Information about Contributors

M. Heather Carver is Assistant Professor of theatre and performance studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia. As codirector of the Writing for Performance Program, Carver has transformed the playwriting program to include new forms of performative expression, including performance autoethnography, autobiographical performance, and adaptation of nontraditional materials for the stage. She recently coedited the volume Voices Made Flesh: Performing Women's Autobiography (2003). Her current research explores her work as artistic director of The Troubling Violence Performance Project, a troupe that performs personal narratives about intimate partner violence.

Kate Berneking Kogut is currently completing her Ph.D. in theatre at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where she teaches acting and playwriting. She has won awards for a number of her plays, including Survival Dance, Another Trail, Assumption #1: Truckers, Assumption #2: Parents, A New Perspective, and Home, and is publishing two short plays in a collection (forthcoming, Vanderbilt University Press). Currently, she is researching the role of narrative performance in the new play development process.

Jacqueline L. McGrath is Assistant Professor of English at the College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, Illinois, where she teaches writing and literature. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Folklore Studies and English at the University of Missouri, Columbia, currently writing her dissertation on Dorothy Day and the Catholic Workers. Her research focuses on religious and political folklore studies, Native American literature and folklore studies, and feminist, gender, and queer studies.

Camilla H. Mortensen has been Associate Lecturer in the Folklore Program and the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is currently a subject specialist for the Ethnographic Thesaurus project of the American Folklore Society. She has conducted fieldwork with body-modified women and on women's narratives of illness and healing. She is at work on a book project exploring the texts of twentieth-century and contemporary ethnic and postcolonial women writers of the Americas through the discourses of liminality, oral storytelling, and ethnography.

Joanne B. Mulcahy teaches and directs the Writing Culture Summer Institute at the Northwest Writing Institute, Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon. She is the author of Birth and Rebirth on an Alaskan Island: The Life of an Alutiiq Healer (2001).Her essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives,The Stories that Shape Us: Contemporary Women Write about the West, and These United States. She is currently working on a book about Eva Castellanoz.

Sw. Anand Prahlad is Professor in the English Department at the University of Missouri, Columbia, where he teaches courses in the Folklore Program and the Creative Writing Program. He has authored numerous articles and three books, including African American Proverbs in Context (1996), Reggae Wisdom: Proverbs in Jamaican Music (2001), and Hear My Story and Other Poems (1982). Prahlad's current research interests involve race and gender theory; the intersections of fetishism, folklore, and popular culture; and postcolonial perspectives on folkloristics. He is currently editing a four-volume encyclopedia set on African American folklore (forthcoming, Greenwood Press) and completing a book manuscript, "Getting Happy: An Ethnographic Memoir."

Deidre Sklar is Associate Professor of dance at Texas Women's University, Denton. She is an interdisciplinary scholar with a performance and directing background in corporeal mime and ensemble theatre. Her ethnography, Dancing with the Virgin: Body and Faith in the Fiesta of Tortugas, New Mexico (2001), addresses identity, community, and the embodiment of belief in the language of sensation. Sklar's articles on performance and embodiment, fieldwork methods, corporeal mime, and the dances of the Tortugas fiesta have appeared in the Journal of American Folklore,Drama Review,Dance Research Journal, the International Mime Journal, and Body/Language, among others. Her current research examines the transmission of performance knowledge among women in Kerala, South India.