Megan Burnett is an associate professor of Theatre and Bellarmine University’s Theatre Program Director, earned her MFA in Theatre from the University of Louisville. She studied at Shakespeare’s Globe, trained with Shakespeare & Co., and with John Basil of American Globe Theatre. She is a Fulbright Memorial Teacher Fund Program member. Burnett acted and served as an acting coach in India for the film, The Hero of Auschwitz: The Life Story of St. Maximilian Kolbe. Burnett toured the country in Shame the Devil! An Audience with Fanny Kemble by Anne Ludlum from 2004–2016. She continued her interest in women abolitionists and suffragists by writing and touring her own one-woman play, Conversations with a Suffragist: Mattie Griffith Browne—Kentucky Abolitionist and Suffragist. Her article, “A Case for Using the First Folio as Directing and Acting Text,” was published in Selected Papers of the Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference: Vol. 8, Article 2, 2015.
Joel D. Chaston is distinguished professor of English at Missouri State University where he teaches courses in children’s, young adult, and British literature. He has served as president of the Children’s Literature Association, an international scholarly organization, and as associate editor of ChLA Quarterly. He has published widely on literature for the young and is the author of Lois Lowry (1997) and co-editor of Bridges for the Young: The Fiction of Katherine Paterson (2003).
Robert C. Evans was I. B. Young Professor of English at Auburn University at Montgomery, where he taught since 1982 and was awarded emeritus status upon his retirement in 2021. In 1984, he received his PhD from Princeton University, where he held Weaver and Whiting fellowships as well as a University fellowship. In later years his research was supported by fellowships from the Newberry Library (twice), the American Council of Learned Societies, the Folger Shakespeare Library (twice), the Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.
In 1982, he was awarded Princeton’s G. E. Bentley Prize and in 1989 was selected Professor of the Year for Alabama by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. At AUM, he has received the Faculty Excellence Award and has been named Distinguished Research Professor, Distinguished Teaching Professor, and University Alumni Professor. Most recently he was named Professor of the Year by the South Atlantic Association of Departments of English. In 2020, he won the Eugene Current-Garcia Distinguished Scholar Award presented annually by the Alabama College English Teachers Association.
He is a contributing editor to the John Donne Variorum Edition, senior editor of the Ben Jonson Journal, and is the author or editor of over sixty books (on such topics as Ben Jonson, Martha Moulsworth, Kate Chopin, John Donne, Frank O’Connor, Brian Friel, Ambrose Bierce, Amy Tan, early modern women writers, pluralist literary theory, literary criticism, twentieth-century American writers, American novelists, Shakespeare, and seventeenth-century English literature). He is also the author of roughly four hundred published or forthcoming essays or notes (in print and online) on a variety of topics, especially dealing with Renaissance literature, critical theory, women writers, short fiction, and literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Charity Gibson earned her PhD from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She is an associate professor of English teaching undergraduate courses in literature and composition in Southwest Missouri. Her area of specialization is contemporary American literature. In much of her research, she explores issues related to motherhood, the mother-daughter relationship, and parenting in contemporary culture. She is raising her children with her husband and enjoys playing the piano, watching films, and traveling.
Rebecca Harris is a graduate student and teaching assistant in the master’s track for Creative Writing at Missouri State University. She is an assistant fiction and nonfiction editor for Moon City Review, as well as a board member for the Children’s and Young Adult Book Review Board of Missouri. Harris has presented at the Fifth Annual MSU Undergraduate Literature Conference and will be presenting at the 2021 Communal Studies Association virtual conference in October for her research on the discordant portrayals of the Harmony Society. She was a finalist in the Moon City Press 2019 MSU Student Nonfiction Competition, for work exploring disabilities in familial relationships.
Susanna Hoeness-Krupsaw is associate professor of English at the University of Southern Indiana. She has over 30 years of teaching experience at the undergraduate and graduate level, including courses on major authors such as Amy Tan. Her research interests include modern American and Canadian fiction, women’s literature, and graphic narratives. She has recently published on John Lewis’s March, Maxine Hong-Kingston’s Warrior Woman, and on the graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred. She co-edited Performativity, Cultural Construction, and the Graphic Narrative, a collection of essays that draws on performance studies. She earned her PhD in English at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.
Qiping Liu earned her PhD in English and American literature. She is a lecturer at the School of English Literature, Language, and Culture and a researcher of Beijing Institute of Intercultural Communication (BIIC), Beijing International Studies University (Beijing 100024, China). Her research interests include Asian American Literature, New Materialism, and Cross-Cultural Studies.
Shu-Jiang Lu holds an MA and a PhD in English from the Western University of Canada. She currently teaches English writing and literature at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Lu has published on Ezra Pound, Composition Studies, Asian American women’s writing, and World Literature. Her articles have appeared in The English Record, Composition Forum, Paideum, the CAALS volume series, and Critical Insights. Lu’s other publications include the translation of the novel The Color Purple by Alice Walker and a book of memoir When Huai Flowers Bloom. Lu’s teaching and research interests center on Asian American Film and Literature, Women’s Literature, and World Literature.
Tina Powell is an assistant professor of English at Concord University, where she teaches courses on American Literature. Her scholarship focuses on the intersection of US immigration policies, US international policy, and postwar American literature. She is currently working on a monograph that uses cartography to discuss transnational and third space migratory pathways. Her work in the field of Critical Refugee Studies and Asian American literature has appeared in several edited collections and journals, and has been presented at numerous conferences on American literature, Asian American literature, and Ethnic Studies. In Winter 2022, her edited book titled Transnational American Spaces will be released.
Suneeta Thomas is an assistant professor of English at Missouri State University, where she teaches in the MA ENG TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) program and the interdisciplinary Linguistics Program. Her current research in World Englishes/Sociolinguistics focuses on patterns in English language use and its users in Middle Eastern, South-Asian, and East-Asian contexts, and how these patterns are influenced by multiple social, cultural, economic, racial, and political factors. Her secondary area of research lies in second language writing and writing pedagogy. Her work has appeared in journals such as World Englishes, Journal of Contemporary Philology, Educational Technology & Society, and TESOL’s SLW News.
Jeff W. Westover is professor of English at Boise State University, where he teaches American literature. He is the author of The Colonial Moment: Discoveries and Settlements in Modern American Poetry, which was selected as an outstanding academic title by Choice magazine in 2005. The Colonial Moment addresses depictions of imperialism by Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes, and Hart Crane. More recently, he has published essays about Elizabeth Bishop, W.S. Merwin, H.D., and Thylias Moss. In 2016, his essay, “The Mother’s Mark on the Daughter’s Speech,” appeared in Critical Insights: The Woman Warrior edited by Linda Trinh Moser and Kathryn West. In 2012, he contributed an essay about sonnets by African American poets to A Companion to Poetic Genre edited by Erik Martiny. He has also published essays about Lorine Niedecker, James Merrill, Henry James, and Herman Melville.