Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina is the Paul Murray Kendall Professor of Biography and Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author or editor of ten books. Several (but not all) of the books are in Black British Studies, particularly the recently revised and updated Black England: A Forgotten Georgian History. Her other books include biographies of Bloomsbury figure Dora Carrington, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and formerly enslaved Lucy Terry and Abijah Prince. A former dean at UMass, previously, she was the first African American woman to chair an Ivy League English department. She frequently appears on American and British radio and podcasts. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Antiquarian Society, Gerzina has won prestigious grants from Guggenheim, Oxford, the NEH, Fulbright, and others. This year she was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal, the highest honor that UMass awards to faculty.

Heather Clark earned her bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Harvard University and her doctorate in English from Oxford University. Her awards include the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism; the Slightly Foxed Prize for Best First Biography; a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship; a Leon Levy Biography Fellowship at the City University of New York; and a Visiting U.S. Fellowship at the Eccles Centre for American Studies, British Library. A former Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, she is the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962-1972. Red Comet was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the LA Times Book Prize in Biography, and was a New York Times Top Ten Book of 2021. Her work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Harvard Review, Time, Air Mail, Lit Hub, and The Times Literary Supplement. 

John Matteson is Distinguished Professor of English at John Jay College at the City University of New York. He received the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father. His second book, The Lives of Margaret Fuller, received the 2012 Ann M. Sperber Prize. His most recent book, A Worse Place Than Hell, tells how five significant lives were transformed by the Battle of Fredericksburg; it was cited by Amazon as one of the best history volumes of 2021. Brian Matthew Jordan of Civil War Monitor called it the year’s most outstanding Civil War book. Professor Matteson is also the editor of W. W. Norton’s The Annotated Little Women. He is now writing a book about the friendship between Voltaire and Frederick the Great. 

As Vice Provost for Academic Initiatives, Barbara Will oversees Dartmouth’s Centers and Institutes and currently heads Dartmouth’s Global Initiatives working group. Will’s scholarship focuses on twentieth-century literature, culture, and history, with a comparative emphasis on Anglo-American and French modernism. Will is a published author of several books. Her book Gertrude Stein: Modernism and the Problem of Genius won the 2001 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award from Choice magazine. She has received several national fellowships, including the American Council of Learned Societies Burkhardt Award and the National Endowment for the Humanities for research on Stein. She holds a B.A. in English from Yale, an M.A. in English from Bryn Mawr, and a Ph.D. in literature from Duke University. Will is co-founder of Montgomery Will LLC, a company that helps organizations navigate historical accountability.