Susan Belasco is Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. The author of articles and reviews on nineteenth-century American women writers and periodical literature, she is the editor of Margaret Fuller's Summer on the Lakes; Fanny Fern's Ruth Hall; and is currently editing Whitman's poems published in periodicals from 1850-1892 for the Walt Whitman Archive. She is the co-editor of "These Sad but Glorious Days": Dispatches from Europe, 1846-1850 by Margaret Fuller; Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America; and Approaches to Teaching Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Lawrence Buell is Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature at Harvard University. His books include: Literary Transcendentalism, New England Literary Culture, and Emerson. Whitman's transnational contexts--Asian, Latin American, and Victorian--have interested him increasingly in recent years.

Matt Cohen works in the fields of the history of the book and race, class, gender and reproduction in American literature. He has published in Prospects, The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, American Literature, and Book History. An editor at the Walt Whitman Archive, he is currently directing the digitization of the nine volumes of Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden, one of the central texts for Whitman scholarship.

Betsy Erkkila is the Henry Sanborn Noyes Professor of Literature at Northwestern University, where she served as Chair of the Department of English for five years. Her teaching and research are in the field of American literary and cultural studies, with a particular interest in American poetry, comparative American cultures, race and gender studies, and cultural and political theory. Her most recent book entitled Mixed Bloods and Other Crosses: Rethinking American Literature from the Revolution to the Culture Wars is forthcoming. Erkkila is also the author of Walt Whitman Among the French: Poet and Myth; Whitman the Political Poet; and The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, Literary History, and Discord. She is co-editor (with Jay Grossman) of Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies and editor of a new Riverside edition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Writings.

Ed Folsom, Carver Professor of English at The University of Iowa, is the editor of The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, co-director of the Walt Whitman Archive and the author or editor of five books on Whitman, including: Walt Whitman's Native Representations and Whitman East and West. He directed the Whitman Centennial Conference in 1992 and edits the Whitman Series for the University of Iowa Press. His essays on American poetry have appeared in numerous journals and books including: American Literature and The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman.

Tom Gannon is an Assistant Professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. Also a lifelong birder, Tom's affinity for both "words and birds" has led him to the arena of eco-critical scholarship, and in particular the study of representations of the animal other in literature. While his current research focuses are Native American literatures and British Romantic poetry, he is ever eager to propound on the writings of yea-sayers and nay-sayers of "Nature" wherever they are, including the corpus of a certain singer of mourning mockingbirds, threnodic thrushes, and dallying eagles.

Ted Genoways is the author of Bullroarer, winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, the Natalie Ornish Poetry Award, and the Nebraska Book Award. He has also edited eight books, including: The Correspondence of Walt Whitman, Volume 7 and a collection of essays on Whitman in contemporary culture. He lives with his wife and son in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he is the editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review.

Ezra Greenspan is Kahn Chair in the Humanities and Professor of English at Southern Methodist University (after earlier stints at Tel Aviv University and the University of South Carolina). Greenspan is the author of Walt Whitman and the American Reader, editor of the Cambridge Companion to Whitman, and compiler of the forthcoming Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Whitman's "Song of Myself." He is also the founding co-editor of the journal, Book History.

Jay Grossman teaches American literature and culture at Northwestern University. He is the author of Reconstituting the American Renaissance: Emerson, Whitman, and the Politics of Representation, and a co-editor of Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies. He is at work on a cultural biography of the American literary scholar and political activist F.O. Matthiessen.

Walter Grünzweig is Professor of American Literature and Culture at Universität Dortmund in Germany and adjunct professor at University of Pennsylvania, the State University of New York at Binghamton and Canisius College. His research interests focus on literary, cultural and academic exchanges between the German-speaking countries and the United States. He is author of Walt Whitmann: Die deutschsprachige Rezeption als interkulturelles Phänomen and of Constructing the German Walt Whitman.

Robert Harris is Chair of the English and Social Science Department at Northwood University.  He works in business and in academics in both Texas and Thailand.  He has a BA from the University of North Texas and an MLA from Southern Methodist University, where part of his collection of Whitman materials was recently displayed.  He is currently working on a book, The Poet and the Collector: Selected Letters of John Ciardi and Charles Feinberg.

