CONTRIBUTORS

• Timothy C. Blackburn is English Chair at Forsyth Country Day School, near Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He has taught at several colleges in Minnesota and independent schools in Minnesota and New Jersey. His previous publications include papers on Defoe's Captain Singleton and Robinson Crusoe.
  
  
• Joshua Dolezal is an erstwhile wilderness ranger and visiting Assistant Professor of English at Central College, in Iowa. His creative and scholarly work has also appeared in Medical Humanities, Hudson Review, Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere.
  
  
• Jonathan D. Gross is Professor of English at DePaul University and Interim Director of the DePaul Humanities Center. He is the author of Byron: The Erotic Liberal and editor of Byron's "Corbeau Blanc": The Life and Letters of Lady Melbourne; Emma, or the Unfortunate Attachment; and Thomas Jefferson's Scrapbooks. He taught a course for DePaul University in 2002, featuring the One Book/One Chicago choice, which was Cather's My Ántonia. His essay in this volume grew out of that experience.
  
  
• Erika Hamilton is a graduate student and researcher at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she recently received an ma in English and creative writing. She is currently working on her PhD in literature with an emphasis on Willa Cather and Renaissance Studies. Hamilton is a Program Officer with the Nebraska Humanities Council.
  
  
• Richard C. Harris, Professor and Director of Humanities at Webb Institute, Long Island, New York, has previously published on Cather in a number of journals, including volumes 1 and 4 of Cather Studies. He is volume editor of the Scholarly Edition of Cather's One of Ours and is currently working with Dr. Mary Weddle on a book on Willa Cather's aunt France "Franc" Cather, the prototype for Mrs. Wheeler in One of Ours.
  
  
• Mark J. Madigan, an Associate Professor of English at Nazareth College of Rochester, has published widely on Cather, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, and other American writers. He is the editor of Keeping Fires Night and Day: Selected Letters of Dorothy Canfield Fisher as well as Fisher's The Bedquilt and Other Stories and Seasoned Timber. He is the volume editor of Youth and the Bright Medusa, forthcoming in the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. He taught American literature at the University Ljubljana, Slovenia, as a Fulbright Scholar in 2004.
  
  
• Richard H. Millington is Professor of English at Smith College. He is author of Practicing Romance: Narrative Form and Cultural Engagement in Hawthorne's Fiction and of essays on Hawthorne and Cather. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne and the coeditor of Hitchcock's America, which includes his essay on North by Northwest.
  
  
• John J. Murphy, Professor of English at BYU, is the author of "My Ántonia": The Road Home and over sixty essays and chapters on Cather and other American writers. He has edited Critical Essays on Willa Cather and Willa Cather: Family Community, and History, and is volume editor of the Cather Scholarly Editions of Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock.
  
  
• Joseph C. Murphy is Assistant Professor of English at Fu Jen University, Taiwan, where he serves on the editorial board of Fu Jen Studies. His publications and conference papers have focused on Whitman, Howells, Henry Adams, and Flannery O'Connor, as well as on Cather, and on the areas of American architecture, painting, and religion. He is completing a book entitled Exposing the Modern: Worlds' Fairs and American Literary Culture, 1853-1907.
  
  
• Elsa Nettels is Professor of English Emeritus at the College of William and Mary. Her publications include James and Conrad; Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells's America; and Language and Gender in American Fiction: Howells, James, Wharton, and Cather. For six years, from 1997 to 2002, she wrote the chapter on Wharton and Cather for American Literary Scholarship.
  
  
• Robert Pinsky, Poet Laureate of the United States (1997-2000), is poetry editor of the online journal Slate and a contributor to The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. His book-length poem An Explanation of America, awarded the Saxifrage Prize when published in 1980, has been reissued by Princeton University Press in a new edition.
  
  
• Jessica G. Rabin is author of Surviving the Crossing: (Im)migration, Ethnicity and Gender in Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen, along with several articles on Cather. She is Assistant Professor of English at Anne Arundel Community College and teaches American Literature, Women's Studies, and Bible and Literature. She also serves as Associate Editor of Philip Roth Studies and Secretary/Treasurer of the Philip Roth Society.
  
  
• Guy Reynolds is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he also directs the Cather Project and serves as General Editor of the Cather Scholarly Edition. He is the author of Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire and Twentieth-Century American Women's Fiction.
  
  
• Michael Schueth earned a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2005. His dissertation was entitled "Willa Cather and Celebrity: The Writer's Self-Image and the Literary Marketplace." He has presented several papers on Cather and currently teaches at Creighton University.
  
  
• Merrill Maguire Skaggs is author of After the World Broke in Two: The Later Novels of Willa Cather and of numerous essays on Cather and other subjects. She edited Willa Cather's New York: New Essays on Cather in the City and now does research within, as well as helps other scholars to use, the Caspersen Cather Collection at Drew University, where she serves as Baldwin Professor of the Humanities.
  
  
• Janis P. Stout is Professor Emerita of English at Texas A&M University. Her most recent books are Through the Window, Out the Door: Women's Narratives of Departure, from Austin and Cather to Tyler, Morrison, and Didion; Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World; and Coming Out of War: Poetry, Grieving, and the Culture of the World Wars. She is the editor of Willa Cather and Material Culture: Real-World Writing, Writing the Real World and A Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather.
  
  
• John N. Swift is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where he teaches British and American modernism and psychoanalytic approaches to literature. A past president of the Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial and Educational Foundation, he has published many essays on Cather and her work and is coeditor of Willa Cather and the American Southwest.
  
  
• Robert Thacker is Professor of Canadian Studies and English at St. Lawrence University, and has been Molson Research Fellow there. He codirected the Sixth International Seminar in Quebec City and coedited its volume of essays, Cather Studies, Volume 4 : Willa Cather's Canadian and Old World Connections. His recent work on Cather has appeared in American Literary Realism, the Canadian Review of American Studies, and A Companion to the Regional Literature of America. His Alice Munro, Writing Her Lives: A Biography was published in 2005.
  
  
• Steven Trout is an Associate Professor of English at Fort Hays State University. He is the author of Memorial Fictions: Willa Cather and the First World War and a coeditor of The Literature of the Great War Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory. His articles on twentieth-century fiction have appeared in numerous journals, including Hemingway Review, Studies in Short Fiction, and Twentieth Century Literature. Most recently he edited Cather Studies, Volume 6 : Willa Cather and the Great War.
  
  
• Joseph R. Urgo is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of Mississippi. His works include Novel Frames: Literature as a Guide to Race, Sex, and History in American Culture and Willa Cather and the Myth of American Migration, as well as journal articles, book reviews, and encyclopedia entries on Cather and Faulkner. He was coeditor of Willa Cather and the American Southwest and appears in the PBS production The Road Is All: Willa Cather.