2023 Festival

Bryce Andrews is the author of three books. When not writing, he raises cattle, grows raspberries, and plants native trees with his family in Montana.

Elise Atchison has lived most of her life in an off-the-grid home on the edge of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness in Montana. She is the author of Crazy Mountain and the recipient of the Eludia Book Award, Montana Arts Council Artist Grant, Barbara Deming Award, and she is currently a finalist for the High Plains Book Award. Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals, anthologies, radio, and elsewhere. For more information visit www.eliseatchison.com.

Helen Atthowe has worked for 35 years to connect farming, food systems, land stewardship, and conservation. She farmed and conducted research at Woodleaf Farm in eastern Oregon until spring 2023, when she moved to western Montana. Her on-farm research includes ecological weed and insect management, organic minimum soil disturbance systems for vegetable and orchard crops, and managing living mulches for soil and habitat building. She is a contributing writer to The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Pest and Disease Control and other books. She has served as a board member for the Organic Farming Research Foundation and advisor for the Wild Farm Alliance. Atthowe has a master’s degree in horticulture from Rutgers University and has worked in education and research at the University of Arkansas, Rutgers University, and Oregon State University, and served as a horticulture extension agent in Montana, where she annually taught an organic master gardener course.

Sindya Bhanoo has worked as a reporter for The New York Times and The Washington Post, where she is still a frequent contributor. She was most recently a Knight-Wallace Reporting Fellow at the University of Michigan.

Sindya is a graduate of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, the Michener Center for Writers, and Carnegie Mellon University.

She lives in Corvallis, Oregon and is an Assistant Professor at Oregon State University.

Christine Byl is the author of Lookout, long-listed for the 2023 Center for Fiction's Debut Novel prize, and Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods (Beacon Press, 2013), a book about trail crews, tools, wildness, gender, and labor; it was shortlisted for the 2014 Willa Award in nonfiction. Christine has worked as a professional trail-builder for 25+ years. She lives with her family in Interior Alaska on the homelands of the Dene.

Cara Chamberlain is the author of Hidden Things, The Divine Botany, and Lament of the Antichrist in a Secular World and Other Poems. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Nimrod, Boston Review, The Southern Review, and Poetics for the More-Than-Human World: An Anthology. She lives in Billings, Montana.

Jennifer Chesak is the author of The Psilocybin Handbook for Women. She is an award-winning freelance science and medical journalist, editor, and fact-checker, and her work has has appeared in several national publications, including the Washington Post. Chesak earned her master of science in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill. She currently teaches in the journalism and publishing programs at Belmont University, leads various workshops at the literary nonprofit The Porch, and serves as the managing editor for the literary magazine SHIFT. Find her work at jenniferchesak.com and follow her on socials @jenchesak.

Michael Earl Craig is the author of Iggy Horse, Woods and Clouds Interchangeable, Talkativeness, Thin Kimono, Yes Master, Can You Relax in My House, and the chapbook Jombang Jet. He’s published poems in various magazines, journals and anthologies—Poetry, The Believer, The New Yorker and The Best American Poetry (2014, 2022) among them. He was poet laureate for the State of Montana (2015-2017) and a Civitella Ranieri Foundation fellow fall 2021. He lives in the Shields Valley where he shoes horses for a living.

Sneed B. Collard III is the author of more than eighty award-winning books including Hopping Ahead of Climate Change—Snowshoe Hares, Science, and Survival; Catching Air—Taking the Leap with Gliding Animals; Fire Birds—Valuing Natural Wildfires and Burned Forests; Double Eagle (novel); Shep—Our Most Loyal Dog; Dog Sense (novel); Pocket Babies and Other Amazing Marsupials; and The Prairie Builders—Reconstructing America’s Lost Grasslands, winner of the AAAS/Subaru/Science Books & Films Prize for Excellence in Science Books. Sneed has evolved through several life-history stages on his way to becoming one of today’s leading children’s authors. His first book, Sea Snakes, was published in 1993. His seventy-fifth (or so) book, his memoir Snakes, Alligators, and Broken Hearts—Journeys of a Biologist’s Son, was released in Fall, 2015. In 2006, Sneed was the recipient of the Washington Post Children’s Book Guild Children’s Nonfiction Writer of the Year Award for his body of work.

Laramie Dean is a Montana writer of queer horror fiction and the director of theatre at Hellgate High School in Missoula. He has recently published several plays from Theatrefolk, including Dracula, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Finding Jo March, a queered adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Laramie’s first novel, Black Forest, is available now from Inkshares. You can find him on his website at bylaramiedean.com and on Instagram at bylaramiedean.

Tess Fahlgren’s fiction and essays have appeared in Joyland, Blue Mesa Review, Permafrost Magazine, Five on the Fifth, The Missoula Independent and more. She was the recipient of Blue Mesa Review’s 2020 Summer Nonfiction Contest and Montana Quarterly's 2016 Big Snowy Prize for Nonfiction. She is a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s MFA program, where she was awarded the College of Liberal Arts Travel Grant, the Gesell Fellowship, and twice the O’Rourke Travel Grant. Previously, she co-directed the Montana Book Festival and taught art in rural Montana, both in a small public school and with the Art Mobile of Montana. Currently, Tess is focusing on the community in her rural Montana town, teaching, renovating a 110-year old bank and organizing to build a skatepark. She is at work on a book about the painful but beautiful experience of a life leaving and returning to rural Montana.

Micah Fields has published essays and photography for the Oxford American, Gulf Coast, The Baffler, Columbia Journalism Review, Field & Stream, Sonora Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, War, Literature & the Arts, and elsewhere. He holds a BA from the University of Montana and an MFA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa. He received the Oxford American’s 2018-19 Jeff Baskin Writers Fellowship, an Iowa Arts Fellowship, and the AWP Intro Journals Award in nonfiction. He served as a Marine Corps infantry rifleman from 2007 to 2011 and is a combat veteran of deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. He lives in Helena, Montana, where he writes, teaches, and works as a fly-fishing guide on the Missouri River. We Hold Our Breath, his book about Houston and its story of development and storms, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton in June 2023.