Susanna Childress earned dual degrees in Writing and English Literature from Indiana Wesleyan University. She received a Master's in Creative Writing/Poetry from The University of Texas at Austin, where she was awarded a thesis fellowship from the James Michener Center for Writers; her first volume of poetry, Jagged with Love, published by the University of Wisconsin, was an exploration of human portraiture and sundry relational complexities. Childress graduated in April of 2007 from Florida State University with a PhD in English/Creative Writing. Her major field is Poetry as a Genre, with Medieval and Early Modern Women's Writing as her minor field. Her creative dissertation, Hyssop, draws on Mary Sidney Herbert's Psalter to investigate hyssop as a means of cleansing and resilience in matters of familial and political tension. Childress is particularly interested in narrative structure in women's writing, from Gertrude the Great to Gertrude Stein, from Anne Bradstreet to Anne Sexton.

Karin Fransen earned a B.A. in English Literature and Philosophy from Gordon College, an M.A. and M.Phil., and Ph. D. in Philosophy from Yale University. Karin specializes in ethical theory, and her dissertation, "Take All My Guilt Away: The Transformative Project and Promise of Forgiveness," looks at how the objective moral guilt of a wrongdoer is affected when she is forgiven by the person she wronged.

Samuel Graber earned his B.A. from Saint Olaf College in English and American Studies, an M.A.R. from Yale Divinity School, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from The University of Iowa. Graber's research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century American literature and culture, transatlantic studies, national memory, and religion. His dissertation, "Twice-Divided Nation: the Civil War and National Memory in the Transatlantic World" explores how transatlantic communication and Anglo-American relations affected the early cultural representation and commemoration of the American Civil War.