Deena Metzger, a writer and feminist and ecological thinker has published over 19 books, and has been teaching writing for over fifty years. La Negra y Blanca won the Oakland PEN Literature Award. Her penultimate novel, A Rain of Night Birds, focuses on two climatologist, one Native, who confront what they know and what they learn from the land and the cosmos.And earlier novel, The novel, The Other Hand, is an epistolary novel addressed to Cardinal Lustiger, by the protagonist, a cosmologist, who states that the Holocaust and the Bomb are the two Koans of the Twentieth Century. In La Vieja: A Journal of Fire, her latest novel, La Vieja takes up residence in a fire lookout in the Sierras, watching for fires and crossing the borders between time and space, human and animal.  She originated the genre, the Literature of Restoration, to promote spirit based, earth-based writing free of the seeds of extinction and climate collapse. She lives at the end of the road in the Santa Monica mountains, with Coyote, Bobcat, Mountain Lion, Squirrel, Owl, Raven and more on land she and the community have designated as a sanctuary for all beings, and regularly meets with African Elephants in the wild. deenametzger.net.