Christopher Cokinos is the author of Hope Is the Thing with Feathers: A Personal Chronicle of Vanished Birds and The Fallen Sky: An Intimate History of Shooting Stars, both from Tarcher/Penguin. The winner of a Whiting Award, Cokinos has traveled across the world, from Greenland to Antarctica, in search of the stories of science and history that inform his writing. Committed to weaving memoir into research-driven narratives, Cokinos loves to explore the connections between lives and landscapes. With his partner the writer Kathe Lison, Cokinos lives along the Blacksmith Fork River in northern Utah.
Best known for being one of the rediscoverers of the ivory-billed woodpecker (which was believed to be extinct since the 1940s) and writing THE GRAIL BIRD, author Tim Gallagher has another passion that has driven him since childhood -- the ancient sport of falconry. Gallagher's most recent adventure -- detailed in his new book, FALCON FEVER -- was to follow in the footsteps of 13th-century Emperor Frederick II -- a scientist, architect, poet, musician, and all-around Renaissance man 200 years before the births of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. Frederick was also the greatest falconer who ever lived. His talks are illustrated with photographs of Frederick's spectacular castles and hunting areas, stunning hand-painted illustrations from
