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  • Jillian Weise was born in Houston, Texas, in 1981. Her first poetry collection, *The Amputee's Guide to Sex*, is a bold investigation of disability and sexuality. *The Los Angeles Times* wrote, "Readers who can handle the hair-raising experience of Jillian Weise's gutsy poetry debut will be rewarded with a fearless dissection of the taboo and the hidden." Weise is also a playwright; her work has been staged at the New York Fringe Festival and the Provincetown Playwrights Festival. Her awards include the Fred Chappell Fellowship at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and the Alan Dugan Writing Fellowship in Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center. Weise currently lives in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, on a Fulbright Fellowship, where she is visiting Charles Darwin's old haunts and working with his notebooks.
  • Alex Lemon is the author of the poetry collections *Hallelujah Blackout* (Milkweed Editions), *Mosquito* (Tin House Books 2006), *At Last Unfolding Congo* (horse less press) and the memoir *Happy* (Scribner 2010). A play will be published by cinematheque press in 2010. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including *Esquire*, *Best American Poetry 2008*, *AGNI*, *BOMB*, *Gulf Coast*, *jubilat*, *Kenyon Review*, *New England Review*, *Open City*, *Pleiades* and *Tin House*. He was awarded a 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2006 Minnesota Arts Board Grant. He co-edits *LUNA: A Journal of Poetry and Translation* with Ray Gonzalez and is a frequent contributor to *The Bloomsbury Review*.
  • Marjorie Heins founded Free Expression Policy Project. She is the author of *Not in Front of the Children: "Indecency," Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth*, which won the American Library Association's Eli M. Oboler Award in 2002 for the best published work in the field of intellectual freedom. From 2004 to 2007, she was a fellow in the Brennan Center for Justice Democracy Program. From 1991 to 1998, she directed the American Civil Liberties Union's Arts Censorship Project, where she was co-counsel in a number of Supreme Court cases, including Reno v. ACLU (the challenge to the 1996 Communications Decency Act). Marjorie is also the author of *Sex, Sin, and Blasphemy: A Guide to America's Censorship Wars* (1993, 1998), *"The Progress of Science and Useful Arts": Why Copyright Today Threatens Intellectual Freedom* (2003), and numerous book chapters and articles about free expression, copyright, and media reform. She graduated from Harvard Law School in 1978.
  • Chris Finan is president of American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, which was established by the American Booksellers Association in 1990 to defend the First Amendment rights of booksellers and their customers. Mr. Finan has been involved in the fight against censorship for over 25 years. He is the chair of Media Coalition, a trade association that defends the rights of businesses that produce and distribute First Amendment-protected material. He studied American history at Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1992. He is the author of *Alfred E. Smith: The Happy Warrior* (Hill and Wang), a biography of the New York governor who was the first Catholic to run for President. His latest book is *From the Palmer Raids to the PATRIOT Act: A History of the Fight for Free Speech in America* (Beacon Press), the winner of the American Library Associations Eli M. Oboler Award for the best work on intellectual freedom published in 2006 and 2007.
  • N. Bird Runningwater is the programmer for Native American Initiatives at the Sundance Institute and the Sundance Film Festival in Los Angeles, California. Before joining the Sundance Institute, Runningwater was based in New York City and served as executive director of the Fund of the Four Directions, the private philanthropy of a Rockefeller family member. Prior to joining the Fund, Runningwater served as program associate in the Ford Foundation's Media, Arts and Culture Program. He is a recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation's National Fellowship in Public Policy and International Affairs and an alumnus of Americans for Indian Opportunity's Ambassadors Program and the Kellogg Fellows Program.
  • Professor Jackson's, PhD, research focuses on moral philosophy and theology, especially the relationship between secular and Christian conceptions of truth, goodness, justice, freedom, and mercy. He is currently working on a book on health care ethics.
  • Wagner James Au has written about high-tech culture for more than ten years, and has been, at various times, a freelance reporter, a metaverse consultant, a game developer, a screenwriter, and most pertinent, a white-suited avatar named "Hamlet Au," the first embedded journalist in a virtual world, beginning in 2003 a role he still plays on his blog, New World Notes (nwn.blogs.com). His work in Second Life has been cited or profiled in The New York Times, the BBC, CNN International, NPR, Wired, The Boston Globe, and The Washington Post, among many other publications and television programs. He also covers the game industry and online worlds for GigaOM.com.