Willow and the Storm

Willow and the Storm,  a collaboration between illustrator Frances Cannon and author and forester Ethan Tapper, is a story for children that helps them better understand how forests work, exposes them to many different elements of natural history, and in some small way equips them to improve their understanding of, and relationship to, the end of human life. 

Frances Cannon is an interdisciplinary writer, artist, and the Mellon Science/Nature Writing Fellow at Kenyon College. She was Director of Sundog Poetry and taught at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has an MFA in creative writing from Iowa and a BA in poetry/printmaking from UVM. Published books include: Walter Benjamin Reimagined, MIT Press, Fling Diction, (GWP), among others. She worked for The Iowa Review, and McSweeney’ s Quarterly. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, Poetry Northwest, The North American Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, among others. Ethan Tapper, a forester and writer based in Vermont, has worked as a consulting forester managing tens of thousands of acres of public and private forestlands and advising thousands of forest landowners on how to manage their forests responsibly. Ethan is also an educator who leads dozens of public events each year, maintains an active presence on social media, and writes a monthly for newspapers and a quarterly in Northern Woodlands magazine. He has received numerous awards and distinctions, including being named Forester of the Year by the Northeast-Midwest State Foresters Alliance.