RICK BASS’S works are concerned with the nature of the human heart and the heart of nature. The son of a geologist, Bass took an early interest in the natural world. Bass published his first novel, Where the Sea Used to Be, in 1998. His most recent fictional works are a short story collection titled The Hermit’s Story: Stories (Mariner Books, 2002) and The Diezmo: A Novel (Houghton Mifflin, 2005). Most of his other recent works have been nonfiction, including The Ninemile Wolves (Mariner Books, 1998), Brown Dog of the Yaak: Essays on Art and Activism (1999), Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had (Mariner Books, 2000), and The Roadless Yaak: Reflections and Observations About One of Our Last Great Wilderness Areas (The Lyons Press, 2003).
MARC BEKOFF is professor emeritus of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, a fellow of the Animal Behavior Society, and a former Guggenheim Fellow. In 2000 he was given the Exemplar Award from the Animal Behavior Society for major long-term contributions to the field of animal behavior. He and Jane Goodall cofounded the organization Ethologists for the Ethical Treatment of Animals in 2000.
Marc has published more than 200 papers and 20 books, including Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart (Oxford University Press, 2002), The Ten Trusts: What We Must Do to Care For the Animals We Love, with Jane Goodall (HarperCollins, 2002), The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy—and Why They Matter (New World Library, 2007), and Animals Matter (Shambhala Publications, 2007). He has also edited a three-volume Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior (Greenwood Publishing, 2004) and a four-volume Encyclopedia of Human-Animal Relationships (Greenwood Publishing, 2007). In 2005, Marc was presented with The Bank One Faculty Community Service Award for the work he has done with children, senior citizens, and prisoners. Marc travels the world, speaking on behalf of animals. His homepage is http://literati.net/Bekoff.
JANAY BRUN has been conducting her own puma research concerning the use of grasslands by pumas on the Buenos Aires Wildlife Refuge, located in Sasabe, Arizona. She currently resides in Arivaca, Arizona, which is about a dozen miles from the border with Mexico.
JULIA B. CORBETT is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah. Her book Communicating Nature: How We Create and Understand Environmental Messages was published in 2006 by Island Press.
DEANNA DAWN is a wildlife biologist living in San Jose, California. Her interest in cougars began with her graduate work, which focused on cougar management in the United States. Deanna has conducted field research on cougars in California, Idaho, and South Dakota.
SUZANNE DUARTE is an online adjunct professor of deep ecology in the ecopsychology master’s program at Naropa University. She has been an ecological writer, teacher, and activist for twenty years, and coauthored Lessons of the Rainforest (under the name Suzanne Head), published in 1990. She currently resides in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Considered the first truly professional writer to hail from Texas, J. Frank Dobie, teacher, storyteller, folklorist, historian, and author, was born September 26, 1888, on a ranch in the south Texas brush country of Live Oak County. Raised in the toughening, physically bracing traditions of a remote ranching region, Dobie nonetheless developed an early love for language and literature. His mother encouraged reading, providing her children with mail-ordered books, and his father developed the boy’s narrative sense with nightly readings of the King James version of the Bible. Following an unsuccessful ranching stint, Dobie wrote his wife, Bertha, that “in the university I am a wild man; in the wilds I am a scholar and a poet.”
STEVE EDWARDS is a naturalist and educator living and teaching in the forests around Bend, Oregon. He has worked for the Oregon Musem of Science and Industry’s Cascade Science School and The Nature Conservancy, and is presently an educator for Wolftree, Inc.
JOAN FOX’S stories and poems have appeared in various journals; a novel excerpt was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Where she lives with her family in the Southwest, a cougar stalking hikers deemed to be “not acting like a cougar” was exterminated.
GARY GILDNER was born in West Branch, Michigan. His twenty published books include Blue Like the Heavens: New and Selected Poems, The Second Bridge (a novel), The Warsaw Sparks and My Grandfather’s Book (both memoirs), and The Bunker in the Barley Fields, which received the 1996 Iowa Poetry Prize. His new collection of short stories, Somewhere Geese Are Flying, was published by Michigan State University Press in 2004. He has also received a National Magazine Award for Fiction, Pushcart Prizes in fiction and nonfiction, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams and Theodore Roethke poetry prizes, and two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships. Gildner has been writer-in-residence at Reed College, Davidson College, Seattle University, and Michigan State University, and has been a Senior Fulbright Lecturer to Poland and to Czechoslovakia. He has given readings of his work at the Library of Congress, the Academy of American Poets, YM-YWHA in New York, the Manhattan Theatre Club, and at some 300 colleges and schools in the United States and abroad. Gary Gildner lives on a ranch in Idaho’s Clearwater Mountains.
Perhaps the most recognizable face of the conservation movement, Jane Goodall is the world’s renowned primatologist-turned-activist who brought the lives of chimpanzees to the forefront of animal behavior studies with her groundbreaking research conducted in the field in Tanzania over four decades. A longtime champion of animals and their well-being, Dr. Goodall, along with Genevieve, Princess di San Faustino, founded the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977. Today, her international environmental and humanitarian program for young people, Roots & Shoots, has 3,000 to 4,000 active groups in more than seventy countries. Dr. Jane Goodall is the author of many best-selling books, including her autobiography A Reason for Hope (Warner Books, 2000) and Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating (Warner Books, 2005).
