Keynote Speaker
Photo credit: Tom Furtwangler
Lyanda Lynn Haupt
Lyanda Lynn Haupt will be the keynote speaker at our upcoming, March, 2025 festival. She is an award-winning author, naturalist, ecophilosopher, and speaker whose work explores the beautiful, complicated connections between humans and the wild, natural world. Lyanda’s writing is acclaimed for combining scientific knowledge with literary, poetic prose. Her books include: Mozart’s Starling The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild, Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness, Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent: The Importance of Everything and Other Lessons from Darwin’s Lost Notebooks, and  Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds. She is a winner of the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, the Nautilus Book Award, a finalist for the Orion Book Award, and a two-time winner of the Washington State Book Award. Lyanda’s newest book is Rooted: Life at the Crossroads of Science, Nature, and Spirit (Little, Brown Spark 2021).
Lyanda has created and directed educational programs for Seattle Audubon, worked in raptor rehabilitation in Vermont, and as a seabird researcher for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the remote tropical Pacific. Her essays have appeared in a variety of publications, including Orion, Discover, Utne, LA Times, Times Literary Supplement, Image, Huffington Post, Wild Earth, and Conservation Biology Journal. She lives the mossy green woodlands of Bellingham, Washington.
Follow Lyanda on Instagram and subscribe to her newsletter, Wander.
Featured Artist (From March, 2024 Festival)
Laurie Potter
Laurie Potter’s paintings are an expression of her love for our beautiful natural world and its inhabitants. Driven by passion for the infinitely interesting colors and forms that she sees while spending time outdoors, Laurie’s work is representational and expressive. She paints with an eye for detail while capturing character, whimsy, and mood in the both the animals and the landscapes that she paints.  As Laurie continues to portray her subject matter in a fairly realistic manner, she’s also developing exciting ways of creating a loose, painterly atmosphere, border, or background with patterns and texture. Approaching her paintings with a playful, spontaneous attitude and finishing with areas of more focused detail results in more than just an image, but rather a story, a metaphor, or an abstracted reality. Click here to learn more about Laurie and to see her work.