Patricia Nelson Limerick is the faculty director and board chair of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, where she is also a professor of history. She is the author of The Legacy of Conquest, and many of her most notable articles, including "Dancing with Professors: The Trouble with Academic Prose," were collected in 2000 under the title Something in the Soil.

Andrew Cowell is an associate professor in the Linguistics, French, and Italian departments at the University of Colorado, where he specializes in linguistic anthropology and anthropological approaches to literature and verbal performance. His work in French and Italian focuses on medieval literature and society, and he has just completed a book entitled The Medieval Warrior Aristocracy: Gifts, Violence, Performance, and the Sacred.

Sharon K. Collinge is an associate professor of biology and environmental studies in the Environmental Studies Program and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado. She is a conservation biologist and restoration ecologist whose research focuses on understanding the ecological consequences of human-induced changes to natural systems.