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Born in Asheville, North Carolina on March 9, 1922, McKissick did his undergraduate work at Morehouse and North Caroline colleges, and later graduated form the University of North Caroline Law School. During World War II McKissick served in the European Theater as a sergeant. After the war, he began legal practice in Durham, North Caroline, where he once represented his own daughter in her successful bid to gain admission to a previously all-white public school. Despite the victory, McKissick later decided that "integration" itself only magnified the perils faced by many black children, McKissick bitterly recalled that his children had been taunted and harassed: "Patches cut out of their hair, pages torn out of books, water thrown on them in the dead of winter, ink down the front of their dresses"-a demoralizing array of constant and relentless pressures designed to crack their composure and destroy their will to learn. The adversity no doubt deepened McKissick's nascent radicalism and militant zeal. As a lawyer, McKissick's most publicized efforts involved a segregated black local in the Tobacco Workers International, an AFL-CIO member. McKissick pressed to have black workers admitted to the skilled scale without loss of their seniority rating. McKissick also successfully defended "sit-in" protestors in the South. It was at this time the rupture widened between the older, established civil rights groups, dependent for their programming on a coalition of educated blacks and affluent whites liberals, and the younger, more rancorous black militants who turned their backs on most institutional whites support. The militants argued that the civil rights groups did not appreciate the urgency of many problems affecting black urban majorities, particularly in the job area where technology often reduced people to ciphers. When Floyd McKissick replaced James Farmer as head of CORE on January 3, 1966, the organization completed a 180-degree turn that saw it change from an interracial integrationist civil rights agency pledged to uphold nonviolence into a militant and uncompromising advocate of the ideology of black power. McKissick and Roy Innis, who at that time was the head of the Harlem chapter of CORE, were close allies, and when McKissick left CORE in 1968, Innis took over. After leaving CORE, McKissick launched a plan to build a new community, Soul City, on Warren County North Carolina farmland. McKissick saw Soul City as an integrated community with sufficient industry to support a population of 55,000. For his venture, he received a $14 million bond issue guarantee from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and a loan of $500,000 form the First Pennsylvania Bank. Soul City, however, ran into difficulties and despite the best offers of McKissick, the project never developed as he had anticipated. Finally, in June 1980, the Soul City Corporation and the federal government reached an agreement that would allow the government to assume control the following January. Under the agreement, the company retained 88 acres of the project, including the site of a mobile home park and a 60,000 square foot building that had served as the project's headquarters. The Department of Housing & Urban Development paid off $10 million in loans and agreed to pay an additional $175,000 of the project's debts. In exchange, McKissick agreed to drop a lawsuit brought to block HUD from shutting down the project.

Eugene Carson Blake (1906-85), an American Protestant leader, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and educated at Princeton University. He has taught at Forman Christian College, Lahore (then in India, now in Pakistan). Blake also served as a minister of Presbyterian churches in Albany, New York, from 1935 to 1940, and in Pasadena, California, from 1940 to 1951. He served as stated clerk of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America and later the United Presbyterian Church, a successor body. Blake also served as president of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America from 1954 to 1957. He was a delegate to the assemblies of the World Council of Churches in Evanston, Illinois, in 1954 and in New Delhi in 1961, and was secretary general of the council from 1966 until his retirement in 1972.

Patricia Hampls most recent book is *The Florists Daughter*, winner of numerous best and year end awards, including the *New York Times *100 Notable Books of the Year and the 2008 Minnesota Book Award for Memoir and Creative Nonfiction. *Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime*, published in 2006 and now in paperback, was also one of the *Times* Notable Books; a portion was chosen for The Best Spiritual Writing 2005. Patricia Hampl first won recognition for *A Romantic Education*, her memoir about her Czech heritage, awarded a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. This book and subsequent works have established her as an influential figure in the rise of autobiographical writing in the past 25 years.

Daniel J. Lasker is Norbert Blechner Professor of Jewish Values at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, where he teaches medieval Jewish philosophy in the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought. Prof. Lasker holds three degrees from Brandeis University and also studied at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. In addition to Ben-Gurion University, he has taught at Princeton University, Yale University, University of Toronto, Ohio State University, University of Texas, University of Washington, Yeshiva University, Jewish Theological Seminary, Kirkland College and Gratz College. Professor Lasker is the author of four books and over a hundred other publications in the fields of Jewish philosophy and theology, the Jewish-Christian debate, Karaism, the Jewish calendar, and Judaism and modern medicine. He has also lectured widely at universities and synagogues throughout North America, as well as at professional conferences on five continents. He is a member of a number of professional organizations, including the Society for Judaeo-Arabic Studies, of which he is a board member. In February 2002, Prof. Lasker was scholar-in-residence for the Jewish community of Houston, Texas. In August, 2003, he will be on the faculty of an NEH summer seminar "Representations of the 'Other': Jews in Medieval Christendom" to be held in Oxford, England, and in Fall, 2004, Prof. Lasker will be the Dean Ernest Schwarcz Eminent Visiting Professor of Jewish Philosophy at Queens College of the City University of New York.

Robin Becker was born in 1951 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She earned a BA and MA from Boston University and taught for 17 years at the MIT. She is the author of *Domain of Perfect Affection*, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006); *The Horse Fair* (2000); *All-American Girl* (1996), which won the 1996 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry; *Giacometti's Dog* (1990); Backtalk (1982); and *Personal Effects* (1977). Her poems and book reviews have appeared in publications such as *American Poetry Review*, *the Boston Globe*, *Gettysburg Review*, and *Ploughshares*. Her honors include the 1997 Virginia Faulkner Prize for Excellence in Writing from *Prairie Schooner* magazine and fellowships from the Mary Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to serving as poetry editor for *The Women's Review of Books*, Becker writes a column for the WRB on poetry and the poetry scene called "Field Notes." She is a professor of English and Women's Studies at Pennsylvania State University.

Born in Santa Monica, CA, September 2, 1933, son of the late Carey and Dorothy Hedrick McWilliams, he had formerly resided in Berkeley, CA, Oberlin, OH, Brooklyn, NY and Highland Park, NJ before moving to Flemington in 1979. A 1st Lieutenant in the 11th Airborne Division of the United States Army from 1955-57, Professor McWilliams earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California at Berkeley. He was currently a Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ where he had been teaching since 1970. His past academic appointments include Oberlin College 1961-67, Brooklyn College 1967-70, and visiting and summer appointments at Yale University, Harvard University, Haverford College, Lafayette College and Fordham University. Author of many books and articles in the field of Political Science, Professor McWilliams won the National Historical Society Prize in 1974 for his first book, 'The Idea of Fraternity in America'. In addition to his numerous honors and awards for his service in the field of Political Science, Professor McWilliams was active in many civic and community activities as well, including serving as a Councilman in the Borough of Flemington, a member of the Hunterdon County Democratic Committee, a trustee of the Hunterdon County Historical Society and a former Elder of the Flemington Presbyterian Church.