Contributors

C o n t r ib u t o r s A u t h o r s Jean Cheney is an adjunct instructor in the English Department at Westminster College in Salt Lake City and Assistant Director of the Utah Humanities Council. She completed a Ph.D. in English at the University of California, Davis, writing her dissertation on the work of four American women nature writers: Mary Austin, Sally Carrighar, Rachel Carson, and Terry Tempest Williams. Cheryll Glotfelty is an associate professor of literature and the environment in the English Department at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is coeditor of The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology and cofounder and past president of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (A SLE). Her current work investigates ties between the literature of Nevada and larger social and cultural issues, and she is editing an anthology on “Literary N evada.” George H art is currently an N EH post-doctoral fellow in literatures of the environment at the University of Nevada, Reno, and is serving as guest editor of ISLE for 2001-2002. He has published articles on William Everson, Adrienne Rich, Larry Eigner, and Ronald Johnson, among others, and is w'riting a book on the sacramental nature poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Kenneth Rexroth, and William Everson. Jan Roush is an associate professor of English at U tah State University, where she teaches folklore and Native American literature. She has been research editor of Western American Literature since 1987 and also serves as associate editor for Western Folklore. G ary Scharnhorst is a professor of English at the University of New Mexico, editor of American Literary Realism, and editor in alternating years of American Literary Scholarship. He received the Don D. Walker Award of the W LA for the best journal article in western literary stud­ ies published in 1996 and the Thomas J. Lyon Award of the W LA for the best book in western literary studies published in 2000. H arry F. Thom pson is the director of research collections and publica­ tions at the Center for Western Studies of Augustana College, Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He also directs the annual Dakota Conference on History, Literature, Art, and Archaeology. His most recent article is “Meriwether Lewis and His Son: The Claim of Joseph DeSom et Lewis and the Problem of History,” which appeared in North Dakota History: Journal of the Northern Plains. C o n t r i b u t o r s 139 A r t i s t s Ben Berlin (1887-1939) immigrated to Los Angeles after World War I. Although he has been described as one of the most original of California’s modernist artists, his connections to European movements such as Cubism and Surrealism are clear. He was a member of the Group of Independent Artists, who sponsored the first exhibition of the Los Angeles Independents in 1923. M aya scribe (ah ts’ih). Like the scribes who created other extant Maya Codices, the ah ts’ih who produced the Madrid Codex remains anony­ mous. Contrary to other Maya texts, the Madrid Codex offers little record of the culture’s sophisticated astronomical and mathematical knowledge. Most of the Madrid Codex’s 112 pages bear information important to beekeepers, hunters, and traders. Only four codices sur­ vived the sixteenth century, during which Maya texts were burned. The Madrid Codex may have been created as recently as the early seventeenth century, attesting to the resiliency of the Maya bookmaking and record­ keeping tradition which quietly survived Spanish attempts to expurgate Native culture (from The Art of the Maya Scribe 175-82). Louise Everett Nim m o (1899-1959), daughter of the Los Angeles painter Mary Everett (1876-1948), studied in France before returning to California and adapting the long-established women’s flower-painting genre to the Southwest. Her studies of cacti and succulents suggest the vitality and fecundity of the desert landscape. For more information, see Patricia Trenton, ‘“ Islands on the Land,’: Women Traditionalists of Southern California,” in Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890-1945, ed. Patricia Trenton. Chiura Obata was bom in Japan in 1885...