Gordon Osing is retired from the writing program at the University of Memphis and lives now lakeside in Delta bluffs woods in Eudora, Mississippi, where he is continuing his career in reading and writing and traveling. The River City Writers Series, that he began some thirty-five years ago at the University of Memphis, is still thriving. He sees himself in a continuation of the works of the Southern Modernists, holding language in poetry as re-contextualized, and the poem as artifact with its own protocols and reasons, the ways and means of a poem's attachments to "truth" belonging peculiarly to poetry. Tom Carlson taught American literature and creative nonfiction at the University of Memphis for thirty-two years. He has published extensively on Melville, Poe, eastern European poetry, and American popular culture.