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Jill Hammer, PhD, is an author, educator, midrashist, myth-weaver, and ritualist. She is the director of Tel Shemesh, a website and community celebrating and creating Jewish earth-based traditions, and the co-founder of Kohenet: The Hebrew Priestess Institute. She is the author of two books:  Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women (Jewish Publication Society, 2001) and The Jewish Book of Days (Jewish Publication Society, forthcoming 2006). She is a poet and essayist whose work has been published in many journals and anthologies such as Lilith, Bridges, Response, Natural Bridge, Zeek, The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion,The Jewish Spectator, Biblical Women in the Midrash, and The Women’s Torah Commentary. Rabbi Hammer is a celebrated adult educator who has taught in many venues including retreats, conferences, synagogues, Jewish community centers, new moon gatherings, and on-going adult education classes. She conducts workshops around the country on ancient and contemporary midrash, bibliodrama, creative ritual, and Jewish cycles of time. She is also currently serving as an adjunct at the Academy for Jewish Religion in Riverdale, NY.

Patricia Monaghan, PhD, is the author of four books of poetry, most  recently Homefront,  a series of mythic and autobiographical  poems on war's effect on families; two sequences from the book, "Song  of a Kerry Madwoman" and "Soldier's Heart" have been set to music by  composers Michael Smith and Lynn Saoirse, respectively.  Another  of her books of poetry, Seasons of the Witch, has been set to music  by women artists; the music has been published together with the poems  in an award-winning volume.  Monaghan is also a nonfiction writer  and essayist, winner of the 2003 Pushcart Prize in nonfiction.   She has published more than a dozen books on mythology and  spirituality, including The Red-Haired Girl from the Bog: The  Landscape of Celtic Myth and Spirit and the classic encyclopedia of  women's spirituality, The Book of Goddesses and Heroines.  She  is Associate Professor of interdisciplinary Studies at DePaul University in Chicago.

M. Macha Nightmare is an author, teacher and ritualist.  She is among the founders of Reclaiming Tradition Witchcraft, and an initiate of (Anderson) Faery/Feri Tradition as well.  As a Witch at Large, she has circled with Witches of many different traditions as well as with people of other Pagan paths throughout the U.S., and in Canada and Brazil.  In addition to books she has written, Pagan Pride: Honoring the Craft and Culture of Earth and Goddess (2004), Witchcraft and the Web: Weaving Pagan Traditions Online (2001), the book Macha co-authored with Starhawk, The Pagan Book of Living and Dying (1997), was voted the number one advanced Pagan title by book reviewers.  She has also contributed to many anthologies, periodicals, and encyclopedias.  A member of the American Academy of Religion, the Marin Interfaith Council, the Nature Religion Scholars Network; and the Sacred Dying Foundation Advisory Council, The Biodiversity Project Spirituality Working Group, and the Ord Brighideach, Macha has spoken on behalf of Paganism to news media as well as academic researchers, and has lectured at colleges, universities and seminaries.  An all-round Pagan webweaver, she teaches on the broomstick circuit, and currently chairs the Public Ministry Department at the nation’s only Pagan seminary, Cherry Hill Seminary, where she also teaches online courses on dying and death and on public ritual www.machanightmare.com.

Jan Willis, PhD (BA and MA in Philosophy, Cornell University; PhD in Indic and Buddhist Studies, Columbia University) is Professor of Religion and Walter A. Crowell Professor of the Social Sciences at Wesleyan. She has studied with Tibetan Buddhists in India, Nepal, Switzerland and the United States for more than three decades, and has taught courses in Buddhism for twenty-five years. She is the author of The Diamond Light: An Introduction to Tibetan Buddhist Meditation (1972), On Knowing Reality: The Tattvartha Chapter of Asanga's Bodhisattvabhumi (1979), and Enlightened Beings: Life Stories from the Ganden Oral Tradition (1995); and the editor of Feminine Ground: Essays on Women and Tibet (1989). One of the earliest American scholar-practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism, Professor Willis has published numerous essays and articles on Buddhist mediation, hagiography, and women and Buddhism. Dreaming Me: An African American Baptist-Buddhist Journey. (2001).