<h4>Caleb Smith is professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of The Prison and the American Imagination (Yale University Press, 2009) and The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics of Justice from the Revolution to the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 2013). His essays on contemporary culture have appeared in BOMB, Paper Monument, Yale Review, and Avidly.org. His homepage is http://calebsmith.commons.yale.edu/.</h4>

Caleb Smith

Unvicarious: Reading with Sam See

"Writing only leads to more writing." — Colette

Literary Criticism

"As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag." — Patti Smith

Gender &amp; Sexuality

Sacred Duty

American Death Cult: A Love Story

"You can't ignore politics, no matter how much you'd like to." — Molly Ivins

Politics

The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict

<h4>Bashaun Brown is co-founder and CEO of TRAP House — a business incubator that helps drug dealers become legal entrepreneurs. Bashaun is a former student of Wesleyan Center for Prison Education and current student at Wesleyan University. A New Jersey native, Brown now resides in Middletown, Connecticut.</h4>

Bashaun Brown

In for Doom: Austin Reed’s “The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict”

"There is nothing more poetic and terrible than the skyscrapers' battle with the heavens that cover them." — Federico García Lorca

Nonfiction

"I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead." — Samuel Goldwyn

Biography &amp; Autobiography

Introducing “No Crisis”

"Never be afraid to sit awhile and think." — Lorraine Hansberry

Philosophy &amp; Religion

Poe in Hard Times: Terror of the Soul at The Morgan Library & Museum

<h4>Austin Graham is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is the author of The Great American Songbooks (Oxford University Press, 2013), a musicological investigation of American fiction and poetry. Currently, he is at work on a study of the American historical novel in the 20th century.&nbsp;</h4>

T. Austin Graham

<h4>John Irwin is the Decker Professor in the Humanities and Professor in the Writing Seminars and the English Department at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Double and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (1975), American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphic in the American Renaissance (1980), and Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytical Detective Story (1994), as well as the author of two books of poetry, The Heisenberg Variations (1975) and Just Let Me Say This About That (1998). His forthcoming book on F. Scott Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald&rsquo;s Fiction: &ldquo;An Almost Theatrical Innocence,&rdquo; is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins Press in 2014.&nbsp;</h4>

John Irwin

<h4>Wai Chee Dimock is William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University. She has published widely on American literature of every period, and is best known for Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (2007). Editor of PMLA, her essays have also appeared in Critical Inquiry, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. Her team-edited American Literature in the World: An Anthology from Anne Bradstreet to Octavia Butler (2017) was published by Columbia University Press in January.</h4>

Wai Chee Dimock

What’s Left to Say? Four Fitzgerald Scholars on Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby

Caleb Smith is professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of The Prison and the American Imagination (Yale University Press, 2009) and The Oracle and the Curse: A Poetics of Justice from the Revolution to the Civil War (Harvard University Press, 2013). His essays on contemporary culture have appeared in BOMB, Paper Monument, Yale Review, and Avidly.org. His homepage is http://calebsmith.commons.yale.edu/.