Stephen Cushman's first book of poems, Blue Pajamas, was published by LSU in 1998. He is also the author of two books of criticism, William Carlos Williams and the Meanings of Measure (Yale, 1985) and Fictions of Form in American Poetry (Princeton, 1993), as well as of a creative non-fiction treatment of the Civil War, Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle (Virginia, 1999). He teaches at the University of Virginia.

W. S. Di Piero was born in South Philadelphia in 1945. A frequent contributor to Threepenny Review and TriQuarterly, he has published several volumes of poetry. The most recent are The Restorers, and Shadows Burning. He is the author of three collections of essays on literature, art, and personal experience: Memory and Enthusiasm, Out of Eden, and Shooting the Works. He has also published works of translation from the Italian, including a version of Giacomo Leopardi's Pensieri and The Ellipse: Selected Poems of Leonardo Sinisgalli, and in 1996 his translation of Euripides' Ion appeared. He lives in San Francisco.

Brady Earnhart comes from Delray Beach, FL. He holds a BA from The College of William and Mary, an MFA from The University of Iowa, and a PhD from The University of Virginia and has published numerous poems as well as articles on "The Song of Roland" and the ballet Giselle. He is currently teaching nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature and creative writing at James Madison University.

John Giannotti is professor emeritus of art at Rutgers University-Camden. He has a studio in Haddonfield, NJ, where he lives with his wife, Antoinette, and son, Delano.

Tyler Hoffman is Assistant Professor of English and Co-Director of the American Studies Program at Rutgers University-Camden. He has published articles on Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Thom Gunn, and the poetry slam, and his book Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry is forthcoming from the University Press of New England. He is working on a second book entitled States of Change: American Public Poetry and the Performance of Culture, and is co-editing a collection of essays called The Public Life of American Poetry. He also serves as associate editor of the Robert Frost Review.

Vicki Howard is a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Rutgers University-Camden and Hagley Museum and Library. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin.

Joshua Boaz Kotzin has just finished a Ph.D. in English at the University of Iowa. His dissertation, titled "The Museum Mood: American Literature and Modern Styles of Retrospection," examines the relationship between American literature and the rise of the civic art museum through close reading of fiction by Henry James, William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, and Edith Wharton. He is now a lecturer in the English Department at Yeshiva University in New York.

Helen McKenna-Uff is a Park Ranger at the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site and a graduate student at Rutgers University-Camden.

William Major is an assistant professor of English at Hillyer College, University of Hartford, where he teaches courses in American literature, advanced composition, and composition. His area of specialty is autopathography, and he has recently published articles in a/b: Auto/Biography, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and Arizona Quarterly.

Paul Outka has just started as an Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Maine, Farmington, following a two year visiting position at the New College of Florida. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in May 2000, and has written on Asian-American autobiography for Contemporary Literature. A long piece on Whitman, entitled “Whitman and Race (he’s queer, he’s unclear, get used to it...)” is forthcoming from The Journal of American Studies. Outka is currently working on a book on ecocriticism and the sublime.

Shirley Samuels is finishing a book called Facing America: National Iconography and the Civil War. She is the author of Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation and the editor of The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth Century America. She teaches American literature and Women's Studies at Cornell University.

Paul W. Schopp, a regional historian who has done extensive scholarly work on Camden City and Camden County, New Jersey, served as the executive director of the Camden County Historical Society from 1996 to 2000. He is currently employed as staff historian for A.D. Marble & Company, an environmental and cultural resource management firm located in Rosemont, Pennsylvania.

Copyright Information

Giannotti: "Sculptor and Poet," Photo by Angelo Flamini © 1992

Cushman: © 1999 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia; from Stephen Cushman, Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle (Charlottesville: Virginia, 1999) pp. 167-187.

Samuels: © Shirley Samuels

Roebling memoir: © Special Collections and University Archives, Rutgers University Libraries

Howard images: "1847 Rogers Bros. 'Silver Plate that Wears,'" 1915, Box 80, N.W. Ayer Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

"Wm. H. Barmore, Confectioner," 1867, Confectionery, Box 1, Warshaw Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.