Anthea Butler is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester. She is the author of Women in the Church of God in Christ: Making a Sanctified World (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). In 2008-2009 she will join the faculty of Harvard Divinity School as the Colorado Scholar and Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and African American Religious History.
Rebecca L. Carter is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Currently she is conducting her doctoral dissertation field research in New Orleans. Using ethnographic, social-geographic, and documentary research methods, her project is a comparative study of the role of religious faith and practice in the everyday lived experience and management of crisis and disaster. The research explores also the relationship between religion, resilience building, and the organization and growth of social and revitalization movements.
Peter Cooley is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Tulane University. He has published seven books of poetry; an eighth, Divine Margins, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, Poetry, The New Republic, and in more than one hundred anthologies. From 1970 to 2000 he served as the poetry editor of The North American Review.
Peter Entell is an American-born filmmaker residing in Switzerland. He is a Guggenheim award winner and the director of the documentaries Josh’s Trees (2005), The Tube (2001), and Rolling (1997), which was nominated for the Swiss Film Prize for Best Documentary.
Lynda Frese is Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Her photographs and other mixed media have been featured in galleries and museums in the United States and Europe, including the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans, the Mississippi Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Palazzo Farnese Collection in Ortona, Italy, and many dozens of others. She has recently focused her attention on the spiritual landscapes of Louisiana and the Gulf South in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Poet and critic John Gery, a Research Professor of English at the University of New Orleans, has published five volumes of poetry, most recently, A Gallery of Ghosts (University of New Orleans Press, 2008). He also directs the Ezra Pound Center for Literature at Brunnenburg, Italy. From 2005 to 2006 his family was displaced from their flooded home in New Orleans and resided in North Carolina, Minnesota, Europe, and Pennsylvania before returning to the city. In 2007 he was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Belgrade, Serbia.
Dianne Glave holds a Ph.D. in United States Social History with an emphasis on African American and Environmental History from Stony Brook University, and is currently a candidate in the M.Div. Program in the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Since Katrina, she has served and worked in Atlanta through Genesis: A New Beginning and CARE. She has co-edited “To Love the Wind and the Rain”: African Americans and Environmental History (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005), and is now at work on a book tentatively titled Currents of Life: The African Diaspora and the Environment.
Karla Goldman is the Sol Drachler Professor of Jewish Communal Leadership at the University of Michigan. She served as historian in residence at the Jewish Women's Archive from 2000 to 2008 and is author of Beyond the Synagogue Gallery: Finding a Place for Women in American Judaism (Harvard University Press, 2000).
Elizabeth A. Goodine was Visiting Assistant Professor of Early Christianity at Loyola University New Orleans. She has recently accepted a position as Assistant Professor in Biblical Studies at Concordia College in New York. She remains a member of St. Paul Lutheran Church in New Orleans, where her husband is pastor.
Cynthia Hogue has published five collections of poetry, most recently The Incognito Body (Red Hen Press, 2006), and has co-edited Innovative Women Poets: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and Interviews (University of Iowa Press, 2006). She is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University.
Zada Johnson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago researching African-American culture and performance traditions in New Orleans.
Richard S. Newman is Associate Professor of History at Rochester Institute of Technology and the author of Freedom's Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (NYU Press, 2008). He is also the co-editor of the series, Race in the Atlantic World (University of Georgia Press).
Heather Nicholson is an independent scholar living in Bloomington, Indiana.
Linda Doussan Rosamano is a mixed-media artist living in New Orleans.
Rebecca Ross is a photographer and public artist whose awards include an Artist Fellowship and Artist Project Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts. Her work has been widely exhibited in the U.S. and Europe and is represented in public and private collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts-Houston, Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture, Mayo Clinic Scottsdale, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at University of Texas-Austin.
Randy Sparks is professor and chair of the History Department at Tulane University. He is the author of The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Odyssey (Harvard University Press, 2004) and On Jordan’s Stormy Banks: Evangelicalism in Mississippi, 1773-1876 (University of Georgia Press, 1994).
.
