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ISHMAEL REED is a novelist, essayist, television producer, publisher, magazine editor, playwright, and radio commentator who has received Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council of the Arts, and American Cultures Fellowships, as well as a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation. His work includes Conjure, Japanese by Spring, Airing Dirty Laundry, Shrovetide in Old New Orleans, and Mother Hubbard.

MARIAH HARDER REESCANO is currently at Booker Arts Magnet School in Little Rock where she is an elementary drama teacher, as well as responsible for organizing and coordinating two drama productions each year.   She graduated from Hendrix in 2002 with a Bachelor of Arts in theatre.   Currently living in North Little Rock, her last stage performance was with The Weekend Theatre's 2005 production of Ragtime.

JAMES W. RHODES is President and CEO of the Quality of Life Council, a non-profit agency whose mission is to improve the quality of life for those living and working in Faulkner County.   A theatre arts major at Hendrix College, he has been involved in over twenty community theatre productions in Pine Bluff.   In 1998, he was named a STARkansan by the state of Arkansas and in 1986, he was named Volunteer of the Year for the Southeast Arkansas Arts and Science Center.   The Faulkner County Leadership Institute recognized his community work by awarding him the Dan Nabholz Leadership Award in 2003.

WILL RHYS is a founder and former Artistic Director for the National Theatre of the Deaf. He directed or produced more than forty productions as the resident and artistic director of The Cleveland Play House. He performed on stages all over the world and participated in acting companies at such theaters as The Indiana Rep, Capital Rep, Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, The Pittsburgh Public Theatre, Pennsylvania Stage Company, and The Music Center, Los Angeles. He also appeared on Broadway in David Storey’s The Changing Room and Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers.

RICHARD ROLLEIGH, Professor of Physics at Hendrix, has done extensive research in quantum field theory, nonlinear acoustics, and electrodynamics. His innovations include a general education course in general physics, a multidisciplinary class on the 1970s energy crisis, and the use of computer experimentation in physics laboratories.

JEROME ROTHENBERG is a poet who also writes in the field of ethnopoetics. He is the author of over fifty books including, That Dada Strain, Symposium of the Whole, and New Selected Poems. He edited Shaking the Pumpkin: Traditional Poetry of the North American Indian and Poems for the Millennium, Volume I.

MARY RUEFLE has published three volumes of poetry, Memling’s Veil, Life Without Speaking, and The Adamant, and won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Poetry Society of American Gordon Barber Award, the Iowa Poetry Prize, and the Southern Humanities Review Hoepfner Award. She teaches at Vermont College.

MICHAEL RUSE is Lucyle P. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University and a fellow in both the Royal Society of Canada and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His published work includes Darwin and Design: Does Evolution Have a Purpose?,The Darwinian Paradigm and Evolutionary Naturalism, as well as numerous articles and reviews on Darwinian evolution and the philosophy of biology. He founded and edits Biology and Philosophy.

ANDREW SANDERS is Chair of English Studies at the University of Durham. He specializes in the Victorian Period and is the author of The Victorian Historical Novel 1840-1880, Charles Dickens: Resurrectionist, and The Companion to A Tale of Two Cities.

ED SANDERS, a poet, short story writer, musician and investigative reporter, has published Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century, Selected Poems 1961-1988, Tales of Beatnik Glory, and Chekhov. He has won NEA Poetry and Short Story Awards, the American Book Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

TOMMY SANDERS, ESPN host and writer, appeared in films Pass the Ammo and The Earnest Green Story. He participated in both Suddenly Last Summer and Bargains at the Arkansas Repertory Theater. He also worked for AETN as a producer and director.

TORU SASAKI teaches English literature at Kyoto University in Japan. His publications include editions of Thomas Hardy’s The Hand of Ethelberta, Wilkie Collins’s novellas, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s John Marchmont’s Legacy.

LOIS SCHWOERER is Kayser Professor Emeritus of History at George Washington University. Her publications include Lady Rachel Russell (1637-1723): “One of the Best of Women” and No Standing Armies! The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth Century England. She was elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and named Senior Fellow of the Folger Shakespeare Library and of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

NATHAN A. SCOTT, JR., is William R. Kenan Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies and Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is a pioneer in the field of religion and literature studies. The most recent among his numerous books are The Poetics of Belief and Visions of Presence in Modern American Poetry.

FRED SEBULSKE, actor and director, is the former head of the Theatre Department at Grand Rapids Community College and the founder and managing director of the Actors’ Theatre of Grand Rapids.

