Eloise Klein Healy Eloise Klein Healy lived in rural Iowa until the age of ten and was a frequenter of backyards, pastures, barns, creek beds, and the library. When her family moved to Southern California, she expanded her investigation of terrain to include the Los Angeles cityscape and the urban wilderness threading its parks and alleys. Her interest in plate tectonics, earthquake faults, and volcanic activity often led her to the western slopes of the California Sierra Nevada mountain range. Eloise began to observe bird behavior in her Silverlake backyard when she was adopted by a one-legged Scrub Jay. The poet May Swenson suggested she get serious and buy a Field Guide and a pair of binoculars. Subsequently, references to the interaction of humans, birds and animals, particularly in the urban environment, began to find a place in her poetry. Her book Artemis In Echo Park explores these themes in depth and links them to the Greek Goddess of animals and the wild places. A writer and teacher of writing for many years, Eloise has held positions at colleges and universities all over Southern California, including Immaculate Heart College, California State University Northridge, The Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, and Antioch University Los Angeles where she was the Founding Chair of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program. She has also taught private writing workshops for over fifteen years, and consults with writers and others on creative projects. Her writing exercises, designed for Eco-Arts travelers, open avenues to perceptions and realizations just below the surface of “the daily mind". They help people arrive at and explore the intersection where inner and outer nature meet. Writing and discussion sessions deepen the experience of a new locale, an unfamiliar terrain, and the wide array of different flora and fauna along the way. Eloise offers on-line follow-up sessions for those trip participants who wish to revise and polish their writing. Eloise is the author of six collections of poetry and a chapbook. Her latest book is The Islands Project: Poems For Sappho (Red Hen Press). Her collection Passing was a finalist for the 2003 Publishing Triangle Audre Lorde Prize, and she has twice been a finalist for The Lambda Literary Award in Poetry. Her work is widely anthologized, and she is a popular reader of her poetry, having given over 400 readings to date. Eloise's web site

Colleen Rooney Colleen Rooney has been interested in the natural world since childhood but became seriously interested in natural history and environmental issues later in life through a captivation with the wonder of birds and a personal experience with cancer. Birds introduced her to the complexities of ecosystems and creature survival. Cancer gave her a personal link to the challenges of creature survival made more challenging by the adverse effects on the environment of the actions of humans. These two life paths converged to motivate her to get a Ph.D. in Environmental Studies. During these studies, she grew to understand that science could help us understand the issues but would not be the solution to global environmental problems. Solutions would have to come from human beings changing our behavior, our understanding of who we are in the world, and from a recognition that we are one with all things – not in an ethereal way but literally at a cellular level. Although nature is everywhere (maybe nature just is), Colleen believes bringing people out of the familiar and into direct contact with less disturbed habitats and their associated plants and animals, gives us a chance to reconnect with the natural world and reconsider our human responsibility to all life. To this venture Colleen brings experience teaching environmental studies topics and bird identification at the college level, leading urban bird walks, traveling experience throughout the world, and birding internationally. She also has years of experience in counseling and education.