Ted Leeson

Ted Leeson studied physics at Marquette University and English literature at the University of Virginia, where he received his PhD in 1984. Since then he has taught literature and creative writing courses at Oregon State University, where he holds the rank of Senior Instructor. In the mean time he has emerged as one of the most eloquent personal essayists now at work, one whose work is often compared to that of Montaigne, Thoreau, Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard. This is all the more remarkable since, unlike Montaigne and the rest, Leeson writes mainly about fly-fishing. He has published essays and journalism in Gray’s Sporting Journal, Field and Stream, Fly Rod and Reel, and other magazines, and is the author of two well-received books, Jerusalem Creek and The Habit of Rivers. In 2007 Fly Rod and Reel magazine named him “Angler of the Year.”

Timothy Steele

Timothy Steele is the author of five books of poetry, including Sapphics Against Anger and Other Poems, The Color Wheel, and most recently Toward the Winter Solstice. He is equally well-known for his two important books on the place of meter in English verse: Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter and All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing: An Explanation of Meter and Versification. He has also edited The Poems of J.V. Cunningham and contributed articles and reviews to such journals as The Southern Review, the Los Angeles Times, and Modern Fiction Studies, and to The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry and The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost. His work has been recognized by, among other honors, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Southwest Review’s Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award, and the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets.

Eric J. Sundquist

Eric J. Sundquist is UCLA Foundation Professor of Literature at the University of California at Los Angeles, having previously served on the faculties of Vanderbilt, Northwestern, and the University of California at Berkeley. Among his eight books on American Literature are several indispensable classics of the field: Home as Found: Authority and Genealogy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Faulkner: The House Divided, and To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. He is also the co-author of Volume 2 of the Cambridge History of American Literature, the editor of several essay-collections and anthologies, and the former editor of the Cambridge University Press book series in American Literature and Culture. Sundquist is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2006 he was one of four recipients of the Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award.