Anne M. Carpenter is the Danforth Chair in Theological Studies at Saint Louis University. She has published articles on metaphysics, Christian tradition, and Hans Urs von Balthasar in journals like Modern Theology and Nova et Vetera. She has two monographs: Theo-Poetics: Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Risk of Art and Being (2015) and Nothing Gained Is Eternal: A Theology of Tradition (2022).
Ian Cooper is Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in German at the University of Kent, UK. He is the author of The Near and Distant God: Poetry, Idealism and Religious Thought from Hölderlin to Eliot(2008) and Poetry and the Question of Modernity: From Heidegger to the Present (2020). He co-edited Literature and Religion in the German-Speaking World: From 1200 to the Present Day, which appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2019. He is currently working on a book about Heidegger and religion.
Anthony Domestico is Chair of the English and Global Literatures Department at Purchase College, SUNY, the books columnist for Commonweal, and the author of Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period (Johns Hopkins). His criticism has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, The Atlantic, The Baffler, and the New York Review of Books, among many other places.
Luke Fischer is a philosopher and poet based in Sydney, Australia. His various writings focus on interconnections between poetry, philosophy, art, and the environment (in Rilke, Hölderlin, and Goethe, among others). Fischer’s books include the monograph The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the ‘New Poems’ (Bloomsbury, 2015), the poetry collections A Gamble for my Daughter (Vagabond Press, 2022), A Personal History of Vision (UWAP, 2017) and Paths of Flight (Black Pepper, 2013), and the co-edited volumes Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus”: Philosophical and Critical Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 2019) and The Seasons: Philosophical, Literary, and Environmental Perspectives (SUNY Press, 2021). With Dalia Nassar he guest-edited a special section of the Goethe Yearbook (2015) on “Goethe and Environmentalism.” Fischer holds a PhD from the University of Sydney where he is also an honorary associate of the philosophy department. For more information visit: www.lukefischer.net
Kevin Hart is Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Theology at the University of Virginia where he is also Courtesy Professor of English and Courtesy Professor of French. His most recent books are Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation(Chicago UP, 2023) and Maurice Blanchot on Poetry and Narrative (Bloomsbury, 2023). Next year will appear Contemplation: The Movements of the Soul (Columbia UP), Dark-Land: Memoir of a Secret Childhood (Paul Dry Books) and The Bible and Literature, vol. 5 (Bloomsbury). His poetry is collected in Wild Track: New and Selected Poems (Notre Dame UP, 2015) and Barefoot (Notre Dame UP, 2018). He has recently completed a new collection of poems, Carnet Beaune, and is completing Spiritual Acoustics.
Toby Martinez de las Rivas has published three collections with Faber & Faber: Terror (2014), Black Sun (2018) and Floodmeadow (2023). A selection of his work appeared in Penguin Modern Poets 7: These Hard & Shining Things (Penguin, 2018). He received The Wiener Holocaust Library International Book Art Prize in 2014, The Andrew Waterhouse Award in 2008, and an Eric Gregory Award in 2005. He is the 2023/24 Blackburn Distinguished Artist in Residence at Duke University.
Dante Micheaux is the author of Circus, which won the Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America and the T. S. Eliot Foundation, and Amorous Shepherd. His poems and translations have appeared in African American Review; The American Poetry Review; Callaloo; Literary Imagination; PN Review; Poem-A-Day; Poetry; and Tongue—among other journals and anthologies. Micheaux’s honors include the Oscar Wilde Award, the Ambit Poetry Prize, and fellowships from The New York TimesFoundation and Cave Canem Foundation, where he currently serves as Director of Programs.
Thomas Pfau (PhD 1989, SUNY Buffalo) is the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English, with a secondary appointment in the Divinity School at Duke University. He has published some fifty essays on literary, philosophical, and theological subjects ranging from the 18ththrough the early 20th century. In addition to two translations, of Hölderlin and Schelling (SUNY Press, 1987 and 1994), he has also edited seven essay collections and special journal issues and is the author of four monographs: Wordsworth’s Profession (Stanford UP 1997), Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, Melancholy, 1790-1840 (Johns Hopkins UP 2005), Minding the Modern: Intellectual Traditions, Human Agency, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame UP, 2013), and Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image (Notre Dame UP, 2022). He in the early stages of a new book project focused on the relationship between poetry and theology from 1800 to the present.
Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of thirteen books of poetry, fiction, and criticism, most recently Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems (Persea, 2021) and a novel, Paradise Close (Persea, 2022). Her honors include a Rona Jaffe Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Prize for Poetry, a Pushcart Prize, and a Horace W. Goldsmith National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Professorship appointment. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere, and she was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, where she founded and directed the Area Program in Poetry Writing for twenty years and for many years directed the Creative Writing Program.
Łukasz Tischner is a literary scholar, essayist, Associate Professor, Head of the Department of the History of Polish Literature in the 20th Century (Faculty of Polish Studies, at the Jagiellonian University), editor-in-chief of Konteksty Kultury. He has published two books on Czesław Miłosz: Miłosz w krainie odczarowanej (“Miłosz in a Disenchanted Land”, 2011) and Miłosz and the Problem of Evil (Northwestern University Press, 2015), as well as one on Witold Gombrowicz – Gombrowicza milczenie o Bogu (“Gombrowicz’s Silence on God”, 2013). He is a co-author and a co-editor of Literatura a religia – wyzwania epoki świeckiej (“Literature and Religion – The Challenges of a Secular Age”, two volumes, 2020). He specializes in the history of 20th century Polish literature and relationships between literature and philosophy/religion.
Educated at Harvard and Stanford, Bernadette Waterman Ward is a Professor of English at the University of Dallas. She wrote Eliot’s Angels: Rene Girard, George Eliot and Mimetic Desire (2022, University of Notre Dame Press) andWorld as Word: Philosophical Theology in Gerard Manley Hopkins. Past President, current secretary of the St. John Henry Newman Association, she has served in its board for more than two decades, and has written numerous articles on Newman. On the board of scholars for the Hopkins Quarterly, she writes frequently on Hopkins. She is also on the board of University Faculty for Life, and in that capacity has published on more recent literature. She has published one drama, and some poetry.
Judith Wolfe is Professor of Philosophical Theology at the University of St Andrews. Born and raised in Vienna, and educated in Milwaukee, Jerusalem, and Oxford, Prof. Wolfe has previously taught at Bard College Berlin and St John’s College Oxford. She is interested in the many ways in which theology, philosophy, literature and art extend and challenge each other, and teaches courses in systematic theology, philosophical theology, and theology and the arts. She has written and edited books on Martin Heidegger, C.S. Lewis, and 19th- and 20th-century theology, and is currently finishing a monograph entitled The Theological Imagination for Cambridge University Press. She is also founding editor of the Journal of Inklings Studies. Prof. Wolfe has spoken on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, PBS’s Closer to Truth, and at festivals, museums, and many conferences. A short documentary about her can be viewed at https://atthethreshold.com/.
