Sharon English and Deena Metzger

Deena Metzger is an American writer, a poet, novelist, essayist, storyteller and healer living at the end of the road in Topanga, California. A radical thinker on behalf of the natural world and planetary survival, a teacher of writing and healing practices for fifty years and a writer and activist profoundly concerned with peacemaking, restoration and sanctuary for a beleaguered world, she has written eight works of fiction, five poetry collections, several plays and five works of non-fiction. Her books examine the tragic failure of contemporary culture and provide guidance for personal, political, environmental and spiritual healing. Her novel La Negra y Blanca won the 2012 Oakland Pen Award for Literature. Her latest novel, A Rain of Night Birds, bears witness: climate change arises from the same colonial mind that enacts genocide on the Native people of the United States.

Canadian writer Sharon English has published two collections of short stories, Uncomfortably Numb and Zero Gravity, and recently completed a novel about the intersection of personal and natural crisis. Her writing emerges from a deep interest in place and the role of writing in a time of ecological and cultural unravelling. “El Dorado,” a story about ginseng and gold, can be found in Dark Mountain 5. In 2015 she co-organized the first Dark Mountain weekend event in Canada. She teaches writing at the University of Toronto and currently directs its Writing and Rhetoric program.