David Barber ("The Lather") is the assistant poetry editor of The Atlantic . His first book of poems, The Spirit Level , was awarded the 1995 Terrence Des Pres Prize and will be published later this year.

Charles Dickinson ("Colonel Roebling's Friend") is an editor at The Chicago Tribune and the author of the novels The Widows' Adventures (1989) and Rumor Has It (1991).

Mark Doty ("A Display of Mackerel") is a former Guggenheim fellow. His 1993 collection, My Alexandria , won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. His latest book of poems, Atlantis , will be published next month.

Winthrop D. Jordan ("Slavery and the Jews"), who for twenty years was a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley, now holds the William F. Winter chair of history and of African-American studies at the University of Mississippi. His books White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro (1968) and Tumult and Silence at Second Creek: An Inquiry Into a Civil War Slave Conspiracy (1993) both won the Bancroft Prize.

Nicholas Lemann ("The Great Sorting") is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the author of The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (1991). He is at work on a book about meritocracy in the United States.

George McKenna ("On Abortion: A Lincolnian Position") teaches political science at the City College of New York. His books include A Guide to the Constitution: That Delicate Balance (1984) and The Drama of Democracy (1994).

Cait Murphy ("'Ulysses' in Chinese") is the social-policy correspondent of The Economist , in London. Murphy is a former editorial-page editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal, which is published in Hong Kong.

Tim O'Brien (cover art) is a freelance illustrator who lives in Brooklyn, New York. His work has won recognition from The Society of Illustrators, Communication Arts , and Print .

David Schiff ("Unreconstructed Modernist") is a composer and a professor of music at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon. He is the author of The Music of Elliott Carter (1983), and is at work on a book about Rhapsody in Blue .

Lynda Schuster ("The Struggle to Govern Johannesburg") is a journalist who has reported from Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Middle East for The Wall Street Journal , and from South Africa for The Christian Science Monitor .

Barbara Dafoe Whitehead ("The Moral State of Marriage") is a guest scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington, D.C. Her most recent cover story for The Atlantic was "The Failure of Sex Education" (October, 1994).

Richard Wilbur ("Two Poems") served as poet laureate of the United States in 1987. His translation of Molière's Amphitryon was published last spring.