(Photograph: Wendy Young)

Joan Myers Photography
www.joanmyers.com

Joan Myers was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1944, and she has spent a lifetime learning and exploring. At Stanford University, her concentration on Renaissance and baroque music led to a B.A. and M.A. in musicology in 1966 and 1967, but, during the early 1970s, Myers turned to photography as her life's work, beginning as a large-format platinum-palladium printer but today primarily shooting and printing digitally. Her photographs have appeared in more than fifty solo and eighty group exhibitions throughout the United States, and they are included in the permanent collections of the Amon Carter Museum, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Center for Creative Photography, Denver Art Museum, George Eastman House International Museum of Photography, High Museum of Art, Minneapolis Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum of Modern Art, Nevada Museum of Art, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. In 2002, the National Science Foundation awarded Myers a prestigious Antarctic Artists and Writer's Grant to photograph at McMurdo Station, surrounding field stations, historic huts, and the South Pole. That resulted in a major traveling exhibition and accompanying book, Wondrous Cold: An Antarctic Journey (Smithsonian Books, 2006), which won an Honorable Mention from the American Association of Museum's 2006 Publications Competition. Her other books include Pie Town Woman (New Mexico, 2001), which was the Best Illustrated Book for 2001 from Publishers Association of the West, Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California, with William deBuys (New Mexico, 1999), which won both the 1999 Western States Book Award for Nonfiction and the 1999 William P. Clements Prize for the Best Nonfiction Book on Southwestern America, Whispered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II (Washington, 1996), which earned the Rocky Mountain Booksellers Award and an Honorable Mention from Maine Photographic Workshops, Santiago: Saint of Two Worlds (New Mexico, 1991), and Along the Santa Fe Trail (New Mexico, 1986).

ABOUT THE ESSAYIST

William deBuys was born and raised in Maryland. He completed his undergraduate work, suma cum laude, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1972 and his M.A. and Ph.D. in American civilization at the University of Texas in Austin in 1982. DeBuys has long been active in conservation and environmental affairs, and his efforts have led to the permanent protection of more than 150,000 acres of wild lands in North Carolina and New Mexico alone. As a writer, deBuy's shorter work has appeared in DoubleTake, High Country News, Northern Lights, New York Times Book Review, and Orion, among other periodicals and anthologies. His books include A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest (Oxford, 2011), The Walk (Trinity, 2007), an excerpt from which won a Pushcart Prize in 2008, Valles Caldero: A Vision for New Mexico's National Preserve (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2006), which won a Southwest Book Award, Seeing Things Whole: The Essential John Wesley Powell (Shearwater/Island Press, 2001), Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California, with Joan Myers (New Mexico, 1999), which won the 1999 Western States Book Award for Nonfiction and the 1999 William P. Clements Prize for the Best Nonfiction Book on Southwestern America, River of Traps, with Alex Harris (New Mexico, 1990; Trinity, 2008), which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction in 1991 won by E. O. Wilson, and Enchantment and Exploration: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range (New Mexico, 1985), which won a Southwest Book Award and is now in its ninth printing. His Website is www.williamdebuys.com.