Barnaby Conrad (1922-2013) was an American author, artist, nightclub proprietor, bullfighter, and filmmaker. After graduating from Yale, Conrad served from 1943 to 1946 as the U.S. vice consul in Seville, Málaga, and Barcelona. While in Spain, he studied bullfighting and became the only American to have fought in that country, Mexico, and Peru. In 1947, he served as secretary to Sinclair Lewis, the first American author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. John Steinbeck chose Conrad’s 1952 novel Matador as his favorite book of the year, and it was translated into over 20 languages. Conrad started the Santa Barbara Writers Conference in 1973, inviting well-known authors such as Eudora Welty, Ray Bradbury, Gore Vidal, Joan Didion, and Ross Macdonald. His charcoal portraits of Truman Capote, James Michener, and Alex Haley are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.

Editor: Barnaby Conrad III (b. 1952) majored in painting at Yale and became an artist, art critic, and author of twelve non-fiction books, including Absinthe: History in a Bottle, Ghost Hunting in Montana, and Jacques Villeglé and the Streets of Paris. A former magazine editor at Horizon and Forbes Life, he was a special correspondent in Paris for the San Francisco Chronicle and now teaches aspiring authors at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. He and his family live in Accomac, Virginia and San Francisco.

George Ewane Ngide is Associate Professor of English/British literature at the University of Yaoundé I, in Cameroon, where he specializes in Romantic literature, postcolonial and multicultural studies, and war poetry. He has published extensively on Robert Owen’s poetry and philosophy, as well as on other topics related to Romantic literature, media, and communication. A Cameroonian journalist, academic, and political figure, he is currently Technical Adviser and Head of the Division for Information and Communication at the Presidency of the Republic of Cameroon. He is also a veteran broadcaster who worked for CRTV Radio and Television for nearly two decades, reporting on the activities of President Paul Biya. In 2019, Dr. Ngide was appointed Spokesman for the Major National Dialogue, a forum aimed at resolving the Anglophone crisis in Cameroon.

Editor: P. V. Laxmiprasad, Ph.D., Department of English, Satavahana University (India)

Julian Young, a New Zealand philosopher, is W. R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Humanities Emeritus at Wake Forest University and Honorary Research Associate at the University of Auckland. His sixteen books have been translated into many languages. His Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography won the Association of American Publishers 2010 PROSE award for philosophy. Apart from postmodernism, his main interests are nineteenth- and twentieth-century German philosophy, the philosophy of art, religion, opera and tragedy, and the meaning of life.

Richard Rex retired from the University of Utah. He is the author of a collection of Chaucer essays titled The Sins of Madame Eglentyne, as well as Alice Muriel Williamson: The Secret History of an American-English Author and The Literary Career of W. B. Trites (Academica Press). He lives with his wife, Ines, on the Olympic Peninsula, in Port Angeles, Washington.

James MacGuire lives in New York City with the sublime Michelle Coppedge. He is the U.S. managing editor of the Catholic Herald and a contributing editor to Quest. He has worked at major media companies, including Time Inc., Macmillan, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; been a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the Center for Social Thought; and taught at Johns Hopkins University, Cambridge University, and The Sheen Center. MacGuire’s work has been published in dozens of national magazines. He is the author or co-author of fifteen books.

T. A. (Terry) Hipolito has a background in medieval literature, having received his Ph.D. in that subject from the University of California Los Angeles, and a career in software development and artificial intelligence. His amateur endeavors have included history and philosophy. He has attempted to unify all of these disciplines in a study of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, which he believes endeavors to do much the same.

Paul Brian Heise has studied the works of Richard Wagner since 1971. While pursuing graduate studies in anthropology at Southern Illinois University, he developed an argument that Wagner’s works could be understood as an allegory and withdrew from formal studies to devote his life to discovering and sharing his wholesale reassessment of the meaning of Wagner’s dramas and their music. Heise has published extensively on Wagner, including The Wound That Will Never Heal: An Allegorical Interpretation of Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung (Academica Press, 2021), and, with the support of the late British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, the website www.wagnerheim.com, an online compendium of Heise’s thoughts about Wagner.

San Francisco Bay-area poet Jack Foley has published eighteen books of poetry, five books of criticism, a book of stories, and a 1300-page “chronoencyclopedia,” Visions & Affiliations: California Poetry 1940-2005. With his late wife, Adelle, he became known for his multi-voiced “choruses,” a practice he has continued with his new life partner, Sangye Land. He has presented poetry on Berkeley, California radio station KPFA regularly since 1988 and is a host of KPFA’s literary program, “Cover to Cover.” He has received two Lifetime Achievement Awards, one from Marquis Who’s Who and one from the Berkeley Poetry Festival. The city of Berkeley declared June 5, 2010 “Jack Foley Day” in Berkeley. In addition, he is the first recipient of the K.M. Anthru International Literary Prize from the Kerala, India-based magazine, LITTERATEUR RW. His most recent books are Grief Songs, a book dealing with his sorrow at his wife’s death; When Sleep Comes: Shillelagh Songs, poems ranging from traditional to experimental verse; Duet of Polygon, a collaboration with Japanese poet Maki Starfield; and the companion volumes, The Light of Evening, a brief autobiography, and A Backward Glance O’er Travel’d Roads, a psychobiography dealing with “the growth of a poet’s mind,” and Creative Death, a book of poems. In 2019, poets/scholars Dana Gioia and Peter Whitfield published Jack Foley’s Unmanageable Masterpiece—a book of essays discussing Visions & Affiliations. Poet Olchar E. Lindsann writes, “Jack Foley’s constantly evolving and exploratory writing has been a mainstay of the American avant-garde for many decades, and his detailed histories of California poetic communities demonstrate an engaged poetic historiography.” In 1994 Lawrence Ferlinghetti remarked at the conclusion of Jack’s radio interview with him, “Jack Foley is doing great things in articulating the poetic consciousness of San Francisco.”

Thomas Phillips is a composer, novelist, and teacher known for the minimalist aesthetic that informs his work. In addition to numerous music releases, installations, and collaborations in dance and theater, he is the author of novels, short story collections, and scholarly monographs, recent examples of which focus on horror and cultural theory. Having completed graduate work in Helsinki and Montreal, he currently teaches literature at North Carolina State University.

Cate Rivers is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at North Carolina State University, where she received her B.A. in English and minors in History and Japanese Studies. Her main areas of focus are the Southern United States and Japan. Her interests span trauma studies, nationalism, memory, gender and critical race theories, modernism, cultural representations of mental illness, mysticism, and Buddhist literature. Her ongoing research project frames 20th century Japanese novels and novels from the Southern Renaissance as social histories, with particular attention to war memory, family history, culpability, the construction of “family,” and the relation between national identity and self-conception.