Ali Berlow founded the Island Grown Initiative a decade ago, wrote The Mobile Poultry Slaughterhouse and was the founding editor and is still the co-publisher of Edible Vineyard. Her most recent book, The Food Activist’s Handbook: Big & Small Things You Can Do to Help Provide Fresh, Healthy Food for Your Community, was published earlier this month.

On Wednesday, April 15, Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn will be coming to the Vineyard to play at the Performing Arts Center.

Willy Mason is sitting on a barstool in a London pub, smoking a cigarette and considering the last decade. He takes a pull on his beer and thinks about what all the buzz — tours with Radiohead, collaborations with the Chemical Brothers and duets with KT Tunstall and Rosanne Cash — has really meant to the young bard now closing in on 30.

One of the very first things Ali Berlow tells you is that she’s never killed a chicken. “I’ve never killed a chicken, and I never intend to,” she says matter-of-factly.

This may sound surprising coming from the author of The Mobile Poultry Slaughterhouse: Building a Humane Chicken Processing Unit to Strengthen Your Local Food System.

Sean Wilentz is hardly your Quaaludes and vitriol music critic. That may be why the Bob Dylan in America author was commissioned to write the definitive history of one of America’s truly great record companies. Mr. Wilentz is also the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln.

Lori McKenna is in the backyard of her home in Stoughton less than a block from where she grew up, and she’s laughing. The woman who writes miniatures of the way life happens, who paints a tableau of marital ennui and how thin paychecks stretch is anything but dour.