Christina Barr has been the Program Outreach
Coordinator for the Western Folklife Center in Elko, Nevada,
since 2003. Previously, she worked for the Nevada Arts Council
and for the Vermont Folklife Center. She has a M.A. in Folklore
from Memorial University of Newfoundland and a B.A. from
Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. Barr has documented traditional
art forms, communities, and cultural issues around North
America and abroad, and has shared her work through presentations
about folklife fieldwork, scholarship,
and community based cultural work. She is a member of the
Arts and Culture Advisory Board to the City of Elko, and
is a founding president of the Salt Lake City based Culture
Conservation Corps. In 2007 she received an Electronic Media
Award for Best Documentary by Las Vegas Women in Communications
for The 24 Hour Show radio series, which documents
the lives and experiences of Las Vegas' casino and entertainment
industry workers. An active participant in national and
regional folklife and cultural
organizations, she has also served as a panelist and consultant
for organizations and agencies around the country.
Teri Brewer has taught folklore, anthropology
and run international fieldschools and study tours from
Wales for many years, originally at the University of Glamorgan,
but more recently at Cardiff University. Today she works
increasingly as a public folklorist and interpretive trainer
dividing her time between Wales and the US. One of the organizers
of Sacred Music in Wales, she also coordinated fieldwork
in Wales for the 1998 Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada,
and has contributed to several other festival programs as
researcher or volunteer. She has run workshops on cultural
heritage interpretation in Canada, the US , Korea and the
UK. She is currently on the curatorial committee for the
Smithsonian Folklife Festival Welsh program in 2009 and
is also working on musical landscape mapping for the Arts
Council of Kern in California. She writes occasional program
notes, journalism, biographical essays, and poetry. She
experiments with short essays and stories, podcasts and
photography. She plans to take these experiments further!
Frank de Caro is Professor Emeritus of
English at Louisiana State University and has lived in New
Orleans since 2004. He received his M.A. from the Writing
Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and his PhD in folklore
from Indiana. His books include Folklife in Louisiana
Photography: Images of Tradition (Louisiana State University
Press, 1990), The Folktale Cat (August House, 1992),
Ballad Girls and Other Poems (Garden District Press,
2005), An Anthology of American Folktales and Legends
(M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2008), and (with Rosan Augusta Jordan)
Re-Situating Folklore: Folk Contexts and Twentieth Century
Literature and Art (University of Tennessee Press,
2004). Recently he edited The Folklore Muse: Poetry,
Fiction, and Other Reflections by Folklorists (Utah
State University Press, 2008).
Norma Elia Cantú, writer, literary
scholar and folklorist, teaches at the University of Texas
at San Antonio. Her writing and research interests include
Border Studies, literary theory, Chicana/o literature, women's
rites of passage, feasts and celebrations, and creative
non-fiction. She has published poetry, fiction and personal
narratives, and authored the award winning Canicula:
Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (U of NM, 1995)and
her most recent novel Champú, or Hair Matters.
Her work has appeared in Ventana Abierta, Puentes, Chicana/Latina
Studies: the journal of the Mujeres Activas en Letras y
Cambio Social, and in a number of other journals. Her
work has been translated to Spanish and Italian. She teaches
a summer seminar (The Spanish Roots of Chicana/o Folklore)
at the Universidad de Castilla La Mancha in Toledo, Spain.
She founded the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa.
In addition to being a much sought after participant in
literary readings, she is a frequent speaker on campuses
and cultural centers on border and Chicana/o traditonal
culture.
Susan Eleuterio is a volunteer workshop
leader for the Neighborhood
Writing Alliance, an organization dedicated to providing
opportunities for adults in Chicago's neighborhoods to write
weekly and publish quarterly in the Journal of Ordinary
Thought.
Eleuterio has written about Chicago's folklore, the Irish
in Chicago, glass ceiling stories, folk and dance costume,
naming customs and Irish American material culture. She
currently authors a blog, Diary of a Peace Activist, and
is working on a book on cultural identity. She has taught
English and Language Arts at the secondary level and College
Reading and Writing at the college level. She is the Co-Director
of Company of Folk, a midwestern non profit devoted to the
research, preservation and presentation of the folk and
local culture of Chicago and the southern shores of Lake
Michigan.
Nicholas Hartmann is currently pursuing
his MA in public folklore at Western Kentucky University,
from where he will hopefully graduate in the spring of 2009.
