Named one of the most powerful women in Texas by Texas Monthly magazine, Rena Pederson has held senior posts at the Dallas Morning News since 1973. As editor at large since 2002, she writes a weekly column for the paper's Sunday Reader section as well as profiles and enterprise feature stories. She previously served as a vice president and editorial page editor, supervising the staff and content of the opinion pages for 16 years.

Andrew Barnes, chairman of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, and former chairman and CEO of the St. Petersburg Times, is a native of New York City and a graduate of Harvard University where he took his degree in history.

No biography/photo currently available.

(Courtesy of the National Endowment for the Humanities)

“When you’re in a state of perplexity, sadness, gloom, elation, you look for a poem to match what you are feeling,” says Helen Vendler. She writes that “Poetry is analytic as well as expressive; it distinguishes, reconstructs, and redescribes what it discovers about the inner life. The poet accomplishes the analytic work of poetry chiefly by formal means.”