Owen Cantrell is an Assistant Professor of English at Perimeter College, Georgia State University in Alpharetta, Georgia. He has written on Midwestern literature in MidAmerica and Pieces of the Heartland: Representing Early Twentieth-Century Midwestern Places; and on Bruce Springsteen and folk music in Bruce Springsteen and Popular Music: Rhetoric, Memorial, and Contemporary Culture. He serves as Coordinator of the GSU Prison Education Project, working to bring higher education into prisons.

Mark Flotow is a retired demographer and vital statistician from the Illinois Department of Public Health. The book he authored and edited, In Their Letters, in Their Words: Illinois Civil War Soldiers Write Home (SIU Press), won the Illinois State Historical Society’s Russell P. Strange Memorial Book of the Year award for 2020.

Tom George, M.D., a past-president of the Historical Society of Michigan, has written for JALA (Summer 2012), For the People (Winter 2015), and Michigan History Magazine. He is a former elected state legislator, in each house, representing the Kalamazoo area, retiring from the Michigan Senate in 2010 due to term limits. A practicing anesthesiologist in Kalamazoo for more than 35 years, he is now Co-Chairman of the Department of Anesthesiology at the Western Michigan University Homer Stryker School of Medicine.

Carl J. Guarneri holds the Brother James Ash Chair in American History at Saint Mary’s College of California. His book Lincoln’s Informer: Charles A. Dana and the Inside Story of the Union War (Univ. Press of Kansas, 2019) won the biennial Albert Castel Award of the Kalamazoo Civil War Round Table for the best book on the Civil War in the West.

Jennifer M. Murray is a military historian, with a specialization in the American Civil War, in the Department of History at Oklahoma State University. She is the author of On a Great Battlefield: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933–2013 (Univ. of Tennessee Press, 2014). She is working on a full-length biography of George Gordon Meade, tentatively titled “Meade at War.”

John A. O’Brien is an independent researcher currently at work on a biography of Lincoln’s Washington pastor, Rev. Dr. Phineas D. Gurley of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church. His article on their relationship, “Seeking God’s Will: President Lincoln and Rev. Dr. Gurley,” appeared in the Summer 2018 JALA. He is president of the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia (LincolnGroup.org) and is a licensed guide in the national capital.

Graham A. Peck is the Wepner Distinguished Professor of Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield. He is the author of Making an Antislavery Nation: Lincoln, Douglas, and the Battle over Freedom (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2017), and has directed and produced two films on Lincoln and Douglas.