Stephen Ausband
Stephen Ausband is a longtime professor of English at Averett University in Danville, Virginia, and an author whose works of nonfiction draw on his interests in the outdoors, history, literature, and myth. An avid fisherman and hunter, he put his knowledge of the outdoors to work in writing Byrd's Line: A Natural History (University of Virginia Press, 2002). The book responds to two accounts written by William Byrd II of his 1728 journey to determine the exact boundary between North Carolina and Virginia and describes Ausband's own journey along the state line, retracing Byrd's steps for himself. Along the way Ausband reveals details of native plant and animal species, takes stock of how the landscape has changed since Byrd's time, and weaves "a conversation stretching across three centuries."

Benjamin R. Cohen
Benjamin Cohen is an environmental historian, historian of science, and Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholar. He is the author most recently of Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil & Society in the American Countryside (Yale University Press, 2009), which examines the cultural conditions that brought agriculture and science together in nineteenth-century America. Cohen explores how and why agrarian Americans—yeoman farmers, gentleman planters, politicians, and policy makers alike—accepted, resisted, and shaped scientific ways of knowing the land. Before moving to Lafayette College in 2011, he was a professor at the University of Virginia, director of The UVA Food Collaborative, and curator of the Thornton Hall Art Gallery.

Sara M. Gregg
Sara Gregg is currently a visiting assistant professor of history at the University of Kansas. Her work addresses the intersections between the environment and agriculture in federal policy, and in particular, the ways in which people and ideas about nature have reshaped the landscape. Her first book, Managing the Mountains: Land Use Planning, the New Deal, and the Creation of a Federal Landscape in Appalachia (Yale University Press, 2010), traces the origins of federal land use programs in the Appalachian Mountains during the 1910s and 1920s and their implications during the expansion of federal planning in the New Deal and beyond. This book blends the analysis of agricultural practices, environmental impacts, and state formation within a regional context in the Virginia and Vermont mountains.

Helen C. Rountree
A native of Virginia, Dr. Helen Rountree is widely acknowledged as the leading researcher and writer on Virginia Indians and one of the leading scholars on East Coast tribes. Rountree began studying Powhatan Indians of Virginia, both modern and historical, shortly after she joined the faculty of Old Dominion University as an Instructor in 1968. She was honored with the 1995 Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia and retired as a full professor in 1999. Rountree is the author of seven books, including Pocahontas's People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries (University of Oklahoma Press, 1996) and Pocahontas, Powhatan, and Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown (University of Virginia Press, 2006). Rountree will explore the ecological richness of the region—now called "Virginia"—and the manner in which it was exploited by the Native people.

Roy T. Sawyer
Roy Sawyer is retired managing director of BIOPHARM (UK) Ltd., a leech research institute in Wales. He is also founder and curator of the Medical Leech Museum, a private facility in Charleston, South Carolina, and author of Leech Biology and Behaviour. In his book America's Wetland: An Environmental and Cultural History of Tidewater Virginia and North Carolina (University of Virginia Press, 2010), Sawyer delivers an ecohistory of this unique waterland whose wind-driven tides cover a rich human and natural past. By examining the impact of humans upon this environment, and vice versa, Sawyer reveals how our alarming short-sightedness has produced a fragile and endangered present and suggests ways in which we might still salvage them.