One of the world’s preeminent natural scientists, Edward O. Wilson (b. 1929) grew up in south Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, where he spent his boyhood exploring the region’s forests and swamps, collecting snakes, butterflies, and ants--the latter to become his lifelong specialty. The author of more than twenty books, including the Pulitzer Prize winners On Human Nature (1979) and The Ants (1991), Wilson, an emeritus professor at Harvard, makes his home in Lexington, Massachusetts.
David Quammen, one of America’s leading science and nature writers, is the author of more than a dozen books including The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction (1996), Spillover: Animal Infection and the Next Human Pandemic (2012), and The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life (2018). He lives in Bozeman, Montana.