Kathy Merlock Jackson, a professor of communication at Virginia Wesleyan University, teaches courses in media studies and children's culture. She is the author or editor of eleven books and former editor of The Journal of American Culture. She has served as past president of both the American Culture Association and the Popular Culture Association. Carl H. Sederholm is a professor of interdisciplinary humanities at Brigham Young University. He is the editor of The Journal of American Culture and has co-authored or co-edited three books as well as published essays on authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Jonathan Edwards, Lydia Maria Child, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Mark I. West is the former chair of the English department at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has written or edited nineteen books on children's literature and culture and is a former president of the Children's Literature Association.