Don Henry has been the Executive Director of the Australian Conservation Foundation since May 1998.  ACF supported the inaugural Two Fires Festival, held in 2005. He began his work as a conservationist in Queensland in the 1980s through a campaign to protect Moreton Island near Brisbane and was the first director of the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland which was established which was established by Judith Wright in the early 1960s. He served as the Australian Director for the World Wide Fund for Nature from 1989 to 1992 and went on to work for WWF in Washington DC from 1992 to 1998, where he first served as Director of the South Pacific Program before moving on the Asia-Pacific Program and then the Global Forest Program. He was awarded the Global 500 Environment Award by the UN Environment Program in 1991 and was named Not for Profit CEO of the year in 2008 by the Equity Trustees.

Associate Professor Kate Rigby is an Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University in Melbourne. Having completed her PhD in German studies in 1991 she has developed a strong interest in ecophilosophy, ecocriticism, Romanticism, phenomenology and critical theory. She was the founding president of the Australia and New Zealand Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE-ANZ) and with Sharron Pfueller and Freya Mathews she is editor of the journal PAN (Philosophy, Activism and Nature). Having grown up in Canberra she is now completing an ‘eco-cultural’ history of the Canberra area and pursuing a new research interest in the cultural and ethical challenges of climate change. She has a strong interest in the literary legacy of Judith Wright and she helped to organise an academic forum at the Two Fires Festival in 2007.

Peter Minter is a leading contemporary Australian poet, editor and scholar. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Empty Texas and blue grass, co-editor of Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets and was poetry editor at Meanjin from 2000-2005. His most recent projects include co-editing the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature and the forthcoming Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. He lectures in Indigenous Studies and Poetics at the University of Sydney.