Contributor Information

Lee Haring is Professor Emeritus of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, where he taught folklore and literary theory. His article in this issue reflects research from 1975 in the islands of the Indian Ocean. He has translated Indian Ocean Folktales (2002) and Ibonia: Epic of Madagascar (1994) and written numerous works, including Verbal Arts in Madagascar (1992) and Malagasy Tale Index (1982). His field manual, Collecting Folklore in Mauritius, was translated into Kreol in 2001.

Audrey Elisa Kerr is Associate Professor of English and director of the graduate program in Women's Studies at Southern Connecticut State University. She is also the chaplain and spiritual director at Leeway, Inc., a residential hospice for people with HIV and AIDS in the greater New Haven area. This article is part of a book-length study titled Paper Bag Principle: Complexion Lore in the Growth and Development of Black Washington, D.C., 1883–1963 (forthcoming, University of Tennessee Press). Her article "Exile: Black Women, Black Mothers and HIV through the Work of Sonia Sanchez and Toni Morrison" will appear later this year in an anthology titled Sonia On My Mind.

Michael Largey is Associate Professor of Music at Michigan State University. He has published articles on Haitian and African-American music and culture and is coauthor of Caribbean Currents: Caribbean Music from Rumba to Reggae (1995), which won the Gordon K. Lewis Best Book Award from the Caribbean Studies Association. He has completed a book about Haitian art music and cultural nationalism and is currently doing research on Haitian Rara, a Lenten processional music associated with Vodou religious ritual and political protest.

Felicia Faye McMahon is Research Associate in the Program on the Analysis and Resolution of Conflicts at Syracuse University and Acquisitions Editor for Voices: Journal of New York Folklore. She holds a Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, has taught folklore and anthropology courses at several institutions, and was a Fulbright Scholar to East Germany (1995–1996). She is coeditor of two books, Children's Folklore: A Sourcebook (1995) and Play, an Interdisciplinary Synthesis: Play and Culture Studies (2004), and author of several articles on folklore in Germany and in the Adirondack Park of New York state. She is currently working in the public sector with refugees from Burma (Myanmar), Kosovo, Bosnia, and southern Sudan.

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."

Cristina Sánchez-Carretero holds a Ph.D. in Folklore and Folklife from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently a researcher at the Spanish Council for Scientific Research, Department of Anthropology in Madrid. Her fieldwork in the Dominican Republic and Spain examined the role of narrating in the creation of locality and agency in the diaspora. She has coedited various books: with Dorothy Noyes, Performance, arte verbal y comunicacón: Nuevas perspectivas en los estudios de folklore y cultura popular en USA (2000); with Luis Díaz et al., Palabras para el pueblo, vols 1 and 2 (2001); and with Jack Santino, Holidays, Ritual, Festival, Celebration, and Public Display (2003). She is currently conducting research on the function of Afro-Dominican Religious Centers in Madrid in maintaining transnational families and is the coordinator of an ethnographic archive that documents the spontaneous shrines and collective mourning after the March 11 attacks in Madrid.