Robert Strauss is a journalist whose work primarily appears in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, Fortune and the Philadelphia publications. He has been a reporter for Sports Illustrated, a feature writer for the Philadelphia Daily News, a news producer for KYW-TV in Philadelphia and a TV critic for the Asbury Park Press and Philadelphia Inquirer. Since he was in fifth grade and wrote the classic, "The Slick Second Baseman," Strauss has always wanted a career in writing and is glad to have had the chance. He is also a manic, if somewhat untalented, basketball and piano player. He loves to travel, but especially likes to country-count, a prospect that often has his children Ella (12) and Sylvia (8) rolling their eyes as they have, for instance, lunch in Liechtenstein or San Marino or a quick border crossing to Gibraltar. Strauss and his family live in Haddonfield, New Jersey. He is married to journalist Susan Warner.
Mark Rosenthal, a graduate of Temple University, Vermont College, and the University of the Pacific (D.A. in Medieval Studies) has been a highly respected Hollywood screenwriter for nearly twenty years. His film credits as a screenwriter include Mona Lisa Smile, Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes, Mercury Rising, Mighty Joe Young, The Beverly Hillbillies, Star Trek VI, Superman IV, and Jewel of the Nile. His latest projects, with co-writer Lawrence Konner, are screenplays for Flicka (Fox 2005) and Eragon (Fox 2005). In addition to his active career in the film world, he has lectured extensively at film classes, seminars, and universities, and has worked with numerous arts organizations.
Paul Hendrickson ( MP3 of the author) is the 2005 recipient of the Provost's Award for Distinguished Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent book, Sons of Mississippi, won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award in general nonfiction. It also won the Heartland Prize presented annually by the Chicago Tribune, and in addition was named to many newspapers "Top 10" lists for books published in 2003. The book, which was published by A.A. Knopf and is now out in Vintage softcover, is a study of the legacy of racism in the families of seven Mississippi sheriffs of the 1960s. The research and writing, which took about five years, were supported by both a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship. Before Penn, Hendrickson worked for thirty years in daily journalism. He was a staff feature writer at the Washington Post from 1977 to 2001. Eventually, he came to understand the truth of the old saying that the legs are the first to go, and that the honorable and difficult business of writing perishable pieces on deadline belonged to younger people. He needed to try to find a place--a home--where he could continue to work on books and the occasional magazine article and to be involved with gifted, creative people. So now, luck beyond dream, fortune beyond hope, he finds himself conducting writing workshops full time at Penn in advanced nonfiction. The neophyte professor, hardly young anymore, was born in California but grew up in the Midwest and in a Catholic seminary in the Deep South, where he studied seven years for the missionary priesthood. This became the subject of his first book, published in 1983: Seminary: A Search. His other books, in addition to Sons and Seminary, are: Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott (a finalist for the 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award); and The Living and the Dead: Robert McNamara and Five Lives of a Lost War (finalist for the National Book Award in 1996). They, too, were published by Knopf. Hendrickson has degrees in American literature from St. Louis University and Penn State. He is married and lives with his family (world-class wife, two world-class sons) in Havertown, Pennsylvania. Oh, yes: He's deep into his next nonfiction book, which has to do with Ernest Hemingway.
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