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Bob Dylan was born on May 24, 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota. Bob Dylan is a towering figure of late 20th century pop music, known for such songs as "All Along The Watchtower", "Like a Rolling Stone," "Tangled Up in Blue," "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and "Lay Lady Lay." Dylan has been recording and performing since 1962, mixing folk, country, blues and rock; he sometimes startles his fans but almost always pleases the critics. During the '80s he toured extensively, and in the '90s his songs found a new audience and more acclaim from the music industry. In 1991 he was given a Lifetime Achievement Grammy; his 1997 album *Time Out of Mind* won three Grammys; and in 2001 Dylan won an Oscar for "Things Have Changed," from the movie *Wonder Boys* (2000). In 2006 he released his first album in five years, *Modern Times*.

Marian Anderson (February 27, 1897 - April 8, 1993) was an American contralto and one of the most celebrated singers of the twentieth century. An African-American, Anderson became an important figure in the struggle for black artists to overcome racial prejudice in the United States during the mid twentieth century. In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused permission for Anderson to sing to an integrated audience in Constitution Hall. Their race-driven refusal placed Anderson into the spotlight of the international community on a level usually only found by high profile celebrities and politicians. With the aid of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Anderson performed a critically acclaimed open-air concert on Easter Sunday, 1939 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. to a crowd of more than 75,000 people and a radio audience in the millions. She continued to break barriers for black artists in the United States, notably becoming the first black person, American or otherwise, to perform at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, occurring on January 7, 1955. Her performance as Ulrica in Giuseppe Verdi's Un ballo in maschera at the Met was the only time she sang an opera role on stage. Anderson later became an important symbol of grace and beauty during the civil rights movement in the 1960s, notably singing at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. She also worked for several years as a delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Committee and as a "goodwill ambassadress" for the United States Department of State.

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.