Ricardo Pitts-Wiley is playwright, actor, director, songwriter and educator. In 2000 he and his wife Bernadet founded Mixed Magic Theatre where there son Jonathan is now Artistic Director. In addition to writing page-to-stage adaptations of Moby Dick, Frankenstein, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Don Quixote and the life and poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ricardo has written the book and lyrics for the original plays Night Voices, The Well of Woman, A Kwanzaa Song, Waiting For Bessie Smith, Celebrations: A Newtime and Christmas, Man. Woman Chaos and 35 Miles From Detroit. As an actor Ricardo has played major roles throughout the country in productions of Fences, Othello, King Lear, A Raisin in the Sun, The Piano Lesson, Master Harold and the Boys, Of Mice and Men, Macbeth, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Threepenny Opera, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Boesman and Lena. He has been an artist-in-residence at several major colleges including MIT and the University of Rhode Island and directed over 50 plays and musicals.

Rudy Cabrera aka Rudacious (because he’s so audacious) is a Providence, RI native. Born and raised in the smallest state. Rudy had his struggles with education growing up as the negative influences from his surroundings and immediate friends distracted him. Rudy had difficulty feeling a part of his own education. It wasn’t until he began doing theater and studying classic literature that he realized many of the ideas in these readings connect and almost mirror many of the issues seen within the inner city, high crime and low income communities. Once the fire within was ignited Rudy became interested in trying to find ways to convince troubled youth the same lessons that was taught to him over the years which is “Although your point of view may be different it isn’t necessarily wrong. You can talk to anyone about anything you want; you just have to put it in words that they can understand.” Now Rudy is an actor, a poet and a host/mc who uses his talents to walk the fine lines between education and entertainment, comedy and drama, hood and suburban.

Wyn Kelley, who teaches in the Literature Section at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is author of Melville's City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (1996) and of Herman Melville: An Introduction (2008). Former Associate Editor of the Melville Society journal Leviathan, and editor of the Blackwell Companion to Herman Melville (2006), she has published essays in a number of journals and collections, including Melville and Hawthorne: Writing A Relationship, Ungraspable Phantom: Essays on Moby-Dick, Melville and Women, “Whole Oceans Away”: Melville in the Pacific, and the Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. A founding member of the Melville Society Cultural Project, she has collaborated with the New Bedford Whaling Museum on lecture series, conferences, exhibits, and a scholarly archive. She serves as Associate Director of MEL (Melville Electronic Library), an NEH-supported interactive digital archive for reading, editing, and visualizing Melville’s texts. She also works with the HyperStudio, MIT’s digital humanities lab, to develop educational programs such as MetaMedia, American Authors, and Annotation Studio.

Henry Jenkins is the Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He arrived at USC in Fall 2009 after spending the past decade as the Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Florez Professor of Humanities. He is the author and/or editor of twelve books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Cultureand From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. His newest books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. Jenkins is the principal investigator for Project New Media Literacies (NML), a group which originated as part of the MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Initiative. Jenkins wrote a white paper on learning in a participatory culture that has become the springboard for the group’s efforts to develop and test educational materials focused on preparing students for engagement with the new media landscape.