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Amy Whorf McGuiggan is a freelance writer and the author of *My Provincetown* and *Christmas in New England*. She lives in Hingham, MA. She is also author of *Take Me Out to the Ball Game*.

Neal Gabler is the author of six books, including four biographies: Catching the Wind, An Empire of Their Own, Winchell, and Walt Disney. He has been the recipient of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Shorenstein Fellowship, and a Woodrow Wilson Public Policy scholarship, and was the chief nonfiction judge of the National Book Awards. Image credit : Jason Longo

With a career spanning theater, television and film, Charles S. Dutton is one of the few actors to earn Tony, Emmy and Golden Globe nominations for the same role. Best-known for his performance in the title role of the comedy-drama *Roc*, Dutton also starred in director Robert Altman's comedy-drama *Cookie's Fortune*, for which he received an Independent Spirit Award nomination. Some of Dutton's additional films include *Random Hearts*, co-starring Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas, *D-Tox*, opposite Sylvester Stallone, and *Gothika*, with Halle Berry and Robert Downey Jr. Dutton earned a B.A. from Towson State University and became active in Baltimore Theater.

Elvis Mitchell has hosted The Treatment, with its inside look at the creators of popular culture, since KCRW first aired the program in April of 1996. Mitchell served as the film critic at the New York Times from January 2000 until May of 2005. In October 2002, he gave the prestigious Alain Locke lectures on African American culture at Harvard University, and subsequently, has been a visiting lecturer at Harvard in Visual and Environmental Studies, and in African American Studies. The former entertainment critic for NPRs Weekend Edition, Mitchell has also been film critic at the Fort Worth Star Telegram, where he received the 1999 AASFE award for criticism, the LA Weekly and the Detroit Free Press. He has been editor-at-large at Spin magazine and is special correspondent for Interview magazine. He also hosts the TCM interview program Under the Influence. A WGA Award nominee for his work on The AFI Lifetime Achievement Award: Sidney Poitier, he produced and co-created The Black List, Volume One, a documentary focusing on achievement in the African American community that HBO acquired and ran after the films debut at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival (where Mitchell has twice served on the Dramatic Competition Jury). Featuring interviews with Slash, Chris Rock, Colin Powell and Toni Morrison, The Black List, Volume 1 recently received the NAACP Image Award for Best Documentary. An accompanying book is available as an audio book and eBook. A sequel, The Black List, Volume 2, featuring interviews with Laurence Fishburne, Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, Melvin Van Peebles, Maya Rudolph and RZA, will air on HBO on February 26, 2009.

Ambassador Reda Mansour holds a masters degree from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and is a PH.D candidate in Haifa University's Middle Eastern History department, with his research focusing on Syria. Ambassador Reda Mansour was appointed in August 2006 to serve as the Consul General of Israel to the Southeastern United States. Prior to this post he served as the Ambassador of Israel to Ecuador, Deputy Ambassador in the Israeli Embassy to Portugal, and Deputy Consul General of Israel to the U.S Pacific Northwest based in San Francisco. In addition to his position as a diplomat, Ambassador Mansour is an accomplished author. He has published three books of poetry, as well as a number of short stories and poems published in literary articles. He has received the Ha'retz Annual Short Story Award, as well as the Haifa University Miller Award. Ambassador Mansour is a long time activist in the promotion of dialogue between Arabs and Jews in Israel. In this realm, he served on the board of several NGO's, taking part in many projects aimed at the promotion of co-existence through cultural and religious dialogue.

Research interests include: modern propaganda, history and tactics of advertising, American film, and media ownership. Books include Boxed In: The Culture of TV; Seeing Through Movies, ed.; Mad Scientists: The Secret History of Modern Propaganda; Spectacle: Operation Desert Storm and the Triumph of Illusion; and The Bush Dyslexicon. His newest book is Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order.

Laurie Shepard is an Associate Professor of Italian at Boston College. Her specialty is Medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, with a particular focus on lyric poetry, rhetoric, and historical linguistics. An English major at Wesleyan University, she pursued graduate studies in Medieval Romance Literature at Boston College and La Sapienza in Rome. She has edited troubadour lyrics in Bruckner, M., Shepard, L., and White, S.,* Songs of the Women Troubadours* (1995), and published a book on Medieval Latin political rhetoric, entitled, *Courting Power: Persuasion and Politics in the Early Thirteenth Century*. (1999). She is currently working on a book about the family as it is protrayed in Renaissance comedy. In February 2000, she began a public reading of the *Divine Comedy* at Boston College, which is now at the midpoint of the *Comedy*. Laurie Shepard lives with her husband, two sons, and a dog in Newton, Massachusetts. She enjoys the Italian language, cooking and eating with family and friends, discussing politics, reading, music, gardening, and hiking.