Sam Berman is a short story writer who lives in Boise. He has had work published in Forever Magazine, Joyland, Expat Press, Maudlin House, the Northwest Review, The Masters Review, Vlad Mag, HAD, Hobart, CRAFT, Dream Boy Book Club, and Rejection Letters. He was selected as the runner-up in The Kenyon Review’s 2022 Nonfiction Competition as well as a finalist for the 2022 & 2023 Halifax Ranch Prize. He has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories. He has forthcoming work in Back Patio Press, X-Ray and The Idaho Review, among many others. In addition to his writing, Sam is also the Director of Storyfort, a literary festival held during Treefort Music Fest every March in Boise.

CMarie Fuhrman is the author of the forthcoming essay collection Salmon Weather: Writing from the Land of No Return (March 2025), Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems and the co-editor of the multiple award-winning Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. She has poetry and nonfiction published or forthcoming in numerous magazines, including Terrain.org, Emergence Magazine, Alta, Northwest Review, Yellow Medicine Review, Poetry Northwest, and various anthologies. CMarie is an award-winning columnist for the Inlander and the Director of the Elk River Writers Workshop. CMarie is the Associate Director of the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Western Colorado University, where she teaches poetry and nature writing. CMarie is the host of Colorado Public Radio’s Terra Firma podcast. She is a former Idaho Writer in Residence and lives in the Salmon River Mountains of Idaho.

A writer, from the coffee to the grave, Erin Rose is a multi-genre writer exploring the boundaries of her craft. She received her MFA in fiction where she wrote, Vinegar, her first collection of short stories. Stories from this collection have been published in Greensboro Review, Juked, Green Hills, Southern Indiana Review, and have won awards with Glimmer Train and Narrative. She is currently editing her first novel, CULLING, and is busy raising her son and hosting international writing retreats with her company Trust and Travel.

Sarah Sentilles is the author of many books, including Draw Your Weapons, which won the 2018 PEN Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her most recent book, Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn’t Ours, was a New York Times Editor’s Choice and Idaho Book of the Year. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other publications. She’s had residencies at Hedgebrook and Yaddo. She earned a bachelor’s degree at Yale and master’s and doctoral degrees at Harvard. She is the co-founder of the Alliance of Idaho, which provides low-cost immigration legal services for families in Blaine County and the surrounding communities.

Christian Winn is a fiction writer, poet, creative nonfiction writer, teacher of creative writing, and sometimes journalist based in Boise, Idaho. He is the author of the short story collections, NAKED ME, and What’s Wrong With You is What’s Wrong With Me, and the forthcoming novels, CROCODILE, and AMENDS. He served as the Idaho Writer in Residence – the state’s highest literary honor – from 2016-2019, and has taught at Boise State University, the College of Idaho, College of Western Idaho, and The Cabin. He is at work on an historical memoir, All This Idaho, which takes a deep-dive into his family’s five-generation storied legacy in the Gem State and beyond.