Alex Andor Skanavis is a Wisconsin-based poet heavily inspired by twentieth-century naturalist philosophers Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg, whose words became an ideal medium for imparting the exuberance of nature and ecology. Finding that the Divine Comedy Trilogy by Italian poet Dante could use an update as a naturalism manifesto (using the fluctuating conditions of Earth’s ecology as the analogy for heaven and hell), he completed his first book Gaia in 2012, now succeeded by the heavenly realms of Galaxia. Alex graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison with an English degree for creative writing in 2013.