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Contributors
Alyssa Alexander is completing her master’s degree at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York. She looks forward to sharing her passions for literature and writing with future students. She specializes in reading and literacy, and she has an interest in nineteenth-century American literature, and issues of race identity and history. Some of her favorite authors include Mark Twain, W. E. B. Du Bois, J. K. Rowling, and Beth Moore.
John Bird is Professor of English at Winthrop University. He is the author of Mark Twain and Metaphor (2007).
Rebecca Guess Cantor is an Adjunct Professor in the English and Honors Departments at Azusa Pacific University. She is in the final stages of writing her first book, Call Me Huck: Mark Twain and American Literary Naming; and she recently published an article titled “Hierarchical Naming in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Twain’s ‘Diaries of Adam and Eve’” in Names: A Journal of Onomastics.
James E. Caron is Professor of English at the University of Hawai῾i at Mānoa, where he specializes in teaching American literature, especially from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, and maintains an interest in theories about comic art and comic laughter. He serves on the editorial board of Studies in American Humor and has published essays on the tall tale, antebellum comic writers, laughter and evolution, Mark Twain, George Washington Harris, Frank Norris, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hunter S. Thompson, and Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes. Along with M. Thomas Inge, he edited Sut Lovingood’s Nat’ral Born Yarnspinner: Essays on George Washington Harris (1996). His book Mark Twain, Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter (2008) uses contemporary contexts to provide a thick description for the early professional writing career of Sam Clemens. Along with Lawrence Howe and Benjamin Click, he coedited a collection of essays on Charlie Chaplin, titled [End Page 151] Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon in Critical Contexts, which will be published by Scarecrow Press in the fall of 2013.
Joseph Csicsila is Professor of English at Eastern Michigan University. He is author of Canons by Consensus (2004), coeditor of Centenary Reflections on Mark Twain’s No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (2009), and coauthor of Heretical Fictions: Religion in the Literature of Mark Twain (2010). He has also served as coeditor of the Pearson Anthology of American Literature since 2007.
James E. Dobson is a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University and currently teaches at Dartmouth College. His dissertation, “The Awkward Age of Autobiography,” examines affective attachments to the past in American fin-de-siècle autobiography.
Alex Brink Effgen is a doctoral student at Boston University’s Editorial Institute, annotating and contextualizing the essays that compose the two editions of Mark Twain’s How to Tell a Story, and Other Essays (1897, 1900).
Jennifer Gaye has been teaching for more than ten years in public and independent secondary schools, and she is currently an Upper School English teacher at Community School of Naples in Naples, Florida. She earned a B.A. in English Literature and an M.Ed. in English Education from Georgia State University in Atlanta. She uses her classes to guide students into a more nuanced understanding of the human experience so that they can begin to create self-defined, fulfilling lives.
Benjamin Griffin earned a B.A. in English at UC Berkeley, an M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Cambridge University, and an M.L.S. from Catholic University of America. Since 2005 he has been an editor at the Mark Twain Project, a research unit of the Bancroft Library in Berkeley, where his editorial credits include two volumes (the third is in the works) of the Autobiography of Mark Twain (2010, 2013), and the forthcoming Mark Twain’s Family Sketch, discussed in this issue.
Patrick J. Keane, former Francis Fallon Chair, is Professor Emeritus of Le Moyne College. His books include William Butler Yeats: Contemporary Studies on Literature (1973), A Wild Civility: Interactions in the Poetry and Thought of Robert Graves (1980), Yeats’s Interactions with Tradition (1987), Terrible Beauty: Yeats, Joyce, Ireland and the Myth of the Devouring Female (1988), Coleridge’s [End Page 152] Submerged Politics (1994), Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason: The Transatlantic “Light of All Our Day” (2003), and Emily Dickinson’s Approving God: Divine Design and the Problem of Suffering (2008). He is currently exploring the final decade of Mark Twain, and publishing personal and literary reminiscences, along with critical essays, in the online literary magazine Numero Cinq, of which he is also a contributing editor.
Ann M. Ryan is Professor of English at Le Moyne College, where she also serves as Chair of the department. In addition to editing the Mark Twain Annual, she is a contributor to and coeditor of Cosmopolitan Twain and A Due Voci: The Photography of Rita Hammond. She writes on issues Twain and race, Twain in the popular culture, and Twain and gender.
Tracy Wuster is an independent scholar who teaches writing at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the Vice President of the American Humor Studies Association and the editor of the blog “Humor in America.” His book—The American Humorist: The Making and Meanings of Mark Twain—is under contract to be released by the University of Missouri Press in the fall of 2014.
Martin Zehr, Ph.D., J.D., is a psychologist and attorney in private practice in Kansas City, Missouri. He is a member of the Mark Twain Circle of America and the Board of Directors of the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum in Hannibal, Missouri. [End Page 153]
