Forum Network

Xeni Jardin is a tech culture journalist. She is a partner, contributor, and co-editor of the award winning blog Boing Boing. She is executive producer and host of the Webby-honored program Boing Boing Video (formerly Boing Boing TV). She also contributes to broadcast, online, and print venues including *Wired* and NPR.

Dean Jansen is the outreach director for the Participatory Culture Foundation (or PCF), which works to build a fairer, more open, and more democratic media space. PCF is also a founder of the Open Video Alliance, a coalition of organizations, companies, and individuals that are working to create open tools, workflows, and licensing systems for online video.

Dr. Danielle Ofri, author of *Singular Intimacies,* is an attending physician at Bellevue and the cofounder and editor-in-chief of *The Bellevue Literary Review*. She is currently a regular contributor to *The Los Angeles Times* and *The New England Journal of Medicine*.

Robert Darnton is a former professor of European History at Princeton University, and current Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and director of the Harvard University Library. The founder of the Gutenberg-e program, he is the author of many books, including most recently George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century, as well as the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award–winning The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

John F. Callahan is Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. His writings include a novel, *A Man You Could Love*. He is the editor of the Modern Library edition of *The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison* and is the literary executor of Ralph Ellison's estate.

Adam Bradley, a Harvard PhD, is an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is the author of the forthcoming *Ralph Ellison–in–Progress*, a critical study of Ellison’s unfinished second novel. Professor Bradley is also the co-editor of the forthcoming *Yale Anthology of Rap* (2010), and the author of *The Book of Rhyme: The Poetics of Hip Hop*.

Fred Barzyk is President of Creative Television Associates, Inc., a Boston-based television production company. He has produced and directed television programs for PBS, HBO, NBC, ABC, and CBS. He was awarded the Venice Film Award in 1985 for best Television Director Worldwide for his HBO drama, Countdown to Looking Glass. Other awards include two ACE awards, three national EMMY'S, and a Peabody Award for the drama Tender Places. Mr. Barzyk is also noted for his experimental work - the first double channel TV drama (two home TV's and two broadcast channels were needed for viewing), the first interactive TV drama for Qube, and the first Video Art work. He was the director of the WGBH New Television Workshop for more than 10 years. Many of the artists and video works associated with the Workshop are now part of the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and several museums in Europe and the Pacific. Two retrospectives of his video work have been presented by the DeCordova Museum of Art in 1997 and the Haggerty Museum of Art, 2001.

Rebecca Skloot is an award-winning writer, and a contributing editor at *Popular Science* magazine. She has worked as a correspondent for NPR's *RadioLab* and PBS's *Nova ScienceNOW*, and her writing appears in *The New York Times Magazine, Discover, Columbia Journalism Review, Prevention,* and many others. Her work has also been anthologized in several textbooks and essay collections, including *The Best Food Writing, Norton's The Best Creative Nonfiction, and Women's Best Friend: Women Writers on the Dogs in Their Lives*. Skloot served for eight years on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle, where she was a vice president and judge for their yearly book awards. In 2006, she launched "Critical Mass", the blog of the National Book Critics Circle. She now runs "Culture Dish", her blog on science, life, and writing, which is hosted by* Seed Magazine*.

George Fifield is a new media curator, a writer about art and technology, and teacher. He is the founding director of Boston Cyberarts Inc., a nonprofit arts organization, which produces the Boston Cyberarts Festival. This international biennial Festival of artists working in new technologies involves numerous exhibitions of visual arts; music, dance, and theatrical performances; film and video presentations and symposia at numerous arts and educational organizations throughout Massachusetts. He is also an independent curator of New Media with numerous projects here and abroad. His most recent exhibition was "Act React: Interactive Installation Art" at the Milwaukee Art Museum from October 2008 to January 2009. For 13 years until 2006, Fifield was Curator of New Media at the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln, MA. He continues to work with the DeCordova on a number of projects. He is adjunct faculty at Rhode Island of Design's Digital and Media graduate program. He was executive co-producer, along with Fred Barzyk, of *The Electronic Canvas*, a hour-long documentary on the history of the media arts that aired on PBS in 2000. Fifield writes on a variety of media, technology and art topics for numerous publications. In 2006, Fifield was honored with the First Annual Special Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Boston Arts Community by the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) Boston Chapter. In 2007, the Boston Cyberarts Festival was honored with the Commonwealth Award by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the category of Creative Economy. Photo courtesy of Chehalis Hegner.

A self-taught poet born in Depew, New York to working class parents, Lucille Clifton began writing at an early age. She cultivated her spare and powerful verse while attending Fredonia State Teachers College in the mid-1950s. Clifton often used her minimalist style to address traditional themes: family, relationships, and strength through adversity. Writer Helen Houston observes that Clifton's poetry brings to light the qualities that keep us alive as well as "the belief that we have the ability to make things better." Clifton's talent was recognized early in her career. Her first volume of poems, *Good Times*, was heralded by the *New York Times* as one of the best books of 1969. Clifton served as the state of Maryland's Poet Laureate from 1974 until 1985, and received numerous awards, including the National Book Award in 1999. Clifton died on February 13, 2010, at the age of 73.

Adam Haslett is the author of *You Are Not A Stranger Here*, a short story collection, which was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, and won the PEN/Winship Award. His work has appeared in *The New Yorker*, *The Nation*, *Zoetrope*, and *Best American Short Stories* as well as National Public Radio's *Selected Shorts*. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Yale Law school and has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the Michener/Copernicus Society of America. He lives in New York City, where he works part-time as a legal consultant.

Stephen Benatar was born in London in 1937. He has taught English at the University of Bordeaux, lived in Southern California, been a schoolteacher, an umbrella salesman, a hotel porter, and an employee of the Forestry Commission. He began writing as a child, but did not publish his first book, *The Man on the Bridge*, until he was 44. Subsequent works include *Wish Her Safe at Home*, *When I Was Otherwise*, *Recovery, Letters for a Spy*, and *Two on a Tiger and Stars*, a book for young readers. *Wish Her Safe at Home* was a runnerup for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Benatar has four grown children and currently lives in West Hampstead, London, with his partner, John.