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301 Contributors Sherman Alexie is the author of over twenty books of poetry and fiction, and the recipient of many literary awards, including the 1999 O. Henry Award, the Poetry of America’s 2001 Shelley Memorial Award, and the 2000 PEN Short Story Award. John Cyril Barton is director of graduate studies and assistant professor of English at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. He has published essays that examine capital punishment in the writings of Theodore Dreiser, William Gilmore Simms, and Lydia Maria Child. He is writing a book on the death penalty in nineteenth-century U.S. law and literature. Steve Champion (now Adisa Akanni Kamara) is a death row prisoner at San Quentin State Prison. A former Crips member, he grew up in South Central Los Angeles and has been incarcerated for twenty-five years. He is selftaught and conversant in African history, philosophy, political science, and comparative religion. In 2010 he published a memoir, From Dead to Deliverance. In 1995 he was awarded honorary mention in the short fiction category of the PEN Prison Writing Contest, and in 2004 he won first place in nonfiction. He is coauthor of two works: Afterlife and The Sacred Eye of the Falcon: Lessons in Life from Death Row. Kia Corthron’s other plays, including Breath, Boom, A Cool Dip in the Barren Saharan Crick and The Venus de Milo Is Armed, have been produced by Playwrights Horizons, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Actors Theatre of Louisville, London’s Royal Court Theatre, New York Theatre Workshop, Minneapolis Children’s Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, Yale Rep, Huntington Theatre, Atlantic Theater Company, New York Stage and Film, Baltimore’s CenterStage, London’s Donmar Warehouse, Goodman Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, Hartford Stage, and elsewhere. Awards include Bellagio Residency (Italy), McKnight National Residency, Wachtmeister Award, Daryl Roth Creative Spirit Award, National Endowment for the Arts Award, and Writers Guild Outstanding Drama Series Award for The Wire. Thomas Dutoit is a professor of English literature at the University of Tours, Paris 7, and Lille, and the author of A Rose, A Ghost, in Edith Wharton. Dutoit has translated and edited works by Derrida, including Aporias, On the Name, and Derrida’s twenty lectures on the death penalty (to be published in French and English in 2012). Dutoit has published articles on sexuality in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, on sovereignty in Frank Zappa’s art, and on the death penalty in Norman Mailer’s writing. 302 contributors Cultural historian H. Bruce Franklin is the author or editor of nineteen books, including War Stars: The Superweapon in the American Imagination, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America, Prison Writing in 20th -Century America, and Vietnam and Other American Fantasies. He has been publishing on Herman Melville since 1961. Currently the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University in Newark, he can be reached through his home page: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~hbf. Tom Kerr is an associate professor of writing and rhetoric in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College, where he teaches courses on the essay, academic and scholarly writing, and composition theory. His writing on prison and prisoners has appeared in San Francisco Bay View, counterpunch.org, and Writing on the Edge. He edited Steve Champion’s memoir From Dead to Deliverance, and edited and published The Sacred Eye of the Falcon: Lessons in Life from Death Row by Steve Champion, Anthony Ross, and the late Stanley Tookie Williams. David Kieran is a postdoctoral fellow in the American Culture Studies Program at Washington University. His work focuses on cultural memory and representations of violence and conflict in contemporary U.S. culture. Kieran is the cofounder of the War and Peace Studies Caucus of the American Studies Association, and his writing has appeared, among other places, in M/MLA: The Journal of the Midwestern Modern Language Association and American Studies International. Jennifer Leigh Lieberman is a National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University, where she also teaches in Auburn Prison (home of the first electric chair) through the Cornell Prison Education Program. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was a research fellow at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution’s Dibner Library, and the Bakken Library and Museum. Jill McDonough’s poems have appeared in Threepenny Review, Poetry, New Republic, and Slate. She has been...

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