Ellen Gruber Garvey is a Professor in the English department at New Jersey City University. She is the author of Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance, and of The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture (Oxford University Press), and has recently published articles on Willa Cather as a magazine editor, the rewriting of Mary Wilkins Freeman’s story “The Revolt of ‘Mother,’ ” book advertising, women editors of periodicals, and recirculation in the nineteenth-century press. She has held fellowships from the National Endowment for Humanities, the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and the Massachusetts Historical Society, and has held the Fulbright Walt Whitman Distinguished Chair in American Literature in the Netherlands. She is a professor of English and also teaches Women’s and Gender Studies at New Jersey City University.

Edvige Giunta (editor emeritus) is an associate professor of English at New Jersey City University where she teaches memoir as well as other writing and literature courses. Since 2003 she has been coeditor of Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy . Her books include Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors (Palgrave, 2002), Dire l'indicibile: Il memoir delle autrici italo americane (University of Siena, 2002), The Milk of Almonds: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Culture , coedited with Louise DeSalvo, (The Feminist Press, 2002), and Italian American Writers on New Jersey , coedited with Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan (Rutgers University Press, 2003), winner of the New Jersey Studies Academic Alliance Award for Fiction and Non-Fiction, and Teaching Italian American Literature, Film, and Popular Culture ,  co-edited with Kathleen Zamboni McCormick (Options for Teaching Series of the Modern Language Association, 2010). She has edited/co-edited special issues of the journals VIA and TutteStorie devoted to Italian American women, and the proceedings of the conference A Tavola: Food, Tradition and Community among Italian Americans . Her articles, reviews, translations, memoir, and poetry have been published in many journals and anthologies. The former poetry editor of The Women’s Studies Quarterly , she serves on its Board . She has been profiled in The New York Times for her work in Italian American studies and was awarded the 2003 Teacher of the Year Award for Higher Education given by the Association of Italian American Educators. She is at work on an anthology on domestic needlework in the Italian diaspora, coedited with Joseph Sciorra, and a memoir.