William Stafford was born in Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1914, and is known as a pacifist and prolific poet and writer. During his lifetime, he published more than 65 volumes of poetry, including Traveling Through the Dark, which was the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 1963. He has received many distinguished honors including the Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a western States Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry. He also served as the twentieth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1970 (this position is now known as the Poet Laureate). In 1940, Stafford was drafted and served as a conscientious objector, and later wrote a memoir about conscientious objectors, Down in my Heart. At the time of his death (August 1993), he lived in Portland, OR.
Dennis Cunningham is a printmaker with a long history of exhibitions, awards, public art works, and publications. He has taught at Marylhurst University since 1986. According to Cunningham, his work is grounded in “my awareness as a child that I wanted to be an artist. Everything I have done in the past forty years stems from that optimistic vision of my place in the world. I continue to hold that childhood desire: it nourishes me every day I work.”
Naomi Shihab Nye was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and lived in Palestine, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she studied at Trinity University. She is the author of numerous poetry books, including You and Yours, 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, Fuel, and Red Suitcase. Her honors include awards from the Texas Institute of Letters and the International Poetry Forum, the Carity Randall Prize, the Academy of American Poets’ Lavan Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. She has been a Lannan fellow, a Guggenheim fellow, and a Witter Bynner fellow, and she was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2010. She has traveled to the Middle East and Asia for the U.S. Information Agency three times, promoting international goodwill through the arts. She lives in San Antonio.
