2026 Faculty and Guests

Ben Goldfarb is an environmental journalist whose work has appeared in National Geographic, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, the New Yorker, and many other publications, and has several times been anthologized in the Best American Science & Nature Writing. His most recent book, Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, was named one of the best books of 2023 by the New York Times and received the Rachel Carson Award for Excellence in Environmental Writing and the Banff Book Competition’s Grand Prize. His previous book, Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter, won the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award. He lives in Colorado with his wife, his daughter, and his dog, Kit — which is, of course, what you call a baby beaver.

Helen Macdonald is the author of the bestselling memoir H Is for Hawk, recently released as a movie starring Claire Foy and Brendan Gleeson, the essay collection Vesper Flights, a cultural history of falcons, Falcon, and three collections of poetry. With Sin Blaché, they wrote a sci-fi novel, Prophet, and they are currently working on a book about Midway Atoll, albatrosses, and the end of the world. Macdonald taught history of science at the University of Cambridge and has long been fascinated by how our attitudes to nature are shaped by cultural history. They’ve assisted with raptor research and conservation projects across Eurasia, written and presented television documentaries for PBS and the BBC, and currently live in Suffolk, England, with three parrots called Bertie, Uwu and Bucky. 

Abe Streep is a reporter at ProPublica and the author of Brothers on Three: A True Story of Family, Resistance, and Hope on a Reservation in Montana. Brothers on Three received the Montana Book Award and a New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick. For ProPublica Streep covers the American Southwest, reporting on topics including wildland fire, border detention, nuclear weapons, and public land. He has also written for publications including the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and New York Magazine. He is a recipient of the American Mosaic Journalism Prize. 

Jennifer Chang is the author of The History of Anonymity, Some Say the Lark, and An Authentic Life, which was a finalist for the Library of Virginia Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Her other honors include the William Carlos Williams Award, the Levinson Prize from Poetry, and fellowships from the Elizabeth Murray Artists Residency, MacDowell, and Yaddo. She is the poetry editor of New England Review and teaches at the University of Texas in Austin. 

Joseph O. Legaspi, a Fulbright and NYSCA/New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow, is the author of the collections Amphibian, Threshold, and Imago, and three chapbooks: Postcards; Aviary, Bestiary; and Subways. His works have appeared in POETRY, American Poetry Review, Orion, SIERRA, Best of the Net, World Literature Today,and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. He works at Columbia University, teaches at Fordham University, and resides in Queens, New York.

Amber Flora Thomas is the author of Eye of Water, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book by an African American poet. Her other books are The Rabbits Could Sing and, most recently, Red Channel in the Rupture. A recipient of the Dylan Thomas American Poet Prize, the Richard Peterson Poetry Prize, and the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, her poetry and essays have been published in Prairie Schooner, Georgia Review, Orion Magazine, Colorado Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Ecotone, as well as numerous other journals and anthologies. A native of northern California, she currently lives on the Pamlico River in North Carolina and teaches creative writing at East Carolina University.

Ramona Ausubel is the national bestselling author of five books of fiction, most recently The Last Animal which won the National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize. Unstuck: 101 doorways leading from the blank page to the last page, a writer’s guide, will be published by Tin House in April 2026. She is the recipient of the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, New York Times, Paris Review, One Story, Tin House, Oxford American, Ploughshares and elsewhere. She is a professor at Colorado State University and lives in Boulder with her family. 

Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. Her short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. Her work has appeared in the New York Times; Orion; O, Oprah Magazine; Ploughshares; Alaska Quarterly Review; Virginia Quarterly Review;, and American Short Fiction, among others. In 2019-2020, she was the Walter Jackson Bate fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and is a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship. The Denver Center for the Performing Arts commissioned her play, based on “Cowboys and East Indians,” which will have its world premiere in 2026. Her novel, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder is forthcomingfrom Pantheon Books in January 2026, and her new essay collection on the American West will be published in 2027. She teaches at Colorado State University and the Warren Wilson MFA for Writers.