Robert Bringhurst is a Canadian poet, typographer and author. He has translated substantial works from Haida and Navajo and from classical Greek and Arabic. He was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in June 2013. His Collected Poems will be published in the fall of 2026, along with a book of interviews called Buying the Ghosts a Drink. Robert lives on Quadra Island, near Campbell River, British Columbia (approximately 170 km northwest of Vancouver) with his wife, Jan Zwicky, a poet, musician, and philosopher.

Jesse Dermody was born in Waukesha, Wisconsin. These days he's living in northern Minnesota, in the backwoods bog north of Duluth a good little ways. He's a poet, a sculptor and full-time musician in a band with his brother Ryan called The Brothers Burn Mountain. He bides his time fairly equally amongst all these forms of art, all of which he's been doing for about 32 years. He sculpts poems, composes sculptures, and helps his brother paint songs. He sees no barriers between these forms or his senses. They're really all one art form, one tree sharing roots with our ancestors, with poem branches, song branches, and sculpture branches growing out. A composite of sensations with rustling leaves. He's published two books of poems, Dear Hieronymous in 2021, and From the Womb's Dark Waters in 2024.

Richard Engling has been a regular participant at the Minnesota Mens Conference since 1995 and has attended Robert Bly readings and events since 1979. He is a Chicago actor, playwright, and the author of five books, including GIVE MY REGARDS TO NOWHERE, ROMEO AND JULIET KEEP THEIR EYES ON THE PRIZE, and THE VERY LAST PRODUCTION OF KING LEAR, a trilogy of comedic novels set in the Chicago theatre scene, as well as the novels, VISIONS OF ANNA and BODY MORTGAGE. His plays include GHOST WATCH and ANNA IN THE AFTERLIFE. He served as artistic director of Polarity Ensemble Theatre for a dozen years. Visit www.richardengling.com for more information.

Matt Faulkner is an author and artist with over 40 illustrated books to his credit. He teaches world building and illustration courses at the undergrad and grad level. And, ever since his first Bly/Hillman/Meade men's conference over thirty five years ago, he has felt happily gobsmacked by the work and deeply grateful to the community.

I came to writing poetry relatively late in life. Thirteen years ago, in the grips of a midlife crisis, days before my 50th birthday, I literally awoke to the realization that only in the incompleteness of poetry could I find a suitable suitcase to unpack my inner life’s contradictions. John Keats’ described poetry’s ability to convey our contradictions of spirit as negative capability. “Negative capability…is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without an irritable reaching after fact and reason.” I then proceeded to spend the better part of eleven years burning through an obsession with reading and writing sonnets, with no good explanation other than I found it amusing. I admit that the brevity and forced canvas on which to work of a sonnet’s structure, fourteen lines, 10 syllables a line, matches my typical poetic attention span on most any given day. This is the only crown of sonnets I am ever likely to write.

I am a lifelong Minnesotan, who resides in the western lee of the intersection between the Crow and Mississippi rivers, near Rogers, on a small acreage owned by my partner in the old farmhouse where she grew up. We reside there amongst a host of memories, furry companions, attempted grace and an endless irritable reaching after good will.

Robert is an avid attendee of Minnesota Men's Conference and recently joined the Board of Directors. Robert is the co-editor of Inroads magazine with Anthony Signorelli, as well as Inroads designer and art director. He believes Inroads is but one small way to contribute to the need of men to ground themselves, develop a relationship with the soul, and grow as individuals and within their community.

Asher Packman is an Australian writer, storyteller and mythopoetic facilitator based in the Byron Bay hinterland on Bundjalung Country. He hosts community gatherings with The Fifth Direction, weaving poetry, place and soul-work in the lineage of the Minnesota Men’s Conference. He lives within earshot of Goonengerry Falls, where water and imagination keep each other honest.

Dougie Padilla is a MN/WI poet and artist. He has published four chapbooks and four full length books of poetry. He is largely an autodidact, but learned much from years around Robert Bly. His poetry loves have included Hart Crane, Dylan Thomas, Blake, Lorca, Gary Snyder, Su Tung Po, Ikkyu, and Hafez. Dougie writes in many styles, from lyric to memoir to haiku. He writes about Minnesota and his Norwegian/Mexican/cowboy roots, about Lake Pepin, about hippie daze and ashram life in India, about love and family, about the state of the world, about Mind itself. He reads his poetry in coffee shops, bars, bookstores, and museums across the region. Of his work Gary Snyder has said: " What a pleasure to read your poems, they are just right. And that's not easy."

Andrew Periale is a puppeteer, poet, playwright and polyglot. With his wife, he founded the Emmy-nominated Perry Alley Theater, and they also produced the magazine Puppetry International for nearly forty years. He was for four years the poet laureate of Rochester, NH, and is a longtime member of City Hall Poets. His work has been produced on stages around the country and has appeared in many anthologies and journals (Yellow Medicine Review, Burnt Bridge, Hole in the Head, Rat’s Ass Review and others).

Anthony Signorelli is an author and poet. He was co-editor of the original Inroads (circa 1990) and is now co-editor this new incarnation of Inroads with Robert Netzer. He's published seven non-fiction books, just released his first chapbook of poems called the Arc of Love, and has a forthcoming book (by April 30, 2026) on climate change. It is titled Carbon 350:What We Need to Do for a Climate Solution. He lives in the Chequamegon National Forest of northern Wisconsin.

Sometimes it takes traveling far from home to find out where one comes from… SonofMel turns travel into tale, sifting the sacred from the profane, delivering story in song, strung up with fistfuls of chords…

Walton is a writer and storyteller. He has held a life-long interest in myth, story, and in the power of story to transform the paradigms and frames in which we live.

Walton is currently working with mythologist Ben Dennis on an anthology of selected tales and myths that have been shared in the past forty years of the Minnesota Men’s Conference. He has also completed a book Following the Wrong God Home, Gilgamesh: The Foundational Myth of Civilization and the Roots of Ecological Collapse exploring the mythic roots of human exceptionalism, and our disconnection from the web of being as expressed in one of humankind’s oldest extant written stories, Gilgamesh.

Daniel Thomas’s third poetry collection, River of Light, was published by Shanti Arts Publishing in 2025. His previous books are Leaving the Base Camp at Dawn and Deep Pockets. He has published poems in many journals, including Southern Poetry Review, Nimrod, Poetry Ireland Review, Amethyst Review, Vita Poetica, Radix, Atlanta Review, and others. More info at danielthomaspoetry.com

Timothy Young is a poet with five published books of poetry, numerous chapbooks and essays. Robert Bly’s The Thousands Press published his first book in 2003 and his poetry appeared in Scribner's The Best American Poetry of 1999. He has worked as a state cattle inspector, a maintenance man at a Totonac Indian Clinic in Mexico, a police dispatcher in North Pole, Alaska, a newspaper editor for the Frogtown district in St. Paul, MN, and as a teacher at the Red Wing, MN juvenile correctional facility. He hosts The Two Boots Word Vault Podcast and two YouTube channels, timtwoboots and Timothy Young’s Words.