Kwame Dawes has authored 36 books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and essays, including, most recently, Nebraska (UNP, 2019), Bivouac (Akashic Books, 2019), and City of Bones: A Testament (Northwestern, 2017). Speak from Here to There (Peepal Tree Press), co-written with Australian poet John Kinsella, appeared in 2016. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. He is also a faculty member in the Pacific MFA Program. He is Director of the African Poetry Book Fund and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. Dawes is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. His book Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius remains the most authoritative study of the lyrics of Bob Marley.
Ruth Hellier is a Professor and scholar-creative artist at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), USA. Dr. Hellier is particularly interested in issues of memory, embodiment, experimentation, political economy and creativity. She focuses on experimental performance-making, the politics~poetics of national and touristic performance in Mexico and Europe, embodied vocality and singing, environmental and community arts, and, engages with performance studies, ethnomusicology and music studies, critical dance and theatre studies, history and feminist studies. Her principal publications include: Embodying Mexico: Tourism, Nationalism, and Performance (Oxford University Press, 2011); Women Singers in Global Contexts: Music, Biography, Identity (University of Illinois Press, 2013); and Performing Palimpsest Bodies: Postmemory Theatre Experiments in Mexico (Intellect and University of Chicago Press, 2019). She was editor of the multidisciplinary journal Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos for five years. Trained as musician at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (73-80), and followed by a BA Music, Drama, Dance (Birmingham University, 83, including opera training with Janet Edmunds at Birmingham Conservatoire); PGCE Drama in Education (UCE 91), and PhD (UCE, 2001), Dr. Hellier had successful careers as an actor/performer (83–91) and Head of Music (92–95) before commencing her professorial career in 2000. In relation to voice and singing, Dr. Hellier has a wide range of professional experience including professional singer; choir director (adults and children), and musical theatre vocal coach (Birmingham Theatre School).
Eric Lott teaches American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Lott has published widely and lectured at dozens of universities and other institutions on the politics of U.S. cultural and performance history, and his work has appeared in a range of periodicals including The Village Voice, The Nation, The Chronicle of Higher Education, PMLA, Representations, Transition, Social Text, American Literary History, and American Quarterly. He is the author of Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford UP, 1993; 20th Anniversary ed., 2013), from which Bob Dylan took the title for his 2001 album “Love and Theft”; The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual (Basic Books, 2006); and Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism (Harvard UP, 2017), a study of race, culture, and fantasy across the long twentieth century. Lott has appeared on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, CBS Sunday Morning, Turner Classic Movies, C-Span Book TV, Al Jazeera TV, and various radio shows and podcasts.
Jeff Todd Titon is Professor of Music, Emeritus, at Brown University where for twenty-seven years he directed the PhD program in ethnomusicology and led an old-time string band. He is the author or editor of numerous recordings, films, and articles, as well as eight books including Early Downhome Blues (1995, 2nd ed.), Powerhouse for God (2018, 2nd ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology (2015), and most recently Toward a Sound Ecology: New and Selected Essays (2020). In 2015, his field recordings were selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry.