Let's Talk About It: Picturing America Scholars
Heid E. Erdrich is the author of three collections of poems. Her most recent book, National Monuments, won the 2009 Minnesota Book Award in poetry. A long-time college professor, Heid Erdrich now works with American Indian visual artists and writers as a curator, editor and mentor. She frequently presents papers, talks, and workshops on Native American literature and visual art. Her website is www.heiderdrich.com.
Quraysh Ali Lansana is author of five poetry books, including They Shall Run: Harriet Tubman Poems (Third World Press, 2004); a children’s book titled The Big World (Addison-Wesley, 1998); and editor of seven anthologies, including Dream of A Word: The Tia Chucha Press Poetry Anthology (Tia Chucha Press, 2006) and Poetry from the Masters: The Sixth Wave (Just Us Books, 2008), a young adult anthology. He is a former faculty member of the Drama Division of The Juilliard School and former Associate Editor-Poetry for Black Issues Book Review. Quraysh earned a Masters of Fine Arts degree at the Creative Writing Program at New York University, where he was a Departmental Fellow. He currently serves as a Contributing Editor for The Writer’s Chronicle of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and is a 2008 Pushcart Prize nominee.
Emily Hooper Lansana works as the Theater and Literary Arts Curriculum Supervisor for Chicago Public Schools. Before joining CPS, Emily served as Arts-in-Education consultant for eta Creative Arts Foundation and has taught at Columbia College, Chicago State University, the University of Chicago, and DePaul University. She has also worked as Director of Education at New York’s Lincoln Center Theater. Emily is an accomplished storyteller and has served on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Black Storytellers and as Past President of the Chicago Association of Black Storytellers. She received her BA in Theater Studies with a certificate in Teacher Preparation/Education from Yale University and an MA in Performance Studies from Northwestern University.
Suzanne Ozment is Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Aiken. She holds a Ph.D. in Victorian literature from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In addition to publishing articles on Victorian poets and novelists, Dr. Ozment co-edited an anthology of fiction, poetry, drama and essays on nineteenth-century British work titled The Voice of Toil (Ohio University Press, 2000). For ten years, she served as editor of the annual, interdisciplinary scholarly journal, Nineteenth Century Studies. Dr. Ozment has been involved in public humanities programming for more than twenty years, as a member of review panels for the public programs office of the National Endowment for the Humanities, as president of the Board of the South Carolina Humanities Council, and as a presenter at dozens of community reading and discussion programs. She is the author of the 1996 ALA-sponsored Let’s Talk About It series, “The Nation That Works.”