Tele Aadsen is a commercial fisherman, writer, and lapsed social worker. Born in Alaska, she finds home in seasonal migrations: ocean summers on the outer coast of Lingít Aaní, Southeast Alaska, aboard the F/V Nerka with her sweetheart, Joel, followed by land winters in the Coast Salish territory of Washington’s Skagit Valley. She self-markets their frozen-at-sea catch through Nerka Sea-Frozen Salmon and performs annually with Oregon’s FisherPoets Gathering. Her name is pronounced “Tell-ah.”

John Brandi’s haiku practice spans four decades, a steadfast companion to his life as a writer, visual artist, and author of numerous books of poetry, travel essays, and haibun. A California native, his early forays into a landscape of desert, mountain, and seacoast opened a broader road for his travels around the Pacific Rim, India, Southeast Asia, and explorations of America’s desert southwest. His haiga (haiku paintings) have been exhibited at the New Mexico History Museum, Durango Arts Center, Roswell Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Public Library. In 2009 he gave the keynote addresses for the Haiku North America Conference in Ottawa, Canada, followed by the Punjabi Haiku Conference in India. In 2017 he received the Touchstone Distinguished Books Award, along with Noriko Kawasaki Martinez, for A House By Itself, translations of Masaoka Shiki’s haiku.

Tom Crawford was the author of nine books of poetry, including Lauds, The Temple on Monday, and The Names of Birds. He was the recipient of the Pushcart Prize, the Foreword Book of the Year Award, and the Oregon Book Award for Poetry, among others, and fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts. His work has been widely published in journals and anthologies, among them Catamaran Literary Reader, Columbia Poetry Review, Orion, and Whitefish Review. Born in Flint, Michigan, in 1939, Tom Crawford grew up in the Kern Valley, California. He joined the U.S. Navy at seventeen, was educated at Sacramento State University, and lectured and taught at colleges and universities throughout the western United States, in China, and for six years in South Korea. He spent many years living in the Pacific Northwest and was a resident of Santa Fe, New Mexico, for thirteen years. Tom died on May 29, 2018, an auspicious day for Tibetan Buddhists and a day of the full moon. You can find more about Tom at tomcrawfordpoet.com.

Michael Daley’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Hudson Review, Ploughshares, New England Review, Rhino, North American Review,Writers Almanac, Raven Chronicles, Seattle Review, Jeopardy, Prairie Schooner, Cirque, Alaska Quarterly Review, Cascadia Review, and elsewhere. Founding editor of Empty Bowl, publisher of the Dalmo’ma anthologies, former Poet-in-Residence for the Washington State Arts Commission, Skagit River Poetry Foundation, Massachusetts Cultural Council, he retired from teaching at Mount Vernon High School in 2012. His reviews and essays have appeared in Pacific Northwest Review of Books, Raven Chronicles,Port Townsend Leader, and Book/Mark Quarterly Review. His collections of poetry include: The Straits (Empty Bowl, 1983), To Curve (Word, 2008), Moonlight in the Redemptive Forest (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2010), Of a Feather (Empty Bowl, 2016)and Born With (Dos Madres, 2020). He hasbeenawarded by the Washington State Arts Commission, Seattle Arts Commission, Artist Trust, Fulbright, and the National Endowment of the Humanities. Pleasure Boat Studio also published his essays, Way Out There (2007) and his translation of Alter Mundus (2013) by Italian poet Lucia Gazzino. oes here