Fred Hersch is among the foremost artists in the world of jazz today. Hersch is a pianist and composer whose work has received nearly universal acclaim in a career spanning over twenty years. Hersch has released seventeen albums as a solo artist or bandleader, two of which were nominated for Grammy awards for Best Jazz Instrumental Performance; he has co-led another twenty albums and has appeared as sideman or featured soloist on over eighty further recordings. On behalf of Classical Action: Performing Artists Against AIDS, Hersch produced and played on two albums: Last Night When We Were Young: The Ballad Album, which has raised over $150,000 for AIDS services and education; and Fred Hersch & Friends: The Duo Album on which he performed duets with 12 jazz greats including Tommy Flanagan, Joe Lovano, Diana Krall, Lee Konitz, Jim Hall and Kenny Barron.

M. Jimmie Killingsworth, Professor of English at Texas A&M University, is the author of such books as Whitman's Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text; Ecospeak: Rhetoric and Environmental Politics in America (with Jacqueline Palmer); and The Growth of Leaves of Grass: The Organic Tradition in Whitman Studies as well as over fifty scholarly articles and book chapters. His most recent book, Walt Whitman and the Earth: A Study in Ecopoetics, combines his work as a pioneer in environmental rhetoric with his interest in nineteenth-century poetry.

Galway Kinnell has taught writing at many schools around the world, including universities in France, Australia, and Iran. He currently divides his time between Vermont and New York City, where he is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University and a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. His volumes of poetry include: A New Selected Poems, a finalist for the National Book Award; Imperfect Thirst; When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone; Selected Poems, for which he received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words; The Book of Nightmares; Body Rags; Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock; and What a Kingdom It Was. He has also published translations of works by Yves Bonnefroy, Yvanne Goll, and François Villon, and, this year, Rainer Maria Rilke.

Ted Kooser is Poet Laureate of the United States and a visiting professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.  Upon Kooser's appointment as Poet Laureate,  Librarian of Congress James H. Billington called Kooser "a major poetic voice for rural and small town America."  He is the author of ten books of poetry as well as several fiction and non-fiction works.  Kooser's recent publications include Delights and Shadows, Seasons in the Bohemian Alps, and Winter Morning Walks: One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison.

Donald D. Kummings is a Professor of English at the Parkside Campus of the University of Wisconsin. His work on Whitman includes four books: Walt Whitman, 1940 1975: A Reference Guide; Approaches to Teaching Whitman's Leaves of Grass; Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia (with J.R. LeMaster); and A Companion to Whitman. In 1990, his collection of poems, The Open Road Trip, was awarded the Posner Poetry Prize by the Council for Wisconsin Writers. In 1997, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching named him Wisconsin Professor of the Year.

Jerome Loving, Distinguished Professor of English at Texas A&M, is the author of a number of books and articles, including: Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself and The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser. His other Whitman volumes include: The Oxford World Editions of Leaves of Grass; Emerson, Whitman and the American Muse; Walt Whitman's Champion: William Douglas O'Connor; and The Civil War Letters of George Washington Whitman. He is currently at work on a biography of Mark Twain.

Cristanne Miller is W. M. Keck Distinguished Service Professor and Professor of English at Pomona College.  Her books include Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar, Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority, and Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Else Lasker-Schuler. Gender and Literary Community in New York and Berlin (forthcoming 2005).  Her next
book will begin with Whitman and explore concepts and functions of the poet and poetry from the 1850s through the beginning of the twentieth century.

James E. Miller, Jr. is the Helen A. Regenstein Professor of Literature Emeritus at the University of Chicago.  He has written, edited, and contributed to numerous articles and books on Walt Whitman.  Among his books on Whitman are A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass; The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction: Whitman's Legacy in the Personal Epic; Walt Whitman; and Whitman's "Song of Myself": Origin, Growth, Meaning.

Martin G. Murray is the founder of the Washington Friends of Walt Whitman, a fellowship of enthusiasts in the nation's capital.  His work on Whitman has been published in the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, The Classroom Electric: Dickinson, Whitman and American Culture, the Yale University Library Gazette, Washington History, Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia, and the forthcoming A Companion to Walt Whitman.  When not researching Whitman, Murray works as an economist for the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Joel Myerson, Carolina Distinguished Professor of American Literature, Emeritus, at the University of South Carolina, has published Walt Whitman: A Descriptive Bibliography and edited Whitman in His Own Time and The Walt Whitman Archive: A Facsimile of the Poet's Manuscripts. He also edited the annual Studies in the American Renaissance for twenty years.

William Pannapacker is Assistant Professor of English and Towsley Research Scholar at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. He holds a Ph.D. in the History of American Civilization from Harvard University and is author of Revised Lives: Walt Whitman and Nineteenth-Century Authorship and numerous entries in Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia. Currently he is preparing an intellectual biography titled Walt Whitman's Philadelphia.