Although primarily interested in areas such as foodways
and Nordic European culture, he also has an interest in
travel writing. This interest, based mainly in poetry and
creative nonfiction, has led to the creation of a blog titled
Life
in Wondermaa, a blog dedicated to topophilia, memory
and the present moment.
Susan L. F. Isaacs is professor of English
and Communication at Union College in Barbourville, Kentucky.
She writes creative nonfiction and poetry. Her teaching
includes a broad range of writing courses from first year
composition through advanced levels, as well as poetry writing.
Her teaching incorporates auto-ethnography and literary
journalism. In her own non-fiction work, she is consistently
committed to evocative, engaging prose. Isaacs received
her doctorate in Folklore and Folklife at the University
of Pennsylvania. Her studies there included work with Dan
Rose, one of anthropology's pioneers merging ethnography,
creative writing, and self. She has participated in the
respected Hindman Settlement School Appalachian Writer's
Workshop (2008). She recently completed an article on "Popular
Print Media and Jewish Rites of Passage," which she
was thrilled to get off her desk. Prior to coming to Union
College, she was downsized from a museum position; soon
after she created a highly cathartic--and funny--job burial
ritual. Her work-in-progress includes an auto-ethnography
of the event.
Steve Kruger has had the great pleasure
of working for the North Carolina Arts Council, the Historic
Happy Valley Project, the Avery Arts Council, and to satisfy
his own unquenchable thirst for traditional musicians, storytellers,
and craftsman since 2006. Most recently he successfully
co-nominated banjo maker Clifford Glenn for the Brown Hudson
Award and is working on several other projects including
African American Shaped Note Singing, Appalachian string
band musicians, a documentary on banjomaker, ballads singer
and Kung Fu master Rick Ward, and getting accepted to grad
school.
Elaine Lawless has taught folklore, women's
literature, and women's studies at the University of Missouri
since 1983. She teaches a wide variety of courses on ethnography,
folklore and fiction, women's folklore and feminist theory,
oral narrative, traditional religion, and folklore topics
courses. She has published five books on women in the ministry,
women's sermons, and women's narrative art. She has also
published one book on the narratives of women living in
a battered women's shelter and has another forthcoming co-written
with her colleague in Performance Studies, Heather Carver,
about their collaboration on The Troubling Violence
Performance Project; the work is an auto-ethnographic
performance text. Lawless has published over fifty articles
in folklore and folklore-related journals. One of her latest
articles, and her first creative nonfiction piece, will
appear in Frank de Caro's forthcoming book, The Folklore
Muse: Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction by Folklorists
(Utah State Press). Lawless has served as director of the
Folklore Program at MU for many years and was Director for
the Center for Arts and Humanities for three years. She
was editor of the Journal of American Folklore
for five years (2000-2005) and has served on the AFS board.
She is currently the President of AFS.
Jon D. Lee is slowly meandering his way
toward a Ph.D. in Folklore at Memorial University of Newfoundland,
and expects to defend his dissertation any week now. His
first book of poetry, Ode to Brian: The Long Season,
was published in 2006. A second poetry manuscript is partially
completed, as are a full-length novel and numerous short
stories and essays. Jon currently lives in Boston, MA, and
teaches English classes for both Emmanuel College and Suffolk
University.
Keith Ludden, the Community and Traditional
Arts Associate at the Maine Arts Commission, joined the
Maine Arts Commission staff in the summer of 2001, and formerly
served as a News Producer/Reporter for Nebraska Public Radio.
Keith is a Nebraska native, and a graduate in Liberal Arts
from Nebraska Wesleyan University. Keith’s theatre
experience includes amateur roles in Lincoln, Nebraska,
two years of summer repertory theatre in Maryville, MO,
and a playwright in residence stint at the Great Platte
River Playwright’s Festival in Kearney, Nebraska.
He received his Master’s degree in Intercultural and
Folk Studies from Western Kentucky University, and graduate
training in theatre history from the University of Nebraska.
He has conducted folk arts and oral history fieldwork projects
in Kansas, Indiana, and Nebraska. Among his first projects
was a series of radio documentaries on Plains tradition-bearers.
While working for Nebraska Public Radio, Keith produced
a series of radio documentary modules on Latino culture,
as part of the Nuestros Tesoros project, sponsored
by the Nebraska State Historical Society and the Nebraska
Mexican-American Commission. Since joining the Maine Arts
Commission, Keith has overseen the Discovery Research program
and the Traditional Arts Apprenticeship program, as well
as a series of projects encompassing arts and humanities
at the community level. In 2007, Keith implemented the Capacity
Building program at the Maine Arts Commission.
