Mark Yuasa is a freelance writer and a guest radio host and blogger on KIRO/ESPN 710 AM The Outdoors Line and Northwest Sportsman Magazine. Mark spent 33 years at The Seattle Times and wrote the outdoors column for 25 years.
Kelly Brenner is a naturalist and writer based in Seattle. In 2009 she founded The Metropolitan Field Guide, a website about urban nature. She writes freelance articles focusing on natural history and is working on a book for Mountaineers Books.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Oregon and a certificate in non-fiction writing from the University of Washington. Having lived in the Pacific Northwest all her life, she has explored much of the region investigating the local flora and fauna. On the side, she photographs the natural world.
Alex Pedersen, a Presidential Management Fellow at HUD during the Clinton Administration, is a former Legislative Aide for the Seattle City Council and publishes the Northeast Seattle newsletter www.4toExplore.org.
Writer and producer Jenny Cunningham has been honored with television journalism's most prestigious awards including Emmy Awards and the Edward R. Murrow Award for Best News Series in America. Her writing has appeared in publications including the Irish Times, Sunset Magazine, Seattle Magazine, the Vancouver Sun, The Oregonian and Wine & Spirits Magazine. Her favorite kind of story is the one she hasn’t done before.
Scott Kurashige is Professor of American and Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington Bothell. His prior books include The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles and The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century (with Grace Lee Boggs).
MacGregor Campbell is a science writer and animator based in Portland. He has worked with OPB, PBS Education, the Economist Intelligence Unit, and Nieman Storyboard, among others. He is also a correspondent for New Scientist, a popular science weekly published out of the UK. There he writes news and features about cutting edge science and technology, and produces a monthly series of “Explanimation” videos. His first real job was teaching math in the city of Compton.
Alex is an advocate for people-centered planning and urban design who works at the neighborhood scale to build a city based on equity, vibrancy, innovation, and cultivation of place attachment. Alex is the Executive Director of the First Hill Improvement Association, and sits on the board of the Freeway Park Association and the Community Involvement Commission—her opinions on The Urbanist are her own. She lives in First Hill with her cat, houseplants, and overflowing library of books about urban planning, design, and placemaking.