FRANCISCO X. ALARCON is one of the nation's most prominent Chicano poets. In Snake Poems (winner of the American Book Award in 1993) and seven other volumes, he explores the links between the mythic/literal landscapes of Atzlan life in ur-Mexico and contemporary multicultural America. Laughing Tomatoes (1997) and two following volumes of poetry for children received a special award from the Amercian Library Association in 2000.

KAREN JOY FOWLER is an award-winning science fiction/fantasy author who explores many worlds, including the historical, the feminist, and the philosophical. Her novel Sarah Canary tells the story of an encounter between a Chinese railroad worker and a mysterious mute woman who wanders into the workers’ camp. The book is also an examination of madness and cross-cultural communication.

The work of JANE HIRSHFIELD, a prize-winning poet, translator, and editor, has been called "radiant and passionate" by the New York Times Book Review for the way it expresses the interconnection of human and natural worlds. Through five collections of poems, her work addresses the life of the passions, the way the objects and events of everyday life are informed by deeper wisdoms, and the darkness, losses, and fracturing that are also our shared fate.

GERALD HASLAM is a retired professor from Sonoma State University and a prolific and popular writer of California’s rural and small town areas. His Coming of Age in California was named to the San Francisco Chronicle’s list of the century’s "100 Best Books of the West."

JACK HICKS is the Yosemite conference organizer and director. He is editor (with Maxine Hong Kingston, James Houston and Al Young) of the landmark collection The Literature of California, Volume I of which was published in late 1999 by the University of California Press.

In eight novels and nonfiction books, JAMES D. HOUSTON has written widely on California and the Pacific Rim. The Last Paradise (1998) won the American Book Award, and Snow Mountain Passage (2000), his latest novel, is based in part on the lives of the survivors of the ill-fated Donner Party.

A former rafting and hunting guide, PAM HOUSTON lives outdoorsy in Colorado and California, and Cowboys Are My Weakness (1993) was a best-seller and critical favorite. Waltzing the Cat (short stories, 1998) and A Little More About Me (1999) are her most recent books. John Updike selected her story "The Best Girlfriend You Never Had" for Best American Short Stories of the Century.

TOM KILLION is a California artist who merges nineteenth-century Japanese wood-block techniques with the contemporary Western landscape. The high Sierra of California, his ninth illustrated book, features thirty-six original prints and excerpts from the early Sierra journals of poet Gary Snyder. Heydey Books will publish it in Spring, 2002.

EARLL KINGSTON has been acting professionaly on the East and West Coasts and in Hawai'i for more than thirty years. His one-man performances have gathered wide follwoings, and he recently co-wrote "We meet at Appomattox," a retelling of the events that brought Generals Grant and Lee together in April, 1865.

MAXINE HONG KINGSTON is the author of three novels, the first of which, Women Warrior (1976), catapulted her to international prominence. China Men (1980) and Tripmaster Monkey (1989) followed, as did many honorary degrees, distinctions, awards, including the United States Presidential Medal in 1998. A draft of The Fifth Book of Peace, her fourth novel, was destroyed in the Oakland hills firestorm of 1991. Rewritten, it now awaits publication.

Author and publisher MALCOLM MARGOLIN founded Heyday Books in 1974 and has written extensively on California natural history, California history, and California Indian life, including such titles as The Ohlone Way, The Earth Manual, and The Way We Lived.

ELDRIDGE MOORES is a geologist specializing in geology and plate tectonics in the northern Sierra Nevada. Besides doing his own voluminous research on the structural origins of continents, he was the human subject around which John McPhee wrapped Assembling California (1993).

Of Choctaw, Cherokee and Scotch descent, LOUIS OWENS is a prominent novelist and scholar of Native American Literature. He draws on wide-ranging familiarity with Western wilderness in his fiction and nonfiction, and his most recent books include Nightland (novel, 1997), Mixedblood Messages (1999), and Dark River: A Novel (1999).

LEE STETSON is an actor based at Yosemite National Park, who for over fifteen years has portrayed John Muir in one-man dramatic presentations to audiences throughout the United States and the world.

Pulitzer-Prize winner GARY SNYDER (Turtle Island, 1976) is author of almost twenty books, most recently the epic cycle Mountains and Rivers Without End. After seven years in a Japanese Zen monastery, in 1970 he moved with his family to Nevada City, to re-inhabit a farmstead in a region devastated by hydraulic gold mining. Snyder teaches at the University of California, Davis. Excerpts from his unpublished journals chronicling his experiences in the Sierra during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as a selection of his poetry were recently included in The High Sierra of California, a hand-printed book with some 25 wood and linocut prints of California’s Sierra mountains by Tom Killion.

AL YOUNG is a novelist, poet, musicologist, and editor of African American literature with almost twenty published books. His recent works include Heaven (1992), Who Is Angelina? (1997), and The Sound of Dreams Remembered : Poems 1990-2000 (2001).

Presenter Abstracts were obtained from the Yosemite Association Yosemite Winter Literary Conference informational pamphlet