WENDY KEEFOVER-RING is the director of the Carnivore Protection Program at Sinapu, an organization dedicated to improving the West for wild carnivores. Keefover-Ring received a Master of Arts degree in history from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She led a five-year campaign that helped reform how Colorado manages its puma population. She also watchdogs the federal predator-killing program, the USDA Wildlife Services. Her publications “Mountain Lions, Myths, and Media: A Critical Reevaluation of Beast in the Garden” and “Final Words About Beasts and Gardens” appeared in the December 2005 issue of Environmental Law. These essays debate radio reporter David Baron about the historical, scientific, and cultural understandings of pumas.
TED KERASOTE’S writing has appeared in more than fifty periodicals, including Audubon, National Geographic Traveler, Outside, Salon, and the New York Times. His most recent books are Out There: In the Wild in a Wired Age, which won the National Outdoor Book Award, and the New York Times best seller Merle’s Door: Lessons from a Freethinking Dog. He lives in Wyoming.
CHRISTINA KOHLRUSS lives, writes, and hikes in cougar territory in the foothills outside of Denver, where she occasionally glimpses a cougar that lives nearby. Like the last cougar she encountered, she is a mother—and her daughter will one day, hopefully, have her own cougar story to tell. She also enjoys practicing balancing energy and body work as a craniosacral therapist.
BARRY LOPEZ is a widely acclaimed author, notably of Arctic Dreams (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1986), for which he received the National Book Award; Of Wolves and Men (Scribner, 1979), a National Book Award finalist for which he received the John Burroughs and Christopher Medals; and eight works of fiction, including Light Action in the Caribbean and Field Notes. His essays are collected in two books, Crossing Open Ground and About This Life. He contributes regularly to Granta, The Georgia Review, Orion, Outside, The Paris Review, Manoa, and other publications in the United States and abroad. In his nonfiction, Mr. Lopez writes often about the relationship between the physical landscape and human culture. In his fiction, he frequently addresses issues of intimacy, ethics, and identity. His work appears in dozens of anthologies, including Best American Essays, Best Spiritual Writing, and the “best” collections from National Geographic, Outside, The Georgia Review, The Paris Review, and other periodicals.
Mr. Lopez is a recipient of the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the John Hay Medal; Guggenheim, Lannan, and National Science Foundation fellowships; Pushcart Prizes in fiction and nonfiction; and other honors.
BK LOREN’S work has garnered many literary awards, including the Mary Roberts Rinehart Nonfiction Fellowship, the Dana Award for the Novel, the D. H. Lawrence Fiction Award, and a Colorado Council for the Arts Fellowship. The Way of the River (repackaged and retitled Tiger to the Bone) was published by Lyons in 2001, and Loren’s shorter works have been published in periodicals and anthologies, including The Best American Spiritual Writing 2004, Women on the Verge, Two in the Wild, Orion, Parabola, and Utne. She attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently completing a novel.
CARA BLESSLEY LOWE is a writer and photographer based in Jackson, Wyoming. In 2001, she cofounded The Cougar Fund. Cara’s work has appeared in The Gift of Rivers: True Stories of Life on the Water (Traveler’s Tales, 2000), The Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior (Greenwood Press, 2004), Wyoming 24/7 (DK Books, 2004), and The Natural World (Mangelsen, 2007). Cara is the author of Spirit of the Rockies: The Mountain Lions of Jackson Hole and the editor of Polar Dance: Born of the North Wind, by Fred Bruemmer and Thomas D. Mangelsen (Images of Nature, 1997), which won the BEA Best of Small Press award in 1997.
STEVE PAVLIK teaches American Indian studies and native environmental science at Northwest Indian College, Bellingham, Washington. In all he has over thirty years of teaching experience in the field of American Indian education. He holds a master’s degree in American Indian studies from the University of Arizona. His specialty areas include Native American religion and spirituality, traditional ecological knowledge, and ethnozoology. He has published extensively and is the coeditor (with Daniel R. Wildcat) of Destroying Dogma: Vine Deloria Jr. and His Influence on American Society (2006).
DAVID C. STONER has been involved with field studies of cougars since 1996. He received his BA from the University of California at Berkeley in 1992 and, following a long hiatus, went on to earn an MS from Utah State University. Stoner’s research is focused on cougar population dynamics within the framework of landscape ecology and has been published in the Journal of Wildlife Management. He is currently working toward a PhD. Stoner lives in Logan with his wife, Lisa; their daughter, Hailey; and a cat named Indy.
LINDA SWEANOR is a cougar ecologist based in Colorado and coauthor of Desert Puma: Evolutionary Ecology and Conservation of an Enduring Carnivore (Island Press, 2001). Based on ten years of research conducted along with her husband, Ken Logan, the book is considered the seminal work on mountain lion biology.