Smith is the author of Fourth of July Creek (Ecco) and Make Them Cry (Ecco). The novel Fourth of July Creek was a 2014 New York Times Notable Book and the winner of the 2015 John Creasy (New Blood) Dagger Award and the 2014 Montana Book Award. It was also a finalist for the 2015 PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, the James Tait Black Prize, the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, the Ken Kesey Award for the Novel, and the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse H. Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction.

Patterson is known for her novels and stories about the West. She is the author of The Stone Sister, which won the 2020 Big Moose Prize for fiction from Black Lawrence Press. Her collection, Ballet at the Moose Lodge, was published in 2017 by Drumlummon Press. She has published stories in periodicals including Epoch, Seventeen, Salamander, and Southwest Review; several of these stories were anthologized The New Montana Story, Bright Bones, and Montana Noir. She received fellowships from the Henfield Foundation, the San Francisco Foundation, the Alison Deming Money for Women, and a Stegner Fellowship in Fiction from Stanford University.

Clare Tallier is an award-winning ex-journalist who worked for the Austin American-Statesman and MSN.com, where she helped produce great writing—and she still does as the editorial director of Self-Publishing Services LLC.

After years of writing and editing nonfiction copy, she has had three fiction pieces published in three anthologies. She is also on her last leg of the first novel in her Once Upon a Fairy Tale series of mysteries set in 1880s London.

Brad Orsted is an award-winning wildlife and conservation filmmaker and photographer, author, speaker, and wilderness therapy instructor. Brad’s work has appeared on Nat Geo Wild, BBC, PBS, Nature, The Washington Post, and Smithsonian Channel. Brad’s most recent film, The Beast of Our Time: Grizzly Bears and Climate Change is narrated by none other than “The Dude,” Jeff Bridges. The film won Best Environmental Film Award at the LA Doc Film Festival in 2021.

Brad’s memoir, Through the Wilderness: My Journey of Redemption and Healing in the American Wild, released in 2023, is receiving fantastic reviews nationwide.