Aku Wuwu (Aku Vuvu) is a poet of the Nuosu branch of the Yi ethnic group of southwest China and a professor of ethnic literature at the Southwest Nationalities University in Sichuan province, China. He is unique among Yi poets for his creation of a corpus of "mother tongue" poetry written in Nuosu (Northern Yi) dialect. The deeply visceral themes of his poems draw heavily on Nuosu traditions, especially early life experiences growing up in the mountains of southern Sichuan province. His themes include cross-cultural intersections between the developing world of southwest China, humans and the environment, and the world of dreams and reality. Many of his poems are deeply ethnographic, rooted in the culture to such an extent that he regards them as "textbooks" for future generations of young Yi. Among his best-known works is a long poem based on a ritual chant to call back the wandering souls of the ill. Entitled "Calling Back the Soul of Zhyge Alu," the poem is a cry for cultural revival among the Yi people of southwest China, who today number over 7 million.

Nimrod Baranovitch is a Senior Lecturer of Chinese Studies and Chair of the Department of Asian Studies, University of Haifa, Israel. His publications include China's New Voices: Popular Music, Ethnicity, Gender, and Politics, 1978-1997 (University of California Press, 2003); articles in Modern China, The China Quarterly, and The China Journal; and contributions to several edited volumes and encyclopedias. Two new articles that he wrote, "Literary Liberation of the Tibetan Past: The Alternative Voice in Alai's Red Poppies" and "Others No More: The