CONTRIBUTORS

John H. Flannigan is a retired professor of English at Prairie State College, Chicago Heights, Illinois, where he taught American, African American, and British literatures and composition and was president of the Faculty Federation from 2004 to 2013. His essays on Cather, music, and opera have appeared in Cather Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, Studies in Short Fiction, and the Willa Cather Review.
Erika K. Hamilton is director of literary programs for Humanities Nebraska, where she supervises Prime Time Family Reading Time, Nebraska Warrior Writers, Nebraska Literary Tour, and the Nebraska State Poet selection process. Her dissertation examining how historical context from 1910 through 1940 influenced literary advertisements for Willa Cather and her contemporaries has led to published essays in Cather Studies, conference papers, and public presentations.
Matthew Hokom is a professor at Fairmont State University where he studies the influence of classical antiquity on Cather’s writing.
James A. Jaap is a professor of English at the Greater Allegheny campus of the Pennsylvania State University. Jaap has published several pieces on Cather and art, including an article on Cather and Southwest painter Ernest Blumenschein in Cather Studies 11. In addition to codirecting the 2017 Cather International Seminar in Pittsburgh, he is coediting Cather Studies 13 and was recently elected to serve on the Willa Cather Foundation Board of Governors. He lives in the Friendship neighborhood of Pittsburgh with his wife and two children, not far from where Cather stayed while living in the city.
Joyce Kessler is professor emerita of the Cleveland Institute of Art, where she serves as interim vice president for academic fairs and dean of faculty. In addition to her article for the present volume, Kessler contributed an article on The Profile to Cather Studies 9 and has published on topics in women’s studies in the journal Style and the poetry of Derek Walcott in the Arkansas Review. She is currently continuing her study of the role of visual culture in the work of Willa Cather.
Diane Prenatt is professor of English at Marian University, where she teaches American and European literature. Her research interests include the representation of domestic acts and ethnic identity in narrative, especially in the fiction of Willa Cather. She has published several essays in Cather Studies and the Willa Cather Newsletter & Review. She is writing a life of the writer and social activist Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant.
Janis P. Stout is a professor emerita of Texas A&M University. Her publications include Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World (2000), Willa Cather and Material Culture ( 2005), Picturing a Different West: Vision, Illustration, and the Tradition of Austin and Cather (2007), and coedited with Andrew Jewell, The Selected Letters of Willa Cather (2013). Her new book, Cather among the Moderns, was published in 2019. She also likes to quilt.
Stephanie Tsank is a visiting assistant professor of English at the University of Iowa, where she teaches courses on food and immigration. Her work has been published in American Studies, Studies in American Naturalism, and the Willa Cather Review.
Sarah L. Young is associate professor of English at Benedictine College, teaching American literature, World War I literature, composition, and linguistics. She has presented research on Willa Cather for the American Literature Association, Literature into Film Conference, International Willa Cather Seminar, and NEH seminars focused on the work of Willa Cather. Her work has been published in Something Complete and Great: The Centennial Study of “My Ántonia” and in the Willa Cather Review. She is a regular writer and arts reviewer for arts journals and newspapers and was a contributing writer to The Encyclopedia of Stage Plays on Film. She is also a trained opera singer who performs regularly.