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David Hume Kennerly has been photographing history for four decades. Contributing Editor for *Newsweek Magazine*, Kennerly continues to travel the globe to produce insightful images of important historic events. His career began in Roseburg, Oregon, where he published his first picture in the high school paper when he was just 15 years old. His first official photographer jobs--as a staff photographer for *the Oregon Journal* and then *the Portland Oregonian*--led him in to a position with United Press International (UPI). Kennerly won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography in 1972 for his remarkable photographs of the Vietnam war. After the war, Kennerly returned to the United States for *Time Magazine*, and in mid-1973 and threw himself into the domestic battles then raging in Washington. After Richard Nixon resigned, Kennerly was on the South Lawn of the White House as the soon-to-be ex-President departed. His historic photo of Nixons wave goodbye, taken when Kennerly was just 27 years old, is one of the dozens of his images that have helped define American photojournalism. In the year 2000, Kennerly traveled more than 250,000 miles to 38 states and seven countries for his fourth book, *Photo du Jour: A Picture-A-Day Journey through the First Year of the New Millennium*, published in October 2002 by the University of Texas Press.

Boyd Matson is best known as the long-time host of "National Geographic Explorer" and current host of "Wild Chronicles," as well as for his survival skill expertise and participation in a number of key expeditions worldwide

Steven Pinker is Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Pinker is one of the world's leading authorities on language and the mind, and the the author of seven books, including *The Language Instinct*, *How the Mind Works*, *Words and Rules*, *The Blank Slate*, and *The Stuff of Thought*.

Billy Collins distinguishes himself through his clear, accessible poetry–and by reinterpreting many traditional poetic forms. His poem "Sonnet" begins "All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now." Collins speaks out against the over-interpretation of poetry, as well as the writing of poetry strictly for an academic audience. As United States Poet Laureate (2001-03), he created a poetry collection called "Poetry 180," a project whose aim was to increase poetry's popularity among teens by exposing them to a meaningful contemporary poem each day of the school year. Although its accessibility is in part responsible for the popularity of Collins's work, humor, irony, and ambiguity also play an important role. The poet Stephen Dunn once wrote of Collins's appeal, "We seem to always know where we are in a Billy Collins poem, but not necessarily where he is going."

Robin D. G. Kelley is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is the author of the prize-winning books *Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression *(1990); *Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class* (1994); *Yo Mama's DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America* (1997), which was selected one of the top ten books of 1998 by *the Village Voice*; *Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor's Last Century*, written collaboratively with Dana Frank and Howard Zinn (2001); and *Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination* (2002). He also edited (with Earl Lewis), *To Make Our World Anew: A History of African Americans* (2000), a Choice Outstanding Academic Title and a History Book Club Selection. *To Make Our World Anew* was an outgrowth of an earlier collaboration with Lewis, the eleven volume Young Oxford History of African Americans (Oxford University Press, 1995-1998), of which he authored volume 10, titled *Into the Fire: African Americans Since 1970* (1996). Kelley also co-edited (with Sidney J. Lemelle) *Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora* (1994). Kelley's essays have appeared in several anthologies and journals, including *The Nation*, *Monthly Review*, *The Voice Literary Supplement*, *New York Times*, *New York Times Magazine*, *Rolling Stone*, *Color Lines*, *Code Magazine*, *Utne Reader*, *Lenox Avenue*, and *African Studies Review*.

Weigel is Senior Fellow and John M. Olin Chair in Religion and American Democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington D.C., and is consultant for Vatican affairs at NBC. He is the author of a biography of Pope John Paul II, entitled *Witness to Hope*, and has written or edited 14 other books. His most recent publication is *Courage to be Catholic*.

Dr. Rebecca M. Valette is Professor of Romance Languages at Boston College. An internationally known expert on language pedagogy and testing, she is the coauthor, with her husband, of several widely-used language programs, including *Discovering French* and *Spanish for Mastery*. Rebecca has recently concluded a three-year term as President of the American Association of Teachers of French, and is now serving as Co-Chair of that organization's (AATF) Student Standards Task Force which is writing the French version of the national student standards document.

Lander received his PhD in mathematics from Oxford in 1981, as a Rhodes Scholar. He joined Whitehead Institute in 1986 and founded the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research in 1990. Lander became the founding director of the newly created Broad Institute in 2003. The Broad is a collaboration of MIT, Harvard University and affiliated hospitals, and Whitehead Institute. It is aimed at creating comprehensive tools for genomic medicine and pioneering their application to propel the understanding and treatment of disease. Eric S. Lander is one of the driving forces behind today's revolution in genomics; the study of all of the genes in an organism and how they function together in health and disease. He is also a professor of biology at MIT and a professor of systems biology at Harvard Medical School. Lander's group recently launched a revolution in the study of human genetic variation, through its own research, and participation in larger projects devoted to the question. He has also led the efforts to develop many new analytical and laboratory techniques for studying complex genetic traits in human, animal and plant populations and for creating a molecular taxonomy of cancer. These techniques have been applied to a broad range of common diseases, including cancer, diabetes, inflammatory diseases and many other less common genetic illnesses.