Featured Readers

Stephanie Eardley an ultra-marathoner, lives on a ranch in Southwest Wyoming and can most often be found along a game trail with her kids and a backpack full of books. Her latest passion is skydiving. She will be reading her essay “Just a Couple Miles: Mountain Ultra-Running,” from the current issue of Deep Wild.

Rick Kempa, founding editor of Deep Wild Journal, also edited the anthologies On Foot: Grand Canyon Backpacking Stories and Going Down Grand: Poems from the Canyon. His latest poetry collection is Too Vast for Sleep. Now retired from teaching, he is free to pursue his primary passion, which is backpacking into wild and less-traveled places. 

Stephen Lottridge, a retired clinical psychologist and former director of Southwest Counseling Services, resides in Jackson. He is the author of two books, Three White Pelicans (Deep Wild Press, 2021), a collection of stories about raising his two daughters in the wilds of Wyoming; and The Old Bison: Threads from the Fabric of a Western Life (Fulton Books, 2022). A third collection, The Book of Bauer: Stories from a Forgotten Town, is forthcoming from the University of Utah Press

Susan Marsh, a product of the Pacific Northwest, has lived in Jackson, Wyoming since 1988. She writes poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction and natural history. With degrees in geology and landscape architecture and a lifelong interest in creative writing, she has combined her interests into a body of work that explores the relationship of humans to the wild.. Her just-published poetry collection is titled This Earth Has Been Too Generous.

Edmond Stevens is a former screen and TV writer who has retired to the snow and single track of the Wasatch Back. In addition to Deep Wild, his work has appeared in Muleskinner Journal and Life in L.A., and he has contributed as a guest editor for The Alpinist Magazine. He will be reading his short story “Buried” from Deep Wild 2022, a tale of a haunted mountaineer at the end of his climbing rope who heads into the Utah desert to bury his gear.

Frederick Swanson, a celebrated environmental historian, has pursued the wild landscapes of the West since his youth and has profiled some of the 20^th Century’s notable explorers and conservationists. He is a recipient of the Wallace Stegner Prize in Environmental Humanities from the University of Utah Press. His latest book is Wonders of Sand and Stone: A History of Utah’s National Parks and Monuments. Twice-published in the pages of Deep Wild, he will be reading short essays about his adventures on the Colorado Plateau.

Kelsey Wellington, winner of the Deep Wild 2022 Graduate Student Writing Contest, recently earned her MFA degree in Creative Nonfiction from Lindenwood University. Kelsey, who moved west from New York City in 2016 and “never looked back,” works as a wildlife guide in Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks and spends her free time climbing the many peaks of the Tetons, mountain biking and trail running, and writing about her (mis)adventures in the outdoors. Kelsey’s winning essay, “An Ordinary Day,” describes an ordeal that is anything but ordinary: a torn ACL on skis five miles from the trailhead on a short winter day.