and an enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians. His third book, Becoming Little Shell: A Landless Indian’s Journey Home, was published by Milkweed Editions on August 20, 2024. His first book, One-Sentence Journal: Short Poems and Essays from the World at Large won the 2018 Montana Book Award and a 2019 High Plains Book Award. His book of haiku and haibun poetry, Descended from a Travel-worn Satchel, was published in 2021 by Foothills Publishing. Chris writes the weekly newsletter “An Irritable Métis” and lives near Frenchtown, Montana. He is the Montana Poet Laureate for 2023–2025.
Faculty
Deborah Miranda
Deborah A. Miranda was born at UCLA Hospital, the mixed-blood daughter of an Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation man with Santa Ynez Chumash tribal ancestry, and an English/French and Jewish woman from Beverly Hills.
In addition to Bad Indians, she is also the author of four poetry collections and coeditor of Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature.
She earned her Ph.D in English Literature from the University of Washington in Seattle and taught for three years at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma before relocating to Lexington, Virginia. There, she was the Thomas H. Broadus Jr. Endowed Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, teaching literature of the margins and creative writing. She retired from that position in 2021 to focus on writing and creating community. In the Fall of 2022, Deborah and her spouse, writer Margo Solod, relocated to River Song Cohousing in Eugene, Oregon on the banks of the Willamette River—just a day’s ride south on the Coast Starlight to homelands in California.
Faculty
Diane Wilson
Diane Wilson (Dakota) is a writer and educator, who has published five award-winning books as well as essays in numerous publications. Her 2021 novel, The Seed Keeper, received the 2022 Minnesota Book Award for Fiction, was selected for the 2025-26 NEA Big Read.
Her recent essays—which explore seed advocacy, food sovereignty, social justice, and cultural recovery—have been featured in acclaimed anthologies, as well as in notable environmental publications, including Orion.
Wilson is the former Executive Director for Dream of Wild Health, an Indigenous nonprofit organization, and the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, a national coalition of tribes and organizations working to create sovereign food systems for Native people.
Wilson is enrolled on the Sicangu Oyate (Rosebud) reservation in South Dakota, and is a Mdewakanton descendent. She lives near the St. Croix River in Minnesota, where she cares for an Indigenous seed garden, native perennials for pollinators, and a Tamarack bog.
Panelist
Lisa Baril
Lisa Baril is the author of The Age of Melt: What Glaciers, Ice Mummies, and Ancient Artifacts Teach Us about Climate, Culture, and a Future Without Ice. She has a broad background in environmental science and communication. Prior to her debut book, she contributed her expertise in natural resources and science to the National Park Service. Notably, she spent eight years as an ornithologist at Yellowstone National Park.
She now serves as the communications coordinator for the Northern Great Plains Joint Venture, a collaborative public-private effort focused on conserving native grasslands and supporting the ranchers who manage them. An avid birder and outdoor enthusiast, Lisa’s personal passions include hiking, backpacking, and cross-country skiing in the mountains near her home at Yellowstone’s northern boundary.
Opening Keynote
Taylor Brorby
Taylor Brorby is the author of Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land (NYT Editors’ Choice), Crude: Poems, Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience, and co-editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. His work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Book Critics Circle, the MacDowell Colony, the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Mesa Refuge, and Blue Mountain Center.
Taylor’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Huffington Post, Orion Magazine, Literary Hub, and has appeared in numerous anthologies. He is a contributing editor at North American Review and serves on the editorial boards of Terrain.org and Hub City Press.
Taylor has been interviewed about his work on MSNBC and NPR and regularly speaks around the country on issues related to extractive economics, climate change, queerness, and disability. He is an assistant professor at Montana State University, where he teaches nonfiction writing and is the Haynes Faculty Fellow.
Panelist
Cristina Eisenberg
Cristina Eisenberg holds a PhD in Forestry and Wildlife from the Oregon State University College of Forestry, where she researched food-web relationships involving wolves, elk, aspen, and fire. Her Prescott College MA is in Environmental Writing and Conservation Biology. A first-generation Native American (Raramuri and Western Apache) and Latinx ecologist, she has led several long-term, federal projects with Indigenous communities in the US and Canada. This work incorporates Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science in ecocultural restoration of forests, grasslands, and cultural keystone species such as wolves and bison.
She is a former professor, Associate Dean, and Director of Tribal Initiatives at the OSU CoF, and the former Chief Scientist at Earthwatch Institute, where she oversaw a global research program. She has authored several books and book chapters, and many peer-reviewed scientific and literary journal articles.
Her books The Wolf’s Tooth: Keystone Species, Trophic Cascades, and Biodiversity, and The Carnivore Way: Coexisting with and Conserving North America’s Predators were published by Island Press. She has served as president of the OSU Press board of directors, and nonfiction editor for the literary journal Whitefish Review.
For several decades she and her family have lived in a small log cabin in a remote northwest Montana valley, where grizzly bears outnumber humans. Her backyard consists of several million acres of contiguous federal wilderness.
Closing Keynote
J. Drew Lanham
J. Drew Lanham is a cultural ornithologist, naturalist, educator, and writer using robust science, artful essays, and evocative oratory to color the conservation conversation. Guided by principles of interconnectedness and interdependence, Dr. Lanham’s work centers on the growing issues within environmental justice as observed through the multifaceted perspective of a Black Southern man. As a storyteller, poet, and passionate advocate for accessibility and stewardship, his writing is in praise of wandering and wildness and in protest against all not justice or joy.