Vivian Pollak is the author of The Erotic Whitman. She has spoken on Whitman at a number of major conferences and published articles in The Mickle Street Review and The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. Additionally, she is the author of Dickinson: The Anxiety of Gender and editor of several volumes, including: A Historical Guide to Emily Dickinson. Pollak is a past President of the Emily Dickinson International Society and of the Association of Women Faculty at Washington University, Hilltop Campus, where she is Professor of English and Women and Gender studies.

Kenneth M. Price is the Hillegass Professor of American Literature at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He is the co-director of the Walt Whitman Archive; editor of Walt Whitman: The Contemporary Reviews; and author of Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century and To Walt Whitman, America.

Ken Reed was born and raised in Wichita Falls, Texas. He is currently Dean of the College of Osteopathic Medicine and Surgery at Des Moines University. A collector of Walt Whitman for the last 25 years, in the Summer 2000 issue of the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review he authored with Ed Folsom "An Unpublished Specimen Days Manuscript Fragment." In addition to Whitman, his interests include the history of medicine, Civil War medicine, literature and medicine, and fly fishing, though not necessarily in that order.

David S. Reynolds is Distinguished Professor of English and American Studies at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books include: Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (winner of the Christian Gauss Award and Honorable Mention for the John Hope Franklin Prize); George Lippard; and Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America. He is the editor of George Lippard, Prophet of Protest: Writings of an American Radical and the coeditor of The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American Literature and of a new edition of three works by the popular nineteenth-century novelist George Thompson. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review.

Glenn Schaeffer is President and Chief Financial Officer of the Mandalay Resort Group in Las Vegas, Nevada.  He earned his bachelor's degree at the University of California-Irvine and completed his MFA in Fiction from the University of Iowa.  A literary philanthropist, he is the founder of the International Center for Writing and Translation and the International Institute of Modern Letters.  Schaeffer is a longtime Whitman collector.

Liu Shusen is Professor of American and English literature and translation studies, and Deputy Dean of the School of Foreign Languages at Peking University. His current research includes Walt Whitman studies, 19th century American literature, and translation studies, on top of a particular interest in the development of American studies in China. His recent publications include A Course in American Literature, Selected Readings of American Literature, and dozens of academic essays published in China and beyond. With Ed Folsom, he co-directed "Whitman 2000," the first major conference on an American poet to be held in China.

M. Wynn Thomas is Professor of English and Director of CREW (Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales), University of Wales, Swansea. Author/editor of more than twenty books, he is also responsible for the unpublished literary estate of R. S. Thomas. His extensive work on Whitman includes such books as The Lunar Light of Whitman's Poetry and Dail Glaswellt: Eltholiad o Gerddi Walt Whitman. His new book is a study of Whitman in the US and UK, called Whitman in Transit: US-UK. He has been a Visiting Professor at Harvard and is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Alan Trachtenberg is Neil Grey Emeritus Professor of English and American Studies and Senior Research Fellow at Yale University. He has been a longtime student of Walt Whitman, who has figured significantly in each of his books: Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol (1965), The Incorporation of America (1982), Reading American Photographs (1989), and his forthcoming Shades of Hiawatha (2004). In addition to these works, he has edited a number of volumes in the field of American Studies, has published many essays and reviews on literary and cultural topics, including the writers Whitman, Dreiser, Stephen Crane, and Wright Morris, and topics such as American photography, film noir and the city, and representations of Native Americans. New projects include a selection of his essays for publication.

Katherine L. Walter is chair of the Digital Initiatives & Special Collections (DISC) department in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) Libraries, and co-directs UNL’s Digital Research in the Humanities initiative with Kenneth M. Price.  Walter is co-principal investigator of the Virtual Archive of Walt Whitman’s Manuscripts project funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.   She also co-directs The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition online edition, a joint project of the UNL Libraries and the University of Nebraska Press funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Public Programs.  In addition, Walter serves as a faculty fellow of the International Willa Cather Seminar.

Tyler White is the Resident Conductor of the Lincoln (Nebraska) Symphony Orchestra and Director of Orchestral Activities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Under White's direction, the UNL Symphony has been recognized as one of America's outstanding collegiate orchestras; UNL opera productions conducted by him have won awards from the Waterford International Festival of Light Opera (Ireland) and twice from the National Opera Association. White has also served as director of orchestras at Cornell University and at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. As a composer, Tyler White has received commissions from the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, and numerous other ensembles.