Elk River Arts & Lectures

Amy Zanoni

Executive Director

Amy has over a decade of experience in the humanities, working as a researcher, writer, and educator committed to advancing social and environmental justice. She believes that the literary arts play an integral role in strengthening our relationships to each other and to this exceptional place we call home. As Elk River Arts & Lectures Executive Director, Amy is dedicated to sustaining Livingston’s literary legacy through community building and the collective pursuit of knowledge and creative expression. A lifelong learner, Amy received a Ph.D. in history in 2020. 

Cmarie Fuhrman

Director, Elk River Writers Workshop

CMarie is Idaho’s Writer in Residence, and an instructor at Western Colorado University’s Poetry and Nature Writing program. The author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems (Floodgate 2020) ,and co-editor of Native Voices (Tupelo 2019), she has published poetry and nonfiction in multiple journals including Emergence Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, Cutthroat a Journal of the Arts, Whitefish Review, Broadsided Press, Taos International Journal of Poetry and Art, as well as several anthologies. CMarie is a regular columnist for the Inlander, translations editor for Broadsided Press, Non-Fiction editor for High Desert Journal, and She resides in the mountains of West Central Idaho with her partner Caleb and their dogs Carhartt and Cisco.

Elise Atchison

Elise Atchison has lived most of her life in an off-the-grid cabin on the edge of the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness in Montana. Her novel, Crazy Mountain, is forthcoming from Sowilo Press.

Atchison is the recipient of the Eludia Book Award and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award. Her short stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. More at eliseatchison.com.

Kathleen Matson Blurock

Writer and poet Kathleen Matson Blurock is an Ohio native, a Los Angeles resident for 40 years, and now lives permanently in Livingston, Montana.

She is a member of the Los Angeles Poets and Writers Collective, and produced the Collective’s booth for the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books for 3 years.

Her poetry has been published in ON THE BUS literary journal, and “I have written 3 novels that are sitting on the shelf as I’ve been too busy running around the world to focus on having them published.”

Lover of literature, Kathleen is a crazed reader (see her blog post “A Book A Week for A Year – kathleenmatson.blogspot.com), loves fiction and the worlds it creates, and is wildly supportive in promoting Literary Livingston through Elk River Arts & Lectures

Michael Earl Craig

Michael Earl Craig’s most recent book of poems is Woods and Clouds Interchangeable (Wave Books, 2019). He’s published poems in various magazines, journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The Believer, The New Yorker, and The Best American Poetry 2014. A recent Poet Laureate for the state of Montana, he lives in the Shields Valley where he shoes horses for a living.

Johnathan Hettinger

Johnathan is a journalist who moved to Livingston from Central Illinois in 2018, eager to learn and write more about the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. He has worked at the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting, the Livingston Enterprise and the (Champaign-Urbana) News-Gazette, and is currently Communications Director for the Park County Environmental Council, and serves on Livingston’s City Conservation Board. He is enthusiastic about planning for Park County’s future, whether that means climate change or a growing population.

Maryanne Vollers

Chair

Maryanne is an author, journalist and producer based in Livingston, Montana. A former editor at Rolling Stone magazine, Vollers reported for Time and NBC News from Africa. Her work has been published in magazines including Esquire, Mother Jones, and The New York Times Magazine, among many others. She is a noted ghostwriter who has collaborated on projects with Jerri Nielsen, Connie Rice, Sissy Spacek, Hillary Clinton and Ashley Judd. Vollers’ books include Lone Wolf and Ghosts of Mississippi, which was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Marc Beaudin

Secretary

Marc is a co-owner of Elk River Books, a Spur Award finalist and the author of Life List: Poems, Vagabond Song: Neo-Haibun from the Peregrine Journals and co-editor of Unearthing Paradise: Montana Writers in Defense of Greater Yellowstone. He was a founder and artistic director of the 303 Collective, a nonprofit radical arts and theatre group in Saginaw, Michigan. Before that, he was a founder and artistic director of Saginaw’s Collective Artists Gallery. Currently he is the artistic director of the Caldera Theatre Company. His poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and collected into the book The Moon Cracks Open: A Field Guide to the Birds and Other Poems. His plays have been produced at theaters in Michigan, Montana and Minneapolis. More information is at CrowVoice.com.