Adult Short Fiction: Anthony Bukoski's short story collections include Children of Strangers (1993), Polonaise (1999), and Time Between Trains (2003). Karl Schmidt read a week of stories from the most recent book on Wisconsin Public Radio's “Chapter A Day” program. The title story from Time Between Trains, read by Tony Award-winning actor Live Schreiber, has been broadcast on National Public Radio

Article: Jenny Brantley, a native of North Carolina, is an associate professor in the Department of English at the U. of WI-River Falls where she won The Distinguished Teacher Award in 2004. She teaches advanced writing workshops and seminars, as well as classes in women's literature. She is also the editor of Literary Magazine Review, a 24-year old national magazine, and her poetry has been published in North American Review, 13th Moon, Hurricane Alice, Women and Language, Genre, Kaleidoscope, Living Forge, and other magazines. Her scholarly work includes an article on Gloria Naylor in Everything Got Four Sides: The Early Novels of Gloria Naylor (University Press of Florida) and “Clorox the Dishes: A Defense of Snow Falling on Cedars” in Censored Books Critical Viewpoints, Vol.2, Scarecrow Press, 2002. For her poetry, she has won a Hart Crane award and an Academy of American Poets Award (University of Nebraska-Lincoln). Presently she is co-editing an anthology of women's literature to be published by Houghton-Mufflin. She is also working on a mixed-genre manuscript, centered on Lake Superior, which she hopes will be completed this fall.

Poetry: LaMoine MacLaughlin is co-founder and Executive Director of the Northern Lakes Center for the Arts and the Northern Lakes School of the Arts located in Amery. He is an active writer and musician. MacLaughlin is the Director of the Northern Lakes Chamber Orchestra, teaches at the Northern Lakes School of the Arts, and is editor of The Hometown Gazette. He has served as President of the Wisconsin Assembly of Local Arts Agencies, as national co-chair of the rural and small community interest area of Americans for the Arts, and as a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Guild of Community School of the Arts. In 1996, he and his wife Mary Ellen received the Wisconsin Governor's Award in Support of the Arts, and in 1999, the Rural Genius Award from the Front Porch Institute. Since 2002, MacLaughlin has been Director of the AMICI Institute, the management training program of the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts. In 2003, he was appointed first Poet Laureate of Amery, WI.

Essay: Carolyn Wedin grew up in rural northwestern Wisconsin, graduating from the one-room Round Lake School; Frederic High School Class of 1957; Gustavus Adolphus College (B.A. in English and German); University of Kansas (Literature and History); UW-Madison (Ph.D. in English and African-American Studies). She taught literature and writing at the UW-Whitewater for 30 years, with interim appointments in UW System Administration, the University fo Gõteborg, Sweden, and Lund University, Sweden, plus year-long Fulbright appointments in Poland and Norway. She has published extensively in women's literature and American minority literatures, with her most recent book being Inheritors of the Spirit: Mary White Ovington and the Founding of the NAACP, published by John Wiley and Sons, Inc. in 1997. In 2001 She and her husband moved back to the northwest woods where she grew up.

Juvenile Short Fiction: Cornell M. Brellenthin writes both fiction and poetry. She is a past winner of The Cream City Review's Annual Poetry Contest, and recent work has appeared in Slipstream and 88: A Journal of Contemporary American Poetry. She received her Ph.D. in Creative Writing from the UW-Milwaukee. Cornell has served as an editor for Reiman Publications and for the Cream City Review. She presently conducts poetry and fiction workshops at the Annual Student Writing Festival hosted by the UW-Whitewater, where she is a faculty member in the Department of Languages and Literatures. In the summer she teaches international students at the Institute for English Language at Harvard University. During autumn, winter, and spring, Cornell lives in southeastern Wisconsin where she writes in a little house in the woods on a dead-end road, which is not a metaphor.

Nostalgia: Wilma Bednarz was editor of the old Milwaukee Northwest News. Her essays have been published in the Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel, the Chicago Tribune, National Observer, The Saturday Review, Christian Science Monitor and Guidepost. Her teenage fiction books-More Teenage Hunted Stories, More Teenage Spy Stories, and More Teenage Secret Agent Stories-were included in anthologies by Lantern Press, edited by A.L. Furman. Her story, “Baleful Beast and Eerie Creatures,” appeared in an anthology published by Rand McNally. And her work, co-authored with Dorothy Miniare, Where to Go and What to Do With the Kids in Milwaukee was published by Price, Stern, and Sloan. A story by Wilma, published in Cricket Magazine, was selected, by a committee of children's periodical editors and Maryland state librarians, for publication in former President George H. W. Bush's America Two Thousand program.