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Dr. William J. Carpenter, FAIA, is the founder and president of Lightroom Studio. He is a nationally recognized architect and educator. He has won numerous design awards and accolades for his teaching. He is a founder of Lightroom, a nationally award winning design firm in Decatur, Georgia specializing in architecture and new media projects for commercial and residential clients. Carpenter received the national ACSA/AIAS Educator of the Year Award in 2000 and the National Young Architects Citation in 1997. He was elected as a Fellow in the AIA in 2000. He is also author of an important and well-regarded book; Learning by Building: Design and Construction in Architectural Education, Wiley, 1997. His work has been published in Southern Living, Atlanta Homes and Lifestyles, Print Magazine Atlanta Magazine and ERA April, 2006. He studied and worked for renowned architect and AIA Gold Medalist Samuel Mockbee FAIA and New York architect Norman Jaffe FAIA known for his elegant buildings that respond to the landscape. After weeks of hard studying in the summer of 2009, Bill became LEED certified. When he doesn't have his nose to the drafting table, Bill can be found hanging out with his two lovely daughters or trotting the globe in search of adventure.

William Stanley Merwin has been garnering praise for his poetry, translations, and prose since W.H. Auden awarded his first book, A Mask for Janus (1952), the Yale Younger Poets Prize. For over five decades, Merwin has been a major presence in American poetry, developing a reputation for an impersonal style that abandons punctuation. The son of a Presbyterian minister, Merwin began writing hymns as a child. He has said "I started writing hymns for my father almost as soon as I could write at all. But the first real writers that held me were not poets… and it was not until I had received a scholarship and gone away to the university that I began to read poetry steadily and try incessantly, and with abiding desperation, to write it." Merwin has published over 20 books of poetry including The Shadow of Sirius (2008), which won the Pulitzer Prize, Migration: New & Selected Poems (2005), which won the National Book Award, The River Sound (1999), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and The Carrier of Ladders (1970), which also won the Pulitzer Prize. Merwin currently lives and works on an old pineapple plantation in Hawaii.

Born in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas in 1949, C.D. Wright has developed a style of poetry all her own—both experimental and Southern, implicit in its lyrical utterance and yet grounded in an inherent sense of the unutterable. As Joel Brouwer recently wrote in the New York Times Book Review, "Wright belongs to a school of exactly one." Her poem "Lake Echo, Dear" showcases the explorative and image-based character of her work. She has published numerous books of poetry, including Steal Away: New and Selected Poems (2002); One Big Self: Prisoners of Louisiana (2003), with photographer Deborah Luster; and, most recently, Rising Hovering Falling (2008). "Poetry is a necessity of life," Wright has said. "It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so." Her various awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Robert Creeley Award. She and her husband, the poet Forrest Gander, edit Lost Roads Publishers. Wright teaches at Brown University near Providence, Rhode Island.

Mark Harris is the author of *Grave Matters: A Journey through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial*. He is a former environmental columnist with *The Los Angeles Times* syndicate, and his articles and essays have appeared in *The Chicago Tribune*, *Reader's Digest*, *E: The Environmental Magazine*, *Hope*, and *Vegetarian Times*. Mark speaks frequently on green burial, green cemeteries, and the modern funeral industry. Mark won a journalism award for his profile of a foster care community that was published in *Chicago Parent*.

A native of Nicaragua, Daisy Zamora is one of the country's most distinguished poets. Her poems, essays and translations have been translated into more than 14 languages and have appeared in more than 50 anthologies. Poet Sonia Sanchez has said, "Daisy Zamora's poems resound with life. Commitment. Struggle. Love. She has been a fighter for liberation and women's rights all of her life." In addition to being an award-winning poet, Zamora is also a painter and political activist. During Nicaragua's Sandinista Revolution, she was a combatant for the Sandinista National Liberation Front and was the program director for the clandestine Radio Sandino during the final Sandinista offensive in 1979. After living in exile in Honduras, Panama, and Costa Rica she returned to Nicaragua and served as the Vice-Minister of Culture for the new government. In 2006, Zamora was honored as Woman Writer of the Year by the National Association of Artists in her native Nicaragua. Zamora currently lives in Managua, Nicaragua, and San Francisco.

Jeremy Wolfe is the head of the Visual Attention Lab at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He is Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School. In addition, he is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT where he teaches Introduction to Psychology, and an Adjunct Associate Professor in Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University. He received his AB in 1977 from Princeton and his Ph.D. in Psychology from MIT in 1981. He is married to Julie Sandell (Dept. of Anatomy,Boston University Medical School) and has three sons (Ben-23 (RA for Frank Tong at Vanderbilt), Philip-20 (2nd year at Culinary Institute of America), and Simon -13 click here to see a younger Simon as a Welsh shepherd). Click here to read his curriculum vitae.

David Kaiser is an associate professor in MIT's Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and a lecturer in MIT's Department of Physics. He completed an A.B. in physics (1993) at Dartmouth College, and PhDs in physics (1997) and the history of science (2000) at Harvard University. Kaiser's historical research focuses on the development of physics in the United States during the Cold War, looking at how the discipline has evolved at the intersection of politics, culture, and the changing shape of higher education. His physics research focuses on early-universe cosmology, working at the interface of particle physics and gravitation.

Hillary Chute is Professor of English at Northeastern University. Formerly an Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists (University of Chicago Press). She is also the author of Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (Columbia University Press) and Associate Editor of Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus (Pantheon). She recently co-edited both the Critical Inquiry special issue on “Comics & Media” and Daniel Aaron’s Scrap Book (Pressed Wafer). She has written for publications including Artforum, Bookforum, The Believer, and Poetry.

Peter Bittel is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of The Futures HealthCore, a school partner in special education efficiency and accountability serving more than 30,000 students and individuals. Dr. Bittel has more than 35 years of clinical and executive leadership experience in the areas of special education, rehabilitation and developmental disabilities. He has taught on the primary, secondary, undergraduate, and graduate school levels..

Linda Howell is a retired nurse who worked in the Mental Health field. She and her husband spent 3 weeks in South Africa in February 2010.

Twenty-two-year old poet Ekiwah Adler-Belendez is from Amatlan, Mexico, a small village an hour from Mexico City. The son of a North American father and a Mexican mother, Ekiwah is a poetic prodigy whose powerful verses have mesmerized Mexico's literary scene. Born September 14, 1987, Ekiwah is the author of three volumes of poetry: *Soy* (I Am); *Palabras Inagotables*, (Never-ending Words); *Weaver* (2003), his first book in English; and *The Coyotes Trace*, which features an introduction by Mary Oliver. Ekiwah lives in Massachusetts, has dual citizenship, and is bilingual.

John Howell is the retired Dir. of Research for the Springfield Public schools and adjunct professor at WNEC. While on sabbatical he spent 6 months at the University of Cape Town, SA in both 1989 and 1996.