Lanham is a Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University. He has received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant (2022) as well as the Dan W. Lufkin Conservation Award from the National Audubon Society (2019), the Rosa Parks and Grace Lee Boggs Outstanding Service Award from the North American Association for Environmental Education (2016), and the E. O. Wilson Award for Outstanding Science in Biodiversity Conservation from the Center for Biological Diversity (2020) and the Thoreau Award in 2024. He served as the Poet Laureate of Edgefield, South Carolina (2022). Lanham and his family lives on a farm in the Upstate of South Carolina.
Guide
Jesse Logan
Jesse A. Logan is a Ph.D. ecologist who had a successful career both in academia and as a Forest Service scientist. Over the past 20 years, he has spent over 2,000 days on skis exploring the Northeast corner of Yellowstone’s backcountry and an additional 1,000 days or so hiking and backpacking in pursuit of Yellowstone cutthroat trout. This combination of formal academic training and local knowledge of Yellowstone’s cultural and natural history has resulted in unique qualifications for guiding in Yellowstone’s wildest corner, the Northern Range.
For the past fifteen years, Jesse has worked as a contract instructor for Yellowstone Forever leading field seminars ranging from flyfishing to backcountry skiing, and as a backcountry ski guide. He currently guides for Yellowstone Ski Tours, and is coeditor of the Big Sky Award winning book, Voices of Yellowstone’s Capstone: A Narrative Atlas of the Absaroka – Beartooth Wilderness.
Doug Peacock
Doug Peacock is the author of Grizzly Years, ¡Baja!, Walking It Off: A Veteran’s Chronicle of War and Wilderness, and co-author of The Essential Grizzly: The Mingled Fates of Men and Bears. A Vietnam veteran and former Green Beret medic, Doug has published widely on wilderness issues ranging from grizzly bears to buffalo, from the Sonoran desert to the fjords of British Columbia, from the tigers of Siberia to the blue sheep of Nepal. A friend of the late author Edward Abbey, Doug was the model for Abbey’s infamous character, George Washington Hayduke. Doug received a 2022 Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his most recent book, Was It Worth It: A Wilderness Warrior’s Long Trail Home. He was named a 2007 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2011 Lannan Fellow for his work In the Shadow of the Sabertooth: Global Warming, the Origins of the First Americans and the Terrible Beasts of the Pleistocene, for which he received a High Plains Book Award.
Panelist
Todd Wilkinson
Todd Wilkinson has been a journalist and award-winning author for more than 40 years, best known for his writing on the environment and, in particular, on his home bioregion, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. Founder of Yellowstonian.org, a nonprofit public interest journalism site devoted to exploring the critical issues of conservation, he has been a longtime contributor to National Geographic, The Guardian and other newspapers and magazines. His books have focused on such varied topics as scientific whistleblowers, the late Ted Turner, Jackson Hole Grizzly 399 and an array of fine art and cultural figures. He lives in Bozeman.
Staff
Director
CMarie Fuhrman
CMarie Fuhrman is the author of Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return, and Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems (Floodgate 2020). She is the co-editor of Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations (Tupelo 2019), and has forthcoming or published poetry and nonfiction in multiple journals including Emergence Magazine, Platform Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Cutthroat a Journal of the Arts, Whitefish Review, Poetry Northwest, as well as several anthologies. CMarie is a regular columnist for the Inlander, translations editor for Broadsided Press, and nonfiction editor for High Desert Journal and Upstreet. She is the Director of Poetry and is on the Nature Writing faculty at Western Colorado University. She was the 2021-2023 Idaho Writer in Residence, and resides in the mountains of west-central Idaho.
Program Manager
Andrea Peacock
As a journalist, workshop staffer Andrea Peacock has covered Montana politics and Western environmental news for alternative newsweeklies across the West, as well as Mother Jones, Amicus Journal, Counterpunch and High Country News. A former editor of the Missoula Independent, she received an Alicia Patterson Fellowship for her work on a project about the ways oil and gas development affects communities in the West. She is the author of Libby, Montana: Asbestos and the Deadly Silence of an American Corporation (finalist for the Mountains & Plains Bookseller Reading the West 2004 award in nonfiction) and the co-author of The Essential Grizzly: The Mingled Fates of Men and Bears (winner of Foreword Magazine’s 2006 Gold Award for Nature Book of the Year), with her husband Doug. She is the co-owner of Elk River Books in Livingston, Monana, and co-founder of Elk River Arts & Lectures.
Staff
Marc Beaudin
Workshop staffer Marc Beaudin is a former Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness Foundation artist-in-residence, a poet, theatre artist and co-owner of Elk River Books in Livingston, Montana. He is the author of Life List: Poems (named a 2020 Honor Book Winner by the Montana Book Award), the hitchhiking memoir, Vagabond Song: Neo-Haibun from the Peregrine Journals, and the album From Coltrane to Coal Train: An Eco-Jazz Suite. His work has appeared in numerous journals, and has been widely anthologized in publications dedicated to environmental and social justice. A frequent performer of poetry and spoken word, Beaudin has worked and recorded with a variety of musicians at venues across the country, including Billy Conway and Dana Colley (of Morphine), Bill Payne (of Little Feat), The Northwoods Improvisers and the Big Sky Jazz Trio. Despite all available evidence, he believes the Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D is more powerful than all the guns, smokestacks and coal trains in the world.
Staff
Stephen Brown
Stephen Brown is a graduate of Colorado State University where he was the recipient of the first place in the nonfiction category of CSU’s 2014 Creative Writing Scholarship. His short work has appeared in Cirque Journal, Canary Literary Magazine, and Apeiron Review.
In 2017 he was awarded The Montana Arts Council’s Developing Artist Grant, which helped to fund his participation in NEA Fellow and Novelist, Karen Fisher’s yearlong workshop through the Fishtrap Writer’s Conference. Most recently he was awarded the The Montana Quarterly’s 2023 Little Snowy Prize for short fiction.