Heidi Mae Niska is a photographer who identifies with the solitude and wilderness found in northeastern Minnesota and Michigan’s Keweena Peninsula. She earned an MS in Electrical Engineering from Michigan Technical University and subsequently studied art at Northern Michigan University. Whether pounding concrete in the city, skipping across moss and rocks near Lake Superior, or dodging sunbeams in Southeast Asia, Heidi Mae seeks to share her intimate understanding of the soothing, nourishing, and restorative attributes of solitude and nature through her photographic imagery.

Julie Gard’s prose poetry collections include Home Studies (New Rivers Press), which was a finalist for the 2016 Minnesota Book Award; Scrap: On Louise Nevelson (Ravenna Press); and the chapbooks Obscura: The Daguerreotype Series (Finishing Line Press) and Russia in 17 Objects (Tiger's Eye Press). Julie's essays, poems, and stories have appeared in Gertrude, Fourth River, Clackamas Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, Ekphrasis, and Blackbox Manifold, among other journals and anthologies. A former Fulbright Graduate Fellow in Vladivostok, Russia, she lives in Duluth, Minnesota and is Associate Professor of Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Superior.