Matthew Davis wrote a column on walks for his local newspaper for ten years and published On Foot in Homestead for the Homestead Valley Land Trust. He holds a BA from San Francisco State University with emphasis on graphic arts and creative writing and has spent over four decades picture framing, house building, gardening, fathering, meditating, and practicing the circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais. He lives in Mill Valley, California.

Gary Snyder is the author of more than twenty collections of poetry and prose. Since 1970 he has lived in the watershed of the South Yuba River in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, Snyder has also been awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry and the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award. His 1992 collection, No Nature, was a National Book Award finalist, and in 2008 he received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Snyder is a poet, environmentalist, educator and Zen Buddhist.