Poet and scientist Bill Yake was born in Spokane, Washington. The author of the poetry collections This Old Riddle: Cormorants and Rain (2003) and Unfurl, Kite, and Veer (2010), his poems were also published widely in magazines and anthologies serving the environmental and literary communities. His poetry also won the Alligator Juniper Award (2003) and the James M. Snydal Prize (2004), and his poem “The Lowly, Exalted” was featured in an exhibition celebrating invertebrates in art. Yake died at the age of seventy-five on December 12, 2022.