Jens Lund holds a Ph.D. in folklore and
American Studies from Indiana University and an M.A. in
American Studies from Bowling Green State University. In
1999, he was a participating field researcher in Duke University
Center for Documentary Studies' "Indivisible"
project, interviewing timber workers in Montana, commercial
fishers in Alaska, and environmentalists in both states.
In 1997-1999, he documented occupational poets in the western
United States and Canada for City Lore Inc., and helped
organize the first People's Poetry Gathering in New York
City. As director of the Washington State Folklife Council,
Jens helped organize the first Cowboy Poetry Gathering for
the Western states (Elko, Nevada, 1985) and the first logger
poetry gatherings in the Northwest (1986-91), and developed
a statewide exhibition of Washington folk arts in celebration
of Washington's Centennial. Between 1975 and 2003, he worked
as a contract fieldworker in twenty-three states. Lund's
and Dillon Bustin's 1985 documentary film The Pearl
Fishers, about freshwater pearl-fishing in Indiana,
was awarded the "Best Ethnographic Film: The Americas"
from the American Anthropological Association. A part-time
faculty member at the University of Washington, Lund has
been a consultant and contract researcher for the Smithsonian,
the Library of Congress, and numerous arts agencies and
museums. Since 2004 he has been managing the Folk and Traditional
Arts in the Parks Program for the Washington State Parks
and Recreation Commission. In 2004 he received the American
Folklore Society's Benjamin A. Botkin Prize "for significant
achievement in public folklore." Jens Lund is the author
of Flatheads and Spooneys: Fishing for a Living in the
Ohio River Valley (Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1995),
Folk Arts of Washington State, and many articles
and reviews.
Joanne B. Mulcahy teaches at The Northwest
Writing Institute, Lewis and Clark College in Portland,
Oregon. Her essays have appeared in numerous journals and
anthologies including The Stories that Shape Us: Contemporary
Women Write about the West and These United States.
Her awards include fellowships from The Oregon Institute
of Literary Arts, the New Letters nonfiction award, and
grants from The British Council, the Alaska Humanities Forum,
and the Oregon Council for the Humanities. She has been
awarded residencies at Caldera, The Espy Foundation, Hedgebrook,
The Mesa Refuge, The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and
UCross. She is the author of two books about traditional
healers: Birth and Rebirth on an Alaskan Island
and Remedios: The Healing Life of Eva Castellanoz
(forthcoming from Trinity University Press, 2009).
Kirin Narayan has drawn on folklore—and
especially folk narratives—in crafting ethnography,
fiction, and a family memoir. Her dissertation, written
under the guidance of Alan Dundes, focused on Swamii, a
garrulous, self-described ‘topsy-turvy’ holy
man in Western India who conveyed teachings through stories.
This dissertation became Storytellers, Saints and Scoundrels:
Folk Narrative as Hindu Religious Teaching (1989) which
won the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing and
was co-winner of the Elsie Clews Parsons Prize for Folklore.
Subsequently, Narayan also undertook a collaboration with
Urmila Devi Sood, a village woman from Kangra, Northwest
India, bringing together Urmila Devi’s repertoire
of tales along with discussions of their meaning and ethnographic
contexts, in Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon:
Himalayan Foothill Folktales (1997). Narayan has also
published a novel, Love, Stars and All That (1994).
Her family memoir My Family and Other Saints (2007)
draws on the creative energy of family stories to recount
transnational spiritual seeking in the late 1960s and early
1970s. Currently Narayan is working to complete an ethnography
on Kangra women’s narrative songs.
Rebecca Penick received her BA and MA
in English at George Mason University after working for
many years as a medical and surgical nurse, including work
in a Clinical Research Unit, funded by the National Institute
of Health to study rare and incurable diseases. She began
writing stories as a teenager, and now enjoys writing both
poetry and prose.
