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Jack Solomon

The coeditors are successful textbook authors who, between them, have over fifty years of teaching experience in the college classroom. Sonia Maasik, a lecturer in the UCLA Writing Programs, has taught writing from developmental to advanced levels, and coordinates training for UCLA writing programs' teaching assistants. Jack Solomon, a professor of English at California State University, Northridge, teaches literature and critical theory, along with his graduate and undergraduate classes on popular cultural semiotics, and is often interviewed by the media for analysis of current events and trends. He is the author of The Signs of Our Time (1988) and Discourse and Reference in the Nuclear Age (1988).  The two together have published Signs of Life in the U.S.A.: Readings on Popular Culture for Writers, Sixth Edition (Bedford/St. Martin's, 2009) and California Dreams and Realities, Third Edition (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2005).

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in 1918. In February 1945, while he was captain of a reconnaissance battery of the Soviet Army, he was arrested and sentenced to an eight-year term in a labor camp and permanent internal exile, which was cut short by Khrushchev's reforms, allowing him to return from Kazakhstan to Central Russia in 1956. Although permitted to publish One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in 1962—which remained his only full-length work to have appeared in his homeland until 1990—Solzhenitsyn was by 1969 expelled from the Writers' Union. The publication in the West of his other novels and, in particular, of The Gulag Archipelago, brought retaliation from the authorities. In 1974, Solzhenitsyn was arrested, stripped of his Soviet citizenship, and forcibly flown to Frankfurt. Solzhenitsyn and his wife and children moved to the United States in 1976. In September 1991, the Soviet government dismissed treason charges against him; Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994. He died in Moscow in 2008.

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Nancy Sommers

Nancy Sommers, who has taught composition and directed composition programs for thirty years, now teaches writing and mentors new writing teachers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.  She led Harvard’s Expository Writing Program for twenty years, directing the first-year writing program and establishing Harvard’s WAC program. A two-time Braddock Award winner, Sommers is well known for her research and publications on student writing. Her articles Revision Strategies of Student and Experienced Writers and Responding to Student Writing are two of the most widely read and anthologized articles in the field of composition.  Her recent work involves a longitudinal study of college writing to understand the role writing plays in undergraduate education. Sommers is the lead author on Hacker handbooks, all published by Bedford/St. Martin’s, and is coauthor of Fields of Reading, Ninth Edition (2010).

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Susan Sontag

Susan Sontag was the author of four novels, including In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction; a collection of stories; several plays; and seven works of nonfiction. She died in New York City on December 28, 2004.

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Sophocles

Seamus Heaney received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. He lives in Dublin and he regularly teaches at Harvard University. His most recent book is Finders Keepers: Selected Prose, 1971-2000 (FSG, 2002).

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Brenda Spatt

Brenda Spatt taught English at Herbert H. Lehman College of The City University of New York for thirteen years and also at Borough of Manhattan Community College before becoming an administrator at CUNY's Central Office.  Her titles included director of academic affairs, executive assistant to the Chancellor, and university associate dean for executive search and evaluation.

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Sarah Stage

Sarah Stage (Ph.D., Yale University) has taught U.S. history at Williams College and the University of California, Riverside, and she was visiting professor at Beijing University and Szechuan University. Currently she is professor of Women’s Studies at Arizona State University. Her books include Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women’s Medicine and Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession.

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Norman Stahl

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Norman A. Stahl

Norman A. Stahl is a Professor Emeritus from the Department of Literacy Education at Northern Illinois University. Over the years his research has focused on postsecondary reading instruction with particular interest in the field's history. Dr. Stahl's works include content analyses, quantitative research, instructional reviews, commentaries, organizational histories, and methodological pieces on documentary history and oral history. He has received honors from the National Association for Developmental Education, the College Reading and Learning Association, the College Literacy and Learning Special Interest Group of the International Reading Association, and the Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers for his scholarship pertaining to reading and learning. He has served as president of the College Reading and Learning Association, the Learning Research Association, the Association of Literacy Educators and Researchers, and the History of Literacy Special Interest Group of the International Reading Association as well as serving as the Chair of the American Reading Forum. He is a national Fellow of the Council of Learning Assistance and Developmental Education Associations.

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Tom Standage

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Tom Standage

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David Starkey

David Starkey is Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Santa Barbara City College.  He is the editor of two collections of creative writing pedagogy, Teaching Writing Creatively (1998) and Genre by Example: Writing What We Teach (2001), and he has been active in all four genres.  His poetry collections include Adventures of the Minor Poet (2007); Ways of Being Dead: New and Selected Poems (2006); and Fear of Everything (2000).  Several poems from his most recent collection, A Few Things You Should Know about the Weasel (2010) were featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac.  His fiction has appeared in American Literary Review, Rio Grande Review, Sou’wester, and in the anthology Blue Cathedral: Contemporary Fiction for the New Millennium.  His creative nonfiction has been published in Cimarron Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, Tampa Review, and in the book Living Blue in the Red States (2007), which he edited.  His plays have been produced in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, Minneapolis, Toronto, and elsewhere.

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Stassen

For Deogratias, J.P. Stassen won the prestigious Goscinny Prize.

Born and raised in Belgium, Stassen has traveled all over the world. His books have been published in many languages, and his remarkable artistry has won him many awards. Some of his works are imbued with the places he lived, such as Tangiers in The Old Frenchman's Bar. From the Maghreb to Latin America, to South Africa and Mozambique, Stassen eventually settled with his family in Rwanda, where they live today.

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Ilan Stavans

Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. His books include Spanglish, On Borrowed Words, The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, and Becoming Americans. His work has been translated into a dozen languages.

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Philip C. Stead

PHILIP C. STEAD is the author of the Caldecott Medal winning A Sick Day for Amos McGee, also named a New York Times Best Illustrated Book of 2010 and a Publishers Weekly Best Children’s Book of 2010, illustrated by his wife, Erin E. Stead (A Neal Porter Book, Roaring Brook Press, 2010).  Philip, also an artist, both wrote and illustrated his debut Creamed Tuna Fish and Peas on Toast (Roaring Brook Press, 2009), which was applauded by School Library Journal for “its wry humor and illustrations worthy of a Roald Dahl creation.”  Philip lives with Erin in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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