Jim and Leslie Costa are the recipients of the 2025 Steve Kemp Writer's Residency. During their residency, the North Carolina-based couple plans to continue work already underway to write and illustrate a new insects natural history field guide for the Smokies to be published by Smokies Life. Dr. Jim Costa is a professor of biology at Western Carolina University and the executive director of WCU's Highlands Biological Station (highlandsbiological.org) in Highlands, North Carolina. He has authored numerous research papers, reviews and magazine articles, as well as nine books. Leslie holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from Georgia Southern University, and graduate degrees in entomology and landscape architecture from the University of Georgia. She is a frequent collaborator on Jim’s books, illustrating The Other Insect Societies (Harvard, 2006) and Darwin's Backyard: How Small Experiments Led to a Big Theory (Norton, 2017).