Dr. Jackson’s writings include both papers and books. His most recent work, Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place, co-edited with William Vitek, was released by Yale University Press in 1996. Becoming Native to This Place was published in 1994 and sketches his vision for the resettlement of America's rural communities. Altars of Unhewn Stone appeared in 1987 and Meeting the Expectations of the Land, edited with Wendell Berry and Bruce Colman, was published in 1984. New Roots for Agriculture, 1980, outlines the basis for the agricultural research at The Land Institute.

The work of The Land Institute has been featured extensively in the popular media including The Atlantic Monthly, Audubon, The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, and National Public Radio's "All Things Considered." Life magazine named Wes Jackson as one of 18 individuals they predict will be among the 100 "important Americans of the 20th century." He is a recipient of the Pew Conservation Scholars award (1990), a MacArthur Fellowship (1992), and Right Livelihood Award (2000). Return to Homepage

Susan Griffin is a well-known writer and poet. Her latest work, The Book of the Courtesans, a Catalogue of Their Virtues, which Alice Walker calls “provocative and compelling...,” was published by Broadway Books (Random House) in October, 2001. It has been translated into seven languages and selected for the French book of the month club. Woman and Nature, a classic work which inspired eco-feminism, was published in a new edition by Sierra Club Books in 2000. In 1998, Harper SanFrancisco published What Her Body Thought, an exploration of the way modern society responds. A Chorus of Stones, published in 1992, was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize and the National Book Critics Award and won the BABRA award in 1992. Her recent essays on gender and society were collected in The Eros of Everyday Life, in 1994. Named by Utne Reader as one of a hundred important visionaries for the new millennium, she has been the recipient of an NEA grant, a MacArthur Grant for Peace and International Cooperation, and an Emmy award (for her play, Voices.) She has published several volumes of poetry. In 1998 Copper Canyon Press published Bending Home, Poems Selected and New 1967-1998 which was a finalist for the Western States Art Federation Award. She is presently at work on and a novel, On the Verge of Horses, a musical theatre piece called “Canto," and along with two others editors, an anthology entitled Transforming Terror, Remembering the Soul of the World. She lectures widely in the United States and abroad as well as teaching writers privately at her home in Berkeley. Return to Homepage

David Mas Masumoto: A third generation farmer, Masumoto grows peaches, grapes and raisins and works with his 82 year old father and mother on their organic 80 acre farm south of Fresno, California. He is the author of Four Seasons in Five Senses, Things Worth Savoring (2003, W. W. Norton), Harvest Son, Planting Roots in American Soil (1998, W.W. Norton) and Epitaph For A Peach: Four Seasons on My Family Farm (1995, HarperCollins). His upcoming book, Letters to the Valley, A Harvest of Memories will be published by HeyDay Books in the fall of 2004. This work captures the spirit, challenges and flavors of the Central Valley of California, from family farmers and their hunger for memories of old fruit varieties to lessons for the children of a valley often considered the “other California” - sometimes forgotten, sometimes invisible. Masumoto is currently a columnist for and The Fresno Bee has written for USA Today and the Los Angeles Times.

His other books include Silent Strength (1984), Home Bound (1989) and Country Voices, The Oral History of a Japanese American Family Farm Community (1987). He received the James Clavell Japanese American National Literacy Award in 1986. Epitaph for a Peach won the 1995 Julia Child Cookbook Award in the Literary Food Writing category and was a finalist for the 1996 James Beard Foundation Food Writing Award. It also received the San Francisco Review of Books Critics' Choice Award 1995-96. Harvest Son won a Commonwealth Club of California silver medal for the California Book Awards in 1999 and was a finalist for the Asian American Writers' Workshop award in New York.

In 2002, Masumoto was appointed to the James Irvine Foundation Board of Directors. P reviously, he was appointed to the California Council for the Humanities board in 1994 and served as Co-Chair from 1998 to 2001. He wrote, designed and curated the museum exhibition, "Country Voices, Three Generations of Family Farmers" which appeared at the Fresno Metropolitan Museum (1992) and the Japanese American National Museum (1993) in Los Angeles. He has a bachelor’s degree in sociology from U.C. Berkeley and a master’s degree in community development from U.C. Davis and attended International University in Tokyo, Japan. Masumoto has been the keynote speaker at conferences including the American Association of Museums, American Institute of Wine and Food, Dance USA, Ag. in the Classroom National Conference, Chamber Music Society of America, Calif. Teachers of English and the Japanese American National Museum. He also was awarded a Breadloaf Writers Conference fellowship in 1996 and was a writer in residence at Iolani School in Honolulu, Hawaii in 2004.

Feature articles about Masumoto have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Time Magazine and The New York Times. His farm has been featured in Sunset, Country Living and Glamour Magazines and on television as part of the California Heartland PBS series. Masumoto serves on the California Tree Fruit Agreement research board and has been a member of the Raisin Advisory Committee research board and was a founding member of California Association of Family Farmers. Masumoto and his wife, Marcy have two children, Nikiko and Korio. Return to Homepage

Timothy Speed Levitch is a prolific playwright and actor, cruiser and urban philosopher in an ongoing love affair with the world. Subject of the Emmy-award winning documentary The Cruise, Speed first came to national prominence as the brilliant interpreter of New York City on Gray Line Tour buses. He now conducts private tours and has published his own guide to New York: Speedology: Speed Levitch on New York on Speed (Context Books, 2002) and appeared in a number of films, including Waking Life (2001), Scotland PA (2001) and Live from Shiva’s Dance Floor, which features his philosophical reflections on what we should really put on the Ground Zero site of the former World Trade Center: tall grass and buffalo. Return to Homepage

Stanley Crawford and his wife Rose Mary have lived and farmed the Embudo Valley of Northern New Mexico since 1970, where they raised their two children, Adam and Kate. Crawford is the author six books, including Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico; and A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm, both published by the University of New Mexico Press. His River in Winter: New and Selected Essays was also published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2003. In addition to his two non-fiction books, Crawford has published four novels. Petroleum Man, a satirical novel, will be released by The Overlook Press, New York, in early 2005. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian Magazine, and High Country News. His work was the subject of a major review in The New Yorker Magazine.

Crawford has been the recipient of numerous writing awards and fellowships, the most recent of which is a 3-year Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation Writing Award. His degrees include a B.A. from Chicago and an M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley.

Stanley Crawford chaired the board directors of the Santa Fe Area Farmers’ Market from 1983 through 1997, during which time the organization evolved from a volunteer group with no budget to a professional organization with full-time and part-time staff members. From early 1998 through 2000 he served as Project Director for the Friends of the Farmers’ Markets to develop a permanent farmers’ market site on the city-owned Railyard property in downtown Santa Fe, under a Ford Foundation grant. In that position he was instrumental in raising over $1 million in private and public funding for planning and construction of a permanent farmers’ market facility in the Railyard.

He is a past chairman of the board of Northern New Mexico Legal Services, Santa Fe, and the Taos Art Association, Taos. He is currently on the board of the non-profit Santa Fe Railyard Community Corporation charged with developing the city-owned railyard property in downtown Santa Fe. Return to Homepage

Rebecca Solnit is an writer and activist whose work focuses on issues of time, place, politics and process. Her fifth, sixth and seventh books are Wanderlust: A History of Walking; As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art; and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. The eighth, Hope in the Dark, Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities will be out in April. She has lived in the Western Addition, just east of USF, for more than two decades.  Return to Homepage