Leslie Prosterman is currently a Senior
Fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the
New School University in New York, museum consultant and
curator of special projects including Framing the Exhibition:
Multiple Constructions (2000), and a sometime trapeze
student at Arachne Aerial Arts in Washington, D.C. and the
Circus Center in San Francisco. Formerly a tenured associate
professor of American Studies and Folklore, she has returned
to the public sector as a scholar and activist after twenty
years in academia. She uses her folklore training in fostering
community-based or grass-roots arts programs and in the
strengthening of civil society through the arts. She writes
about the politics of exhibition and display, law and art,
and comparative aesthetics.. Her most recent academic work
"'Subtle, Intangible, and Non-quantifiable': Aesthetics,
Law, and Speech in Public Space" is published in the
collection The Arts of Democracy (2007). It continues
her work in aesthetics and community begun with Ordinary
Life, Festival Days: Aesthetics in the Midwestern County
Fair (1995), for which Margaret Yocom helped create
the title. She has been writing poetry since 1999. This
coming fall, three of her ethnographic poems commenting
on poetry workshops and readings appear in the volume of
creative writing edited by Frank de Caro called The
Folklore Muse (2008).
Anne Pryor has worked as a folklorist
with the Wisconsin Arts Board since 1997. She specializes
in folklore in education by creating curricular resources
and professional development opportunities for K-12 teachers.
Her favorite past projects include the team efforts behind
the websites Wisconsin
Weather Stories and Wisconsin
Folks, and the book Kid’s Guide to Local
Culture (with Ruth Olson and Mark Wagler). She is a
co-founder of Wisconsin Teachers of Local Culture, a group
that has become a treasure. She has written about ethnography
in the classroom, narrative on stage, religious shrines,
and, most recently, Hmong blacksmithing. An ongoing research
interest outside her WAB work is Marian apparitions, especially
in regard to the intersection of narrative and sacred space.
She is venturing into fiction by writing a novel about pilgrims
on their way to an apparition, the inspiration for which
emerges from fieldwork experiences.
Rachelle H. Saltzman, Ph.D. has been the Folklife Coordinator for the Iowa Arts Council/Department of Cultural Affairs since 1995. Her most recent work is Iowa Folklife 2, an online multicultural folklife curriculum and a companion to Iowa Folklife: Our People, Communities, and Traditions, also online (both at www.iowaartscouncil.org). Her current book project is the forthcoming A Lark for the Sake of Their Country (Manchester University Press), which examines the role of upper and middle class strike breakers in defining Englishness during the 1926 General Strike. In collaboration with Iowa Public Radio, Saltzman produces "Iowa Roots," a radio series and website that explore cultures and traditions. With funding from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, she researched and developed a website on place-based food in Iowa (both websites at www.iowaartscouncil.org). Saltzman also works with a variety of communities and individuals to provide assistance with multicultural and diversity issues, project development, event planning and implementation, presentation of traditional arts and artists, grant writing, and curriculum content. She is the author of numerous public folklore publications as well as peer-reviewed articles in the Journal of American Folklore, Anthropological Quarterly, Journal of Folklore Research, New York Folklore, Southern Folklore, Southern Exposure, and edited collections.
Amy E. Skillman is Vice-President of the
Institute for Cultural Partnerships and its director of
arts and heritage programs. For eight years prior to joining
ICP, she served as the director of State Folklife Programs
at the Pennsylvania Heritage Affairs Commission. She was
the coordinator for cultural heritage programs at the Missouri
Cultural Heritage Center for two years before moving to
Pennsylvania in 1988. She received her Masters degree in
Folklore and Folklife from the University of California,
Los Angeles in 1979 and her Bachelor of Arts from St. Lawrence
University in a self-designed major Cultural Minorities
and the Immigrant Experience. As a folklorist working in
multiple communities, Skillman advises community-based organizations
and artists on the development of folk arts and folklife
programs, guides them to potential resources, and develops
programs to help build their capacity to sustain these initiatives.
In that context, Skillman has developed a variety of public
programs to honor and bring attention to the issues of importance
to these communities. Her current work includes a leadership
empowerment initiative using creative writing with refugee
and immigrant women, a statewide traveling exhibition on
the folk arts of Pennsylvania, and an arts residency with
alternative high schools students that draws upon ethnography
and arts to engage them in giving voice to their perspectives.
Her own creative writing reflects her experiences as a folklorist
and often occurs late at night in the glow of the computer,
where it will remain until it is ready to blossom.
