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Patricia Gndara is a professor of education at the University of California-Davis. In addition to being associate director for the University of California Linguistic Minority Research Institute, she is also a co-director for Policy Analysis in California Education, a University of California/Stanford University policy research consortium. Gndara's research interests include equity and access in education and the education of linguistic and ethnic minority groups. Her most recent publication is *Over the Ivy Walls: The Educational Mobility of Low-income Chicanos*. Gndara is currently conducting a study of classroom teachers and their perceptions of the challenges they face in teaching English learners. She received her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from UCLA. Gndara has directed education research for the California State Assembly, and served as Commissioner for Postsecondary Education for California.

John Edgar Wideman is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His articles on Malcolm X, Spike Lee, Denzel Washington, Michael Jordan, Emmett Till, Thelonius Monk, and women's professional basketball have appeared in* The New Yorker*, *Vogue*, *Esquire*, *Emerge*, and *the New York Times Magazine*. He was awarded a Benjamin Franklin scholarship by the University of Pennsylvania, where he not only won a creative writing prize but also earned membership in Phi Beta Kappa. Matching his scholastic achievements with his athletic ones, he won All-Ivy League status as a forward on the basketball team and successfully competed on the track team. In 1963, he graduated with a B.A. in English, and won a Rhodes scholarship to study philosophy at Oxford University's New College. Returning to the United States in 1966, Wideman spent a year as a Kent Fellow at the University of lowa's Writers' Workshop, where he completed his first novel, *A Glance Away*, in 1967. His other novels include *Two Cities*,* Hurry Home*, *The Lynchers*, *Hiding Place*, *Sent for You Yesterday*, *Philadelphia Fire*, and *The Cattle Killing*. He is the author of a memoir, *Brothers and Keepers*. Wideman is the only writer to have been awarded the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction twice-- once in 1984 for his novel *Sent for You Yesterday* and again in 1990 for *Philadelphia Fire*. In 1990, he also received the American Book Award for Fiction. He was awarded the Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction in 1991 and the MacArthur Award in 1993.

Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, essayist, playwright, and teacher. Alexander has degrees from Yale University and Boston University and completed her PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania. Most recently, she composed and delivered "Praise Song for the Day" for the inauguration of President Barack Obama. The poem has recently been published as a small book from Graywolf Press. In addition, she has published five books of poems: *The Venus Hottentot* (1990), *Body of Life* (1996), *Antebellum Dream Book* (2001), *American Sublime* (2005), which was one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and was one of the American Library Associations Notable Books of the Year; and her first young adult collection (co-authored with Marilyn Nelson), *Miss Crandalls School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color* (2008 Connecticut Book Award). Her two collections of essays are *The Black Interior* (2004) and *Power and Possibility *(2007), and her play, *Diva Studies*, was produced at the Yale School of Drama.

Derek Walcott was born in 1930 in the town of Castries in Saint Lucia, one of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles. The experience of growing up on the isolated volcanic island, an ex-British colony, has had a strong influence on Walcott's life and work. Both his grandmothers were said to have been the descendants of slaves. His father, a Bohemian watercolourist, died when Derek and his twin brother, Roderick, were only a few years old. His mother ran the town's Methodist school. After studying at St. Mary's College in his native island and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, Walcott moved in 1953 to Trinidad, where he has worked as theatre and art critic. At the age of 18, he made his debut with *25 Poems*, but his breakthrough came with the collection of poems, *In a Green Night* (1962). In 1959, he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop which produced many of his early plays. Walcott has been an assiduous traveller to other countries but has always, not least in his efforts to create an indigenous drama, felt himself deeply-rooted in Caribbean society with its cultural fusion of African, Asiatic and European elements. For many years, he has divided his time between Trinidad, where he has his home as a writer, and Boston University, where he teaches literature and creative writing.