GAYLE SEYMOUR, Professor of Art History at the University of Central Arkansas, specializes in 19th-century art and teaches and writes about modern and contemporary art. The Carnegie Foundation named her a Professor of the Year.

MICHAEL SLATER is Professor of Victorian Literature in the University of London’s Birkbeck College School of English and Humanities. Formerly president of the Dickens Society of America and of the International Dickens Fellowship, he is the author of Dickens and Women and An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Dickens, and he has edited a number of Dickens’ texts.

ARTHUR J. SLAVIN is Justus Bier Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Professor of History at the University of Louisville. He has been an NEH Senior Research Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Folger Library Fellow, and Director of a Folger Seminar. His publications include Thomas Cromwell on Church and Commonwealth and The Tudor Age and Beyond.

ELIZABETH S. SMALL is the president of both the Phillips Development Corporation and the Chester Phillips Construction Company. She has worked with a number of community theatres, and she volunteers in the Little Rock community.

C. MURRAY SMART is Dean of the School of Architecture of the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. His publications include articles on William Burges and the stained glass of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.

JANE SMILEY is an award-winning author of rare depth and popular appeal.   A Thousand Acres , a retelling of the Lear story, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Award.   She has written 11 novels, three works of non-fiction, and articles for many academic and popular journals.

GLENN ALLEN SMITH has written plays which have been produced off-Broadway, as well as at many regional theaters and universities. His play, Souls in Flight, was a finalist in the Julie Harris Playwright Award Competition, and Chester and Grace was a finalist in the Drama League Competition.

LOUISE MOSLEY SMITH is the theater coordinator at the Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Dallas, Texas. She has acted, directed, and designed for productions of the Dallas Theater Center, where she was a member of the Resident Professional Company for 22 years.

VIRGINIA SMITH received her M.F.A. in directing from Rooselvelt University in Chicago. In 1993 and 1994, she was named “Director to Learn From” by the Chicago Performance newspaper. Currently a member of the theatre faculty at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Smith has directed and acted in numerous productions across the country. She also appeared in the film Home Alone.

ANN SPATZ is a potter who works in her studio at home, making mostly functional work in stoneware and porcelain. She also experiments with Raku and smoke-fired pieces.

AGAPI STASSINOPOULOS is author of the book Conversations with the Goddesses: Revealing the Divine Power Within You and conducts a one-woman presentation based on her book in colleges, universities, museums, and theaters. She did extensive theater and film work in both England and the United States, and appeared in Surviving Picasso.

TIMOTHY STEELE is author of Uncertainties and Rest, Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems, Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter,The Color Wheel, All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification.

LEON STOKESBURY wrote The Drifting Away and has published poetry in The Partisan Review, The New Yorker, and The Southern Review. He teaches at Georgia State University.

J. L. STYAN is author of a number of books on stagecraft and Shakespeare, a book on Chekhov, and an influential work on Restoration comedy.

ALISON SUMMERS has directed over 30 plays that have toured throughout the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. She has been the artistic director for the Sydney-based Tow Truck Theatre, a member of the Circle Rep lab, a Usual Suspect member at New York Theatre Workshop, a member of the Director’s Circle at the Women’s Project and a resident director at New Dramatists.

KAREN SWENSON was awarded the 1993 National Poetry Series award for The Lady in Bangkok. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, and Paris Review. She has taught at colleges and universities across the country, such as Barnard College, Fordham College, Scripps College, the University of Denver, the University of Idaho, and the City College of New York.

DAVID TEAGUE is Associate Professor of English in the University of Delaware Parallel Program and a winner of the Border Regional Library Association Award for Literary Excellence and Enrichment of the Cultural Heritage of the Southwest. He is author of The Southwest in American Literature: The Rise of a Desert Aesthetic and co-editor of The Nature of Cities.

GREG THOMPSON is the owner of an art consulting business in Little Rock where he has put his fine arts degree to work selling large scale collections of art to Fortune 500 companies, public entities, and private collectors.

JANE TOMPKINS gives lectures and workshops around the country on making the classroom a more humane environment. Her published work includes A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned, West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, and Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction. She teaches in the College of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago.

JANE JEONG TRENKA is a newly published author. Her new autobiographical work, The Language of Blood: A Memoir, gives readers a better understanding of the pain of displacement and the internal battle to reclaim self without severing ties to the ones who have loved you. Trenka, a Korean adoptee and a concert pianist as well as a writer and poet, has been selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers program and has also had her prose and poetry published in magazines and journals.

