About the Editor
Zachary Michael Jack's love of nature and the outdoors originates in his family's Iowa Heritage Farm and woodland settled before the Civil War. An associate professor at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, Jack is a member of the environmental studies faculty and a specialist teaching courses in place and rural studies in the interdisciplinary urban and suburban studies program. The great-grandson of conservation writer Walter Thomas Jack, Zachary is a former writer-in-residence at the Blue Mountain Center in the Adirondacks and the author or editor of many books on outdoor life, including several previous collections on conservation, the environment, and agrarianism, most recently Liberty Hyde Bailey: Essential Agrarian and Environmental Writings; Love of the Land: Essential Farm and Conservation Readings from an American Golden Age; Black Earth and Ivory Tower: New American Essays from Farm and Classroom; and The Furrow and Us: Essays on Soil and Sentiment. Black Earth and Ivory Tower and The Furrow and Us have been nominated for the Theodore Saloutos Award for the year's best book on agricultural history. He is the founding director of the agrarian School of Lost Arts for children, advisory board member for the Interversity Place Studies listserv and consultant to the Voices of the American Land series. Jack has authored two place-based collections of original poetry, The Inanity of Music and Wings and Perfectly Against the Sun.