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Margaret Morganroth Gullette is a cultural critic and prize-winning writer of nonfiction, an internationally known age critic, essayist, and activist. Her latest book, *Aged by Culture*, was chosen as a Noteworthy Book of the Year by the *Christian Science Monitor*. *Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife* won the Emily Toth Award as the best feminist book on American popular culture. Margaret's focus on the midlife (the Midlife Fictions series) has expanded to become Age Studies. Age studies from childhood on can be as powerful as studies of gender or race in empowering people to challenge American age culture. Margaret has written for* N.Y. Times*, *Ms., Nation*, *Boston Globe*, *American Scholar*, *American Prospect*, womensenews.org; Feminist Studies, *Representations*, *Journal of the History of Sexuality*; she has appeared on *Brian Lehrer*, *The Connection*, WBAI, *To the Best of Our Knowledge*, *CultureShocks*. A recipient of NEH, ACLS, and Bunting Fellowships, she is a member of PEN-America. Her work is cited by scholars and journalists and used in courses. In Nicaragua, her work has helped hundreds of adults to become literate and go on to secondary education.

Catherine Ayoub is a developmental and licensed counseling psychologist with research and practice interests in the impact of childhood trauma across the life span, and the development and implementation of prevention and intervention systems to combat risk and promote resilience with emphasis on young children. Ayoub also holds an appointment at Harvard Medical School and is senior staff at the Law and Psychiatry Service at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she serves as a forensic mental health expert for children and adults involved with the legal system.

Jesse is the Playmaking Program Director of Project Joy and the Assistant Director of the Children's Trauma Recovery Foundation. He received an undergraduate degree in psychology at Umass Boston and a master's degree in education with a focus on at-risk child development and intervention theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has been working with young children and teachers with Project Joy in the Metro-Boston are for the past eight years. Jesse's responsibilities with the organization include recruiting teachers, coordinating logistics, and training for the Project Joy retreats. He also conducts research regarding the impact of stress on children and the healthy benefits of play. Having grown up in and around Boston, Jesse is an avid local sports fan. His mother claims he was reading the "Football Notes" section of the Sunday Globe at the early age of 6. Jesse is reigning champion of his fantasy football league and is thankful for the prowess of Bill Belichick and the strength of the 07' Red Sox starting rotation. He is a lover of music and you might see him playing loudly while riding through the city or dancing at on of his favorite night spots.

Gerald Lesser's interests are in child development, the effects of visual media on children, and the design of education programs ranging from television broadcasting to cable to videocassettes. He is also interested in the effects of different cultural backgrounds on the development of patterns of mental abilities of children. He was one of the principal architects in the creation of the PBS television series *Sesame Street*. He is currently consulting on the Palestinian-Israeli coproduction of *Sesame Street*. He received his PhD from Yale University.

Michael Vazquez, former editor of *Transition* magazine, is a writer and consultant based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is a fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

Professor Edwards is the author of *The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism* (Harvard University Press, 2003), which won the Gilbert Chinard Prize from the Society for French Historical Studies. With Robert G. O'Meally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, he co-edited the collection *Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies* (Columbia University Press, 2004). He has published essays and articles in a wide variety of journals and magazines on topics including African American literature, Francophone literature, theories of the African diaspora, black radical intellectuals, cultural politics in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, surrealism, 20th-century poetics, and jazz. The co-editor of the journal *Social Text*, Professor Edwards also serves on the editorial boards of Transition and Callaloo. He is a Permanent Fellow at the university's Center for Cultural Analysis and sits on the supervisory board of The English Institute at Harvard University. Between 2005 and 2006, Professor Edwards was awarded a fellowship to pursue research at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at The New York Public Library.

Dan Brock is the Frances Glessner Lee Professor of Medical Ethics in the Department of Social Medicine, the Director of the Division of Medical Ethics at the Harvard Medical School, and the Director of the Harvard University Program in Ethics and Health. Prior to his arrival at Harvard, Professor Brock was Senior Scientist and a member of the Department of Clinical Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health. Until July 2002, he was Charles C. Tillinghast, Jr. University Professor, Professor of Philosophy and Biomedical Ethics, and Director of the Center for Biomedical Ethics at Brown University where he had a joint appointment in the Philosophy Department (of which he was Chair in 1980-86) and in the Medical School. He was President of the American Association of Bioethics in 1995-96, and was a founding Board Member of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. He is the author of over 150 articles in bioethics and in moral and political philosophy, which have appeared in books and refereed scholarly journals. He is the author of "Deciding For Others: The Ethics of Surrogate Decision Making", 1989, (with Allen E. Buchanan), "Life and Death: Philosophical Essays in Biomedical Ethics", 1993, and "From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice" (with Allen Buchanan, Norman Daniels and Daniel Wikler) 2000. He is currently an editorial board member of 12 professional journals in ethics, bioethics and health policy, and has lectured widely at national and international conferences, professional societies, universities, and health care institutions.