Bonnie Sunstein is Professor of English
and Education at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where
she directs both Undergraduate Writing and English Education
and teaches non-fiction writing, ethnographic research,
folklore, and English. With her co-author, Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater,
she has written three editions of Fieldworking: Reading
and Writing Research, a textbook for doing field-based
research studies (Bedford St.Martins, 1997, 2002, 2007)
and another book about conducting teacher research, What
Works? A Practical Guide for Teacher Research. She
is author of Composing a Culture, (Boynton-Cook,
1994), and has co-edited three collections of articles about
portfolios. In 2000, she received an “Imagining America”
grant from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation for a website "FieldWorking
Online,” a virtual community for student and faculty
researchers. Her chapters, articles, and poems appear in
many professional journals and books. Among other writing
projects, she is currently working on a book about nonfiction
writing, and conducting two studies involving student collaborative
writing partners: one in high school geometry and one between
pre-service English teachers and ESL students.
Since 1996, Jacqueline Thursby has taught
folklore, mythology, American culture studies, and secondary
English methods in the English Department at Brigham Young
University, Provo, Utah. Among her courses have been “Women’s
Culture: Women’s Folklore,” “Myth, Legends,
and Folktales,” and “Folklore in Literature.”
She has written several articles, chapters and books on
subjects ranging from folklore, cultural studies, and ethnography
to literature, classroom literary discussion, and English
pedagogy. She has edited a special issue of Western
Folklore on contemporary hunting and fishing, and is
currently co-editor of Digest, a publication of
the Foodways section of the AFS. Her publications include
five books (Mother’s Table, Father’s Chair:
Cultural Narratives of Basque American Women: Utah
State UP, 1999; Begin Where You Are: Deseret Press,
(Utah) 2004; Funeral Festivals in America: Rituals for
the Living, UP Kentucky, 2006; Story: A Handbook:
Greenwood P, 2006; and Foodways: A Handbook, Greenwood
P, 2008). Her current book project is a discussion of folklore
in world literature and will be published by Utah State
UP. Active in department, college, and university committee
work, she is slated to be director of BYU’s the secondary
English teaching program beginning in fall, 2009.
Jeff Todd Titon grew up in New York and
Atlanta. After college at Amherst and doctoral work at the
University of Minnesota, he taught folklore and ethnomusicology
at Tufts. Since 1986 he has been a professor at Brown where
he directs the PhD program in ethnomusicology. His folklore-related
fiction, "Letter from Ole Bull to Sara Thorp,"
was published in the Summer 2004 issue of the Journal
of American Folklore, and his short story, "Percy,"
was published in The Folklore Muse, edited by Frank
de Caro.
Libby Tucker has taught folklore at Binghamton
University for the past 31 years. She has published three
books: Campus Legends: A Handbook, Haunted Halls: Ghostlore
of American College Campuses, and Children's Folklore:
A Handbook. In 2002, remembering Dick Dorson's work
on folklore and heart disease, she decided to write about
her own experience with cancer. She is glad to be part of
the group of writers who have made The Folklore Muse
such an exciting publication. Her email address is ltuckerAT
binghamton.edu.
Since 1977, Margaret Yocom has taught
folklore in the Department of English at George Mason University
in Fairfax, Virginia. Among her courses is "Living
Words: Folklore and Creative Writing." She has written
about Inuit folktales, ethnographic fieldwork, regional
study, family folklore, gender, material culture, and folklore
and creative writing. Her most recent work includes "'We'll
Take Care of Liza and the Kids': Spontaneous Memorials and
Personal Response at the Pentagon, 2001" in Spontaneous
Shrines and Other Public Memorializations of Death (2006,
ed. Jack Santino). Her current book project features the
traditional arts of the Richard family of Rangeley, Maine.
Active in public sector folklore, she is the curator and
archivist at the Rangeley Lakes Region Logging Museum. She
serves as American Folklore Society liason to the Association
of Writers and Writing Programs. Her poetry and creative
non-fiction comes from encounters in her fieldwork areas
of northwestern Maine and southeastern Pennsylvania, and
has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Daily Bulldog,
Friends Journal, and Voices. Email: myocomAT
gmu .edu.
Steve Zeitlin is a folklorist, filmmaker,
writer, and cultural activist. He is the founding director
of City
Lore, an organization dedicated to fostering New York
City – and America’s – living cultural
heritage. He is a commentator for public radio, and is the
author or co-author of a number of books on America’s
folk culture, including Because God Loves Stories: an
Anthology of Jewish Storytelling, City Play, The Grand Generation,
a book of poems, I Hear America Singing in the Rain,
and three books for young readers. He teaches the class,
“Writing New York Stories” at Cooper Union.
He has documented, recorded and fallen in love with carnival
pitches, children’s rhymes, family stories, subway
stories, ancient cosmologies, and oral poetry traditions
from around the world.
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