ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Strom is both a research astronomer and fine-art photographer. His work, largely interpretations of landscapes, has been exhibited throughout the United States and is held in the collections of the Center for Creative Photography, University of Oklahoma Art Museum, Mead Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, among others. He has published nine books of photography, including, most recently, Death Valley: Painted Light, with poetry by Alison Hawthorne Deming and an essay by Rebecca A. Senf (George F. Thompson, 2016), Earth and Mars: A Reflection, with Bradford A. Smith (Arizona, 2015), Sand Mirrors, with Richard B. Clarke (Polytropos, 2012), Otera Mesa: Preserving America's Wildest Grasslands, with Gregory McNamee and Stephen Capra (New Mexico, 2009), and Earth Forms, with Gregory McNamee (Dewi Lewis, 2009).

ABOUT THE ESSAYISTS

Barbara Hurd is an author, essayist, and teacher in the M.F.A. writing program at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her essays have appeared in Audubon, Best American Essays, The Georgia Review, Orion, and The Yale Review, among many others, and her books include Listening to the Savage/River Notes and Half-Heard Melodies (Georgia, 2016), Walking the Wrack Line: On Tidal Shifts and What Remains (Georgia, 2008), Entering the Stone: On Caves and Feeling through the Dark (Houghton Mifflin, 2003), which won a Library Journal Best Natural History Book of the Year, and Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination (Beacon Press, 2001), a Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2001. In 2015, she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in General Nonfiction.