Charlyne Berens combines her backgrounds in journalism and politics to write about government and the people who make it work. One House: the Unicameral's Progressive Vision for Nebraska explores Nebraska's unique legislative structure and whether it has lived up to the promises its founders made for it in 1934. Since its publication, she has spoken to dozens of groups about Nebraska government and politics and government in general. Her recent book, Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward, examines the political career of one of Nebraska's U.S. Senators, someone who is often touted as a potential presidential candidate--or as one of his own party's biggest critics. Speculation continues about what the future holds for this energetic man who is always looking for a new challenge to overcome. Berens is available for speaking engagements or interviews.

Colin Burgess is a prolific and authoritative writer on the subject of human space flight and has enjoyed a deep and enduring interest in its history since the early days of NASA’s Mercury program. Residing in Australia, where he is also a noted military historian, he has established long-standing contacts and friendships with many of the early astronauts and cosmonauts. Writing mostly on biographical topics, his published titles include books on the lives of many space explorers, including teacher candidate Christa McAuliffe and the eight NASA astronauts who died prior to the Apollo lunar landings. His current involvement is in the dual role of author and series editor for the University of Nebraska Press’s spaceflight series, Outward Odyssey. He is available for any speaking engagements and interviews.

Robert V. Camuto is an award-winning journalist and travel writer whose most recent book entitled Palmento: A Sicilian Wine Odyssey is a chronicle of a year in Sicily's burgeoning wine scene. He is a contributor to Wine Spectator and the Washington Post and the author of Corkscrewed: Adventures in the New French Wine Country, available in a Bison Books edition.

Leslie A. Duram grew up in Kansas, Michigan and the Netherlands and she now leads a quiet life as Chair of the Department of Geography and Environmental Resources at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Organic farming has been an interest of hers for many years and her book Good Growing has, in fact, grown out of her fondness and admiration for the many farmers she's met over the years. While not the only expert on the topic, she tends to know quite a bit of practical information about organic agriculture: policy, ecology, social concerns, and influences. (MS 1991, Kansas State; PHD 1994, University of Colorado at Boulder)

Kathleen Flenniken's poems have appeared in Poetry, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Mid-American Review, Farm Pulp, Prairie Schooner, and Poetry Daily. She is the recipient of a 2005 Literary Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a 2003 Literary Fellowship from Artist Trust, along with grants from Artist Trust and Seattle Office of Arts and Culture. Her first collection of poems, Famous, is winner of the 2005 Prairie Schooner Prize in Poetry. Kathleen began writing in a night class in her 30s after a first career in engineering and while a stay-at-home mother. Kathleen is a co-editor and president of Floating Bridge Press, an all-volunteer non-profit press dedicated to publishing Washington State poets. She’s taught poetry in the schools through the Washington State Arts Commission, Writers in the Schools, and Powerful Partners, and led poetry workshops for students of all ages. Kathleen works to relieve students of the burden to be profound and show them how to make sparks by rubbing words together in surprising ways.

Pamela Carter Joern is the author of The Floor of the Sky, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection for the holiday season, 2006. She has written five professionally produced plays and several short stories that have been published in a variety of journals, including the Red Rock Review, South Dakota Review, the Laurel Review, and others. She is a Teaching Fellow at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. In addition to classes and/or workshops on writing craft—elements of the short story, exploring point-of-view in fiction, writing dialogue that works, using place to develop character, addressing the so what factor—Joern speaks passionately and inspirationally about aspects of the writing life: * Why Write, when you could be good at so many other things * How to read as a writer * How to mine your life for material, when you don't want to write a memoir * How to sustain discipline and ego, when it looks like you're not doing anything *

Aaron Raz Link is a historian and philosopher of science and a graduate of the Dell'Arte International School of Physical Theatre. He has worked with institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, Sojourn Theatre, Oregon's Regional Arts and Culture Council, Lunatique Fantastique, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Pride and Equity Foundations, and the Clown Conservatory of the San Francisco School of Circus Arts. Link teaches, performs, curates exhibits, and works as a writer and consultant on diversity issues. His book, What Becomes You, co-written with his mother, Hilda Raz, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2007. As a transsexual, an ex-street service worker, and a gay man of multiethnic background, Link brings personal as well as academic expertise to issues of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality. His work, which has been praised by artists from Mary Zimmerman to Kate Bornstein, explores the creation of identity--the physical features and personal artifacts people use to define, disrupt, and communicate individual, social, and mythic roles.

David Shields is the author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction which explore communication, miscommunication, media culture, and the vicariousness inherent in contemporary existence. Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season (which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and named one of the best books of the year by Esquire, Newsday, LA Reader, and Amazon.com) explores how white fans project their fears onto black men, especially black men’s bodies. Heroes is a novel on much the same subject. In Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine Shields uses sports as a way to get underneath the culture’s most cherished myths surrounding race, religion, money, and sex.

Dr. Stanley Teitelbaum's book, Sports Heroes, Fallen Idols examines the moral climate of modern sports. He investigates all of the major sports and dissects the careers of more than 200 athletes within the context of society's unwillingness to endorse the concept of responsibility, our fascination with celebrity and our general erosion of values. Many of our sports heroes, under pressure from their own inner demons, or as an outgrowth of their distorted view of themselves have become involved in self destructive and other destructive off the field activities. Among the topics he discusses are: the need for sports heroes, the psyche of the athlete, the scandalous rise of steroids, athletes and violence toward women, athletes and murder, and athletes and mental health problems. Dr. Teitelbaum has been a practicing clinical psychologist in New York and New Jersey for thirty-five years.

Robert Vivian is the author of Cold Snap As Yearning, a collection of meditative essays, and The Mover Of Bones, a novel. Cold Snap won the Society of Midland Authors Award in nonfiction for 2002--and also the Nebraska Center for the Book in the same category. His essays, stories, and poems have appeared in over seventy journals, including Harper's, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Massachusetts Review, and others. He also writes plays--and recently wrote an original version of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts which premiered in the winter of 2006 at Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo, New York. Several other of his shorter plays have been produced in New York City. He currently teaches literature and creative writing at Alma College in Michigan.

Kellie Wells has published two books, a collection of short fiction, entitled Compression Scars , that won the Flannery O’Connor Prize and a novel, Skin, published in the University of Nebraska’s Flyover Fiction Series. She is particularly interested in deviant fictions by women, that is fictions that, as Susan Sontag put it in her introduction to Halldor Laxness’s Under the Glacier, “deviate from [the] artificial norm" of realist fiction "and tell other kinds of stories, or appear not to tell much of a story at all.” These kinds of fictions “still, to this day, seem innovative or ultraliterary or bizarre," provoking labels that make it clear they "occupy the outlying precincts of the novel's main tradition." She teaches in the Writing Program at Washington University.

Matthew C. Whitaker is an award winning scholar, teacher, activist and emerging voice among public intellectuals in the United States. Professor Whitaker is Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, where he is also an Affiliate of the African and African American Studies Program and the School of Justice and Social Inquiry. Dr. Whitaker is a highly sought after writer, speaker, and consultant, who’s historical training and expertise in interpersonal and intercultural communication, civil and human rights, social movements, politics, and popular culture places him at the cutting edge of our constantly changing global society.

S.L. Wisenberg lives in Chicago, where she teaches creative writing at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago Graham School of General Studies. She writes and thinks about Jewish identity and about the echoes of the Holocaust in contemporary Jewish and American life. Holocaust Girls: History, Memory, and Other Obsessions was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2002. She has also lectured about creative nonfiction, exploring its varieties and definitions. Wisenberg is known for tackling serious subjects with dollops of humor, and she is an unrepentant 21st-century feminist.