WERNER TRIESCHMANN is a playwright whose plays have been produced in Boston, Los Angeles, Denver, and several cities in Arkansas. He was the first playwright to win Arkansas’s top literary honor, the Porter Fund Prize. Founder of the Hendrix College playwriting contest, he is a columnist and an editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

ROBERT TRIPLETT, Director of Performance Seminars in Lisbon, Iowa, wrote Stagefright: Letting It Work for You.

PATRICK TUCKER is Staff Director for a television drama in Liverpool and Director of Studies for the Drama Studio, London. He has directed plays including a Korean translation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Alan Ayckbourn’s A Chorus of Approval in Israel, and his own Shakespeare anthology, Court Revels.

FREDERICK TURNER, Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, is author of The Return, The New World, Natural Classicism, and the epic Genesis and is a regular contributor to Harper’s.

GWENDOLYN TWILLIE, a professional storyteller, is the former chair of Theatre and Dance at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She has choreographed and performed in such productions as Orfeo, Member of the Wedding, and For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf.

STUART VAUGHAN was the artistic director of the New York Shakespeare Festival, the Seattle Repertory Theatre, New York’s Phoenix Theatre, Repertory Theatre New Orleans, and The New Globe Theatre. His directing credits include many New York productions.

HELEN VENDLER is Porter University Professor of English at Harvard. She is an eminent poetry critic whose work includes Coming of Age as a Poet: Milton, Keats, Eliot, Plath, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, The Odes of John Keats, and The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics. She edited The Harvard Book of Contemporary American Poetry. In 2004, she delievered the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.

GUSTAVO VERDESIO is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Verdesio received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1992. He is the author of Forgotten Conquests: Rereading New World History from the Margins.

FRANCIS WARNER, British poet and playwright, is Vice-Master of St. Peter’s College, Oxford University, and the University’s Pro-Senior Proctor. Eleven of his plays are in print including Requiem and the verse-dramas Moving Reflections and Living Creation.

PETE WEBER is a 1996 Hendrix graduate.   He is currently the Director of Ministries to Families with Youth at the Jacksonville First United Methodist Church.   Involved in theatre while at Hendrix, his attention has shifted some to the theological and trying to encourage teenagers to critically examine their belief structures.   Most recently, you can find Pete as the voice of Shigure Surgeon of the Damned in the Yu Yu Hakusho animated series on the Cartoon Network.

JOHN WESTON is a recipient of the Lucille Award from the Memphis’s Blues Foundation. His CDs include So Doggone Blue, I’m Doing the Best I Can, and Got to Deal with the Blues.

SARAH WHITE is a graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington.

LIBBI DIXON WHITEHURST is the Senior Associate in Human Resources at Acxiom.

RICHARD WILBUR was Poet Laureate of the United States and won two Pulitzer Prizes and the National Book Award for his poetry. In 2003 he received the Wallace Stevens Award. His published work includes Things of This World, New and Collected Poems, Beautiful Changes, Ceremony, Advice to a Prophet, Opposites, Walking to Sleep, The Catbird’s Song, and Mayflies: New Poems and Translations. Besides his work as a poet, editor, and translator, he has been a teacher at numerous prestigious universities, a Broadway lyricist, a critic, and an author of children’s literature.

SUSAN MILLAR WILLIAMS, Hendrix Class of 1977, wrote A Devil and a Good Woman, Too, which won the Julia Cherry Spruill Award from the Southern Association for Women Historians. Her work has appeared in such publications as The Nation, Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association, and Southern Review.

MILLER WILLIAMS is a poet whose published work includes Living on the Surface: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Poets’ Prize, and Halfway to Hoxie. Other works include the recent The Lives of Kelvin Fletcher: Stories Mostly Short. The founding Director of the University of Arkansas Press, he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature.

KYLE WILSON earned an M.F.A. in playwriting at Carnegie-Mellon University. An Arkansas native, he also studied with famed playwright Edward Albee at the University of Houston.

KRISHNA WINSTON is a professor of German Language and Literature at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. She has translated over twenty books and numerous shorter works. In 1994, she received the Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize. She was awarded the 2001 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize.

KATHRYN WOODS has acted in productions across the United States. Her credits include performances with Theatreworks, People’s Theatre, the Wheelock Family Theatre, and the Underground Railway Theatre. She has also performed in Moscow and at the Edinburgh Arts Festival.

JONATHAN YARDLEY, a literary and cultural critic for the Washington Post, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism and has had a long career as a journalist and critic on the staff of the New York Times and of newspapers in North Carolina and Florida. His books include States of Mind: A Personal Journey Through the Mid-Atlantic, Out of Step: Notes from a Purple Decade, and Our Kind of People: the Story of an American Family.

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