Margaret Ferguson (Ph.D. Yale University) is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California--Davis. She is author of Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (2003) and Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (1984). She is coeditor of Feminism in Time, Women, Property, and the Letters of the Law, Literacies in Early Modern England and a critical edition of Elizabeth Cary's Tragedy of Mariam. Mary Jo Salter (M.A. Cambridge University) is Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Johns Hopkins University, where she teaches poetry and poetry-writing. She has published several books of poems, including Henry Purcell in Japan (1985), Unfinished Painting (1989), Sunday Skaters (1994), A Kiss in Space (1999), and, most recently, Open Shutters (2003). A vice president of the Poetry Society of America, she has also served as poetry editor of The New Republic.