Neuffer began her distinguished career with *The Boston Globe* in 1988. Over the years, she was a federal courts reporter, covered the Persian Gulf War in 1991, reported on the fall of the Soviet Union and the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev, worked in *the Globe*'s Washington bureau where she covered the Clinton Administration's efforts to reform health care, served in Berlin as the paper's European correspondent, and mostly recently worked as the paper's United Nations correspondent and roving foreign correspondent. Most recently, she reported extensively from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq. In 1997, Neuffer won the SAIS-Novartis Prize for Excellence in International Journalism for *Buried Truth*, a 10-part series of articles on war crimes in Bosnia and Rwanda. Paul Wolfowitz, then dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and now deputy defense secretary in the Bush administration, said at the time that the series demonstrated "exceptional qualities of reportorial perseverance, courage and commitment and brought important, unresolved issues to the publics attention." Neuffer was a 1998 winner of the Courage in Journalism Award granted by the International Women's Media Foundation. Elizabeth was an Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of a book about war crimes and post-war justice, *The Keys to My Neighbors House *(2001). The book follows several people from the battlefield to the courtroom as they seek justice before the newly created ad hoc war crimes tribunals in Bosnia and Rwanda. She graduated with honors from Cornell University, with a degree in history. She also earned a masters degree in political philosophy from the London School of Economics. She speaks French, German and Russian.

Mark Daly's research focuses primarily on statistical genetics and is moving in several exciting directions. Work in the Daly lab is focused on understanding patterns of variation in the human genome and translating that knowledge into more effective statistical methods for finding the variation responsible for the disease. Daly was recently appointed to a new position as a Whitehead/Pfizer Fellow in computational biology. He comes to bioinformatics via a physics background. He received his BS in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989 and joined the Whitehead Institute shortly thereafter as a senior software engineer. In 1996, he was appointed director of the Human Genetics Informatics group at the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research. Daly is active in the traditional statistical genetics field of linkage analysis. His group has developed GENEHUNTER software, which is used by hundreds of labs worldwide, for performing statistical analysis designed to identify genomic regions containing disease risk factors in families. He also serves as an advisor and analyst to several international genetic research collaborations studying inflammatory bowel disease and psoriasis.

An immigrant from El Salvador, Edwin came to the U. S. in the 1980s. He joined East Boston Ecumenical Community Counsel in 1998 as an Immigration Counselor. Edwin is a well-known activist involved in many issues in the East Boston neighborhood and in the Greater Boston Latino community over the past 10 years.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1942, The Reverend Professor Peter J. Gomes is an American Baptist minister ordained to the Christian Ministry by The First Baptist Church of Plymouth, Massachusetts. Since 1970 he has served in The Memorial Church, Harvard University; and since 1974 as Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in The Memorial Church. Widely regarded as one of America's most distinguished preachers, Professor Gomes fulfills preaching and lecturing engagements throughout America and the British Isles. In 2007 he preached at the Inauguration of Deval L. Patrick as Governor of Massachusetts; in 2005 he presented a series of sermons in St. Edmundsbury Cathedral, England, in the presence of Their Royal Highnesses The Prince of Wales and The Duchess of Cornwall; and in 2000 he delivered The University Sermon before The University of Cambridge, England, and The Millennial Sermon in Canterbury Cathedral, England. His New York Times and national best-selling books, *The Good Book: Reading the Bible with Mind and Heart*, (1996); and *Sermons: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living* (1998), were published by William Morrow and Company, Inc.; *The Good Life: Truths That Last in Times of Need* was published in 2002 by HarperSanFrancisco. In 2005, *The Backward Glance and the Forward Look* was published by WordTech. He has also published ten volumes of sermons as well as numerous articles and papers.

Elizabeth Bebe Moore Campbell Gordon is the author of the New York Times bestseller *Brothers and Sisters* as well as *Your Blues Ain't Like Mine*, for which she won an NAACP Image Award for Literature. She is a commentator for National Public Radio and a contributing editor for Essence magazine, and her articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and numerous other publications. Campbell was born and raised in Philadelphia and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, where she earned a bachelor of science degree in elementary education. She taught elementary and middle school for five years.