Deena Metzger is the author of A Rain of Night Birds. Her novel La Negra y Blanca won the 2012 Oakland Pen Award, and her Warrior Poster photograph is celebrated around the world as a testament to a woman’s triumph over breast cancer.

Stan Rushworth was born in 1944 and raised primarily in the East San Joaquin valley by his Cherokee grandfather. He served in the Army during the Vietnam war, and attended Cabrillo and San Francisco State, where he received a M.A. in Language Arts and Creative Writing in 1970. He has taught Native American Literature at Cabrillo for the last twenty-five years, including similar work at UCSC as a lecturer, and worked for twenty years at Cabrillo’s Watsonville Center teaching basic skills and critical thinking surrounding Indigenous peoples’ issues. He authored Sam Woods: American Healing (Station Hill Press, New York) in 1992, and Going to Water: The Journal of Beginning Rain (Talking Leaves Press, Freedom, CA) in 2014.