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Fred Carrigg is currently "on loan" to the New Jersey Department of Education as the New Jersey Director of Reading First. He is working with the state to restructure reading programs in impoverished districts, thereby reducing the number of children reading below grade level by 30% within 3 years. He is also a special assistant to the commissioner for urban literacy, working with the poorest districts in the state on curriculum, instruction, policies, and programs to improve urban education. Since 1989, Fred has been the executive director for academic programs in Union City, New Jersey. He supervises the development and implementation of curriculum for all programs, Pre-K-12. He also oversees the seamless integration of technology into the daily curriculum for which Union City is nationally recognized. Fred served as Union City's bilingual/ESL supervisor for twelve years. Prior to that, he taught eighth grade and ESL, Spanish, and reading at Union Hill High School. Fred has a BA in foreign languages from Montclair State and an EdM in intercultural education from Rutgers University.

Award winning journalist and ocean activist David Helvarg is president of the Blue Frontier Campaign and the author of three books: *Blue Frontier Dispatches from Americas Ocean Wilderness*, *The War Against the Greens*, and *50 Ways to Save the Ocean*. He has produced more than 40 broadcast documentaries for PBS, The Discovery Channel and others, and written for newspapers and radio.

Connie Merigo’s current leatherback research project is on the health of wild caught and disentangled leatherbacks.

Scott received a B.S. in zoology with a major emphasis of marine biology at the University of California, Davis in 1992. He completed an intensive program in marine biology at the Bodega Bay Marine Laboratory in the spring of 1992. He also attended veterinary school at the University of Pennsylvania and completed several electives in aquatic animal medicine. After graduating in 1997 with a VMD from Penn, Scott received a Thouron fellowship to study for two years in the United Kingdom. In the United Kingdom, Scott completed an MSc in aquatic pathobiology from the Institute of Aquaculture at Stirling University. During this time Dr. Weber performed surgery on numerous koi with gonadal tumors and was featured on the Discovery Channel show *A Pet Story*.* Since 2001 Scott has been the head veterinarian and a research scientist at the New England aquarium with responsibility for the veterinary care of the collection, rehabilitation, and research animals, a collection greater than 20,000 animals. Dr. Weber was featured in the PBS documentary *Windows to the Sea for the New England Aquarium*. In June 2007, Dr. Weber took a position at the UC Davis school of Veterinary Medicine to start an clinical Aquatic Animal Health program with an emphasis on fish.*

Anthony Flint is Director of Public Affairs at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a think-tank based in Cambridge, Mass., where he is engaged in writing and research about urbanism and development patterns. He is author of *Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder* and *Transformed the American City*. He has been a newspaper journalist for twenty years, primarily at *The Boston Globe*, where he covered urban planning, development, architecture and transportation, and had a weekly column on urban design and public space. He has also published papers on planning and transit for the Rappaport Institute of Greater Boston at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a chapter on planning in the book *Governing Greater Boston*. A graduate of Middlebury College and Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, he served in 2005-2006 as education director at the Office for Commonwealth Development, the Massachusetts agency coordinating housing, transportation, environment and energy.

Altha J. Stewart, M.D., is the executive director of the National Leadership Council on African-American Behavioral Health. Dr. Stewart has served in several executive positions nationally, managing large public mental health programs and systems in Pennsylvania, New York, and Michigan. Dr. Stewart is also past president of the Association of Women Psychiatrists and the Black Psychiatrists of America.

Arlo Guthrie was born with a guitar in one hand and a harmonica in the other, in Coney Island, Brooklyn, New York in 1947. He grew up surrounded by dancers and musicians: Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Fred Hellerman and Lee Hays (The Weavers), Leadbelly, Cisco Houston, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, all of whom were significant influences on Arlo's musical career. Guthrie gave his first public performance at age 13 and quickly became involved in the music that was shaping the world during the 1960s.

Mary was an accountant and company director for 20 years before becoming a writer. She wrote her first book in 1981 at the age of 40, while recovering from a broken back which was the result of a riding accident. Mary S. Lovell has written acclaimed biographies of Beryl Markham, Amelia Earhart, Jane Digby, Sir Richard Burton, Betty "Cynthia" Pack, the Mitford Girls and Bess of Hardwick. She returned to accountancy but during the following 5 years she also published two further non-fiction books that were written in her spare time. After a subsequent meeting, Mary decided to write Markham's biography and *Straight on Till Morning*, researched and written in under a year, became an immediate international bestseller. Mary decided to retire from accountancy at this point to write full time. Most of the books she has written since then have made the non-fiction best-seller lists, and *The Mitford Girls* (titled The Sisters in the USA) a biography of the celebrated Mitford sisters, first published in September 2001 (paperback August 2002) has been another international best-seller. Her latest book, *Bess of Hardwick*, was published in the UK in 2005 and is now selling well in paperback. Four of her books are optioned for films. She is presently writing a family biography of the Churchills. Mary is particularly noted for her intensive research methods and all her non-fiction books are extensively annotated. She feels strongly that "biography is history" and deplores biographies in which contentious statements are made about a subject without any verifiable attribution. She also dislikes the increasing trend for biographies which set out to destroy reputations. She regards herself as "a storyteller, rather than a literary writer. Everybody enjoys a good fast-paced story and that is what I try to write, only my stories are fact, not fiction. For me there is always an added frisson of enjoyment when I know that what I'm reading about actually occurred, and is not simply a figment of someone's imagination."