Wendy Martin is professor of American literature and American studies and director of the Tufts Poetry Awards Program at Claremont Graduate University (CGU). She is also vice provost and director of transdisciplinary studies at CGU and holds the George and Ronya Kozmetsky Endowed Chair of Transdisciplinary Studies. Her published works include The American Sisterhood: Writings of the Feminist Movement from Colonial Times to the Present; An American Triptych: Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich; We Are the Stories We Tell: Best Short Stories by North American Women Since 1945; and The Cambridge Companion to Emily Dickinson.

Cecelia Tichiis the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English and professor of American studies at Vanderbilt University, where her research and classroom work has focused in recent years on the literature and culture of the U.S. Gilded Age and Progressive Era. She is the past president of the American Studies Association and is the 2009 recipient of the Jay B. Hubbell Prize for distinguished work in American literary studies, awarded by the American Literature Division of the Modern Language Association. Tichi's work has been supported with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Radcliffe Institute, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (under the auspices of the Henry E. Huntington Library), and the Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation. In addition, she has held the Chair in Modern Culture at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. She has lectured widely in the United States and abroad and is the author of eight scholarly books, including Exposés and Excess: Muckraking in America 1900/2000; Civic Passions: Seven Who Launched Progressive America (And What They Teach Us); and Jack London: A Writer's Fight for a Better America. Her several edited volumes include a recent collection of short stories, Best of Times, Worst of Times: American Short Stories from the New Gilded Age, coedited with Wendy Martin.