Steve McCaffery
Steve McCaffery is author of fifteen books of poetry and one novel. He has twice received the Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative American Poetry (1993—94 and 1994—95). Theory of Sediment was nominated for the Governor General’s Award in 1992 and The Black Debt was short-listed for the 1990 Before Columbus Award. Volume 1 of Seven Pages Missing was also nominated for the Governor General’s Award in 2001. He has performed his poetry worldwide and his work has been widely translated. He is a Professor of Poetics, Critical Theory, and Contemporary Literature at York University and is the current Director and founder of the North American Centre for Interdisciplinary Poetics.

John O’Leary
John O’Leary has been involved in the Canadian literacy movement throughout his twenty-eight-year career as an educator. He joined Frontier College as a teacher in a prison literacy program in 1976 and went on to successfully establish literacy coalitions outside the educational field, with labour, business, non-profit, and non-government organizations. Since being appointed the President of Frontier College in 1991, O’Leary has launched several innovative and wide-reaching programs, including a national initiative to organize literacy programs with volunteers from every university and college campus in Canada.

Camille Paglia
Camille Paglia, University Professor of Humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, is the author of three best-selling books: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson; Sex, Art, and American Culture; and Vamps Tramps: New Essays. Her fourth book, a study of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, has been published by the British Film Institute in its Film Classics series. She has also written a study of poetry that will be published next year by Pantheon Books.