Bonus: Creature Needs with Lucy Spelman, Susan Tacent, and Christopher Kondrich

Lucy Spelman is a board-certified zoological veterinarian, senior lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design, and executive director and founder of Creature Conserve (2015.) She is co-editor of Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation and The Rhino with Glue On Shoes and author of National Geographic Kids Animal Encyclopedia.

Susan Tacent is a writer, scholar, and educator from Brooklyn, New York. Her fiction has appeared in Blackbird, DIAGRAM, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Tin House Online, Coolest American Stories 2022, Slice Magazine, and elsewhere; her criticism, interviews, and scholarly writing have appeared in The Common, Dostoevsky Studies, The Keats-Shelley Journal, and others. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Brown University and has taught literature and creative writing at Oberlin College, Roger Williams University, LitArts RI, and elsewhere. She is writer-in-residence for Creature Conserve, and co-editor of Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation, University of Minnesota Press, 2025. She lives with her human and more-than-human families in Rhode Island, US.

Christopher Kondrich is a poet, writer, and editor. His third book, Tread Upon, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in April 2026. He is also the author of Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), which won the National Poetry Series and was selected by Library Journal as a Best Poetry Book of 2019. His poetry appear widely in such venues as The Atlantic, The Believer, The Kenyon Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and The Yale Review. He has received fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He currently teaches in the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Maryland, as well as in Eastern Oregon University’s low-residency M.F.A. in Creative and Environmental Writing. Co-editor of Creature Needs: Writers Respond to the Science of Animal Conservation (University of Minnesota Press, 2025) and an associate editor for 32 Poems, he lives in Maryland with his partner and daughter.