Alex Palmer is a naturalist and certified interpretive guide with the Forest Preserves of Cook County at Sand Ridge Nature Center.
He has over 10 years of experience in the natural resource management and environmental education professions across the eastern United States, including within the Calumet Region along the south rim of Lake Michigan. A native of the Great Lakes, Alex spent his childhood within the Lake Erie watershed on the Allegheny Plateau in the eastern half of Cleveland, Ohio, where he developed a fascination for urban natural areas. He considers himself an “urban naturalist.”
Ann Durkin Keating is the Toenniges Professor of History at North Central College where she has taught since 1991.
She holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois and her graduate degrees from the University of Chicago. She was the co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Chicago (2004), a print and online project. She has also written several books including Building Chicago: Suburban Developers and the Creation of a Divided Metropolis (1988) about the emergence of suburban government in Chicago and Chicagoland: City and Suburbs of the Railroad Age (2005). More recently, she has turned to Chicago’s early history in Rising Up From Indian Country: The Battle of Fort Dearborn and the Birth of Chicago (2012). She has also just completed a manuscript on Juliette Kinzie and Chicago before the 1871 fire to be published next year by University of Chicago Press.
Gavin Van Horn is the director of cultures of conservation for the Center for Humans and Nature, a nonprofit organization that focuses on and promotes conservation ethics.
He is the author of The Way of Coyote: Shared Journeys in the Urban Wilds, co-editor of City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness and Wildness: Relations of People and Place, and he writes for, edits, and curates the City Creatures blog. He lives in Evanston, IL.