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Todd Davis, associate professor of English, teaches creative writing, environmental studies, and American literature. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Northern Illinois University. His poems have appeared in such journals and magazines as "The North American Review," "Indiana Review," "Iowa Review," "River Styx," "West Branch," "Arts & Letters," "Quarterly West," "The Christian Science Monitor," "Green Mountains Review," "Poetry East," "Many Mountains Moving," "Natural Bridge," "Epoch," "The Louisville Review," "The Nebraska Review," "Orion," and "Image." He is the author of two books of poems, "Ripe" (Bottom Dog Press, 2002) and "Some Heaven" (Michigan State University Press, 2007), and is co-editor with Erin Murphy of "Making Poems: 40 Poems with Commentary by the Poets" (State University of New York Press, forthcoming). His poems have been featured by Garrison Keillor on "The Writer's Almanac" and by Ted Kooser in "American Life in Poetry." The winner of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, Davis's poetry has also been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. In addition to his creative work, Davis is the author of "Kurt Vonnegut's Crusade, Or How a Postmodern Harlequin Preached a New Kind of Humanism" (State University of New York Press, 2006), and co-author of "Postmodern Humanism in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Reconciling the Void" (Palgrave, 2006) and "Formalist Criticism and Reader Response Theory" (Palgrave, 2002). He has co-edited "Mapping the Ethical Turn" (University of Virginia Press, 2001), "The Critical Response to John Irving" (Praeger, 2004), and "Reading the Beatles" (State University of New York Press, 2006). His criticism has appeared in such journals as "Critique," "College Literature," "Studies in Short Fiction," "Literature/Film Quarterly," "Western American Literature," "Style," and "Mosaic."

Mary G. DeJong received her Ph.D. in literature from the University of South Carolina. She has published many articles on American literature and culture, including three on the composition and performance of hymns. Her research interests and teaching now center on gender issues, especially in women's writing.Her current project is a study of the letters exchanged by two American women reformers in the 1840s, Anna Parsons and Marianne Dwight.

Thomas R. Klevan taught secondary English and was chair of the Altoona Area High School language department before changing careers to journalism where he became executive editor of The Altoona Mirror. Before coming to Penn State Altoona, he taught college English in three state prisons as an instructor in St. Francis College's continuing education program. His field of interest is creative nonfiction, and here at Penn State Altoona he teaches reading nonfiction, understanding literature, reading poetry, writing in the social sciences, business writing, advanced business writing, and basic writing skills. As a certified lay speaker in the United Methodist Church, he writes and preaches from six to ten sermons annually.

Thomas R. Liszka has an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Northern Illinois University. His research specialty is medieval English literature, especially a collection of saints' lives in Middle English verse known as the South English Legendary. Dr. Liszka is a textual editor who studies manuscripts of the SEL. He has published five articles on this material and one on the teaching of composition. He is editing a selection of saints' lives from one of the SEL manuscripts. He has also edited four volumes of the "Index to Reviews of Bibliographical Publications: An International Annual" and a collection of essays devoted to various topics related to the North Sea World during the Middle Ages.

Meg Powers Livingston was educated at Allegheny College (B.A., 1988), the University of Warwick, and the University of California Los Angeles (M.A., 1995; Ph.D., 1999). Her areas of specialization include sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature, especially drama, with additional interest in literature written by women. She also has a broad interest in drama that ranges from classical Greece to recent off-Broadway. Her current research efforts involve performance issues, censorship, and textual criticism. Her edition of John Fletcher's play "The Woman's Prize" is forthcoming from the Malone Society and Oxford University Press.

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Ian Marshall is the author of "Story Line: Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail" and numerous scholarly articles on writers as diverse as Henry Thoreau and Dr. Seuss. His specialties are American nature writing and ecocriticism. He received his B.A. and M.A. from West Chester University, PA (1977, 1983), and his Ph.D. from the University of Delaware (1988).

Erin Murphy is the author of three collections of poetry: "Dislocation and Other Theories" (Word Press, 2008); "Too Much of This World" (Mammoth Books, 2008), winner of the Anthony Piccione Poetry Prize; and "Science of Desire" (Word Press, 2004), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize for the best poetry book of 2004. With Todd Davis, she is co-editor of "Making Poems: 40 Poems with Commentary by the Poets" (forthcoming from the State University of New York Press). Her awards include a $5,000 2006 Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the 2006 Foley Poetry Award, the 2004 National Writers' Union Poetry Award judged by Donald Hall, and fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s "The Writer’s Almanac" and have appeared in dozens of journals and in several anthologies, including "180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day," edited by Billy Collins (Random House, 2005).

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Sandra Harbert Petrulionis received her M.A. and Ph.D. in English from Georgia State University; she specializes in nineteenth-century American Literature and the literature of slavery and abolition. She is the author of "To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau's Concord" (Cornell UP, 2006), and co-editor (with Laura Dassow Walls) of "More Day to Dawn: Thoreau's Walden for the 21st Century" (U of Massachusetts P, 2006). In addition to editing "Journal 8: 1854" in the Princeton edition of Thoreau's journals, she has also published articles on Thoreau, Herman Melville, Louisa May Alcott, and other nineteenth-century American writers and reformers. Her current research includes a digital edition of Mary Moody Emerson's manuscript Almanacks (co-edited with Noelle Baker), and "The Oxford Handbook to Transcendentalism" (co-edited with Joel Myerson and Laura Dassow Walls).

Laura Rotunno received her MA and Ph.D. in English from the University of Missouri at Columbia. Her research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century British literature, the novel, narrative theory, cultural studies, and genre and gender studies. "The Long History of 'In Short': Mr. Micawber, Letter-Writers, and Literary Men," an article that foregrounds her interest in nineteenth-century correspondence customs, appears in a recent issue of Victorian Literature and Culture. Currently, she is working on a book tentatively entitled "Readdressed: Correspondence Culture and Victorian Fiction."

Steven Sherrill teaches creative writing and integrative arts courses at Penn State Altoona. After receiving a Welding Diploma from Mitchell Community College (and the passing of a considerable amount of time) he went on to earn an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Fiction in 2002. His first novel, "The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break," has been published in nine languages. His second novel, "Visits From the Drowned Girl," published by Random House, US and Canongate, UK, was released in June of 2004, and was nominated by Random House for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. His third novel, "The Locktender's House," is forthcoming from Random House in April 2008. In his dream life, Steve is a painter.

Megan Simpson received her Ph.D. from the University of New Mexico. She has an M.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University and a B.A. in literature/creative writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Simpson is the author of "Poetic Epistemologies: Gender and Knowing in Women's Language-Oriented Writing." Her teaching and research interests include African American literature, multiethnic literatures of the U.S., poetry, women writers, and literary theory.

Dr. Ryan Weber received his Ph.D in Rhetoric and Composition from Purdue University. He currently teaches courses in freshmen writing and advanced business writing. Some of his scholarly interests include irony, service learning, computers and composition, classical rhetoric, ethos, and public rhetoric. His co-authored publications appear in the electronic journal "Karios" and in a forthcoming collection about service learning in the writing classroom.

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley earned her Ph.D. in Creative Writing and English from Western Michigan University, a Master of Science degree from Indiana University, Bloomington, and a BA in English from the University of Liberia. She is the author of three books of poetry: "The River is Rising" (Autumn House Press, Pittsburgh, 2007), "Becoming Ebony," (SIU Press, 2003) and "Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa" (New Issues Press, 1998). Her second book, "Becoming Ebony" is a 2002 Crab Orchard Award winner. Dr. Wesley has won several other awards, including the World Bank Fellowship, the Victor E. Ward Foundation for Literary Excellence Award, 2001, the College of West Africa Alumni Association Award for Literary Excellence, 2006, the Irving S. Gilmore Emerging Artist Grant from the Kalamazoo Foundation among others. She is a regular featured author and speaker both in the US and internationally, and her poetry has been critically acclaimed by many reviewers. Patricia has published works in many US and international journals and anthologies, including the "New Orleans Review," "Crab Orchard Review," "English Academy Review of South Africa," "The Prometeo Magazine," "Medellin," "Colombia," "Echoes Across the Valley: Poets of Africa," (Kenya), "Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania," "Approaching Literature: Writing, Reading, Thinking," among others. Patricia is currently Chair of MLA's Division on African Literatures. Her interests include creative writing, poetry, African, African American and Diaspora literatures and the Liberian civil war. She is presently working on a memoir of her Liberian civil war experiences.

Kenneth Womack was educated at Texas A&M University (BA, 1990; MA, 1992), the Moscow Institute of Communications, and Northern Illinois University (Ph.D., 1997). He has published widely on twentieth-century literary and popular culture. He serves as Editor of "Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory" and as Coeditor of Oxford University Press's celebrated "Year's Work in English Studies." His book-length publications include "Postwar Academic Fiction: Satire, Ethics, Community" (Palgrave, 2001), "Key Concepts in Literary Theory" (Columbia, 2001), "Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics," "Culture, and Literary Theory" (Virginia, 2001), "Reading the Beatles: Cultural Studies, Literary Criticism, and the Fab Four" (SUNY, 2006), "Postmodern Humanism in Contemporary Literature and Culture: Reconciling the Void" (Palgrave, 2006), "Long and Winding Roads: The Evolving Artistry of the Beatles" (Continuum, 2007), and "The Cambridge Companion to the Beatles" (Cambridge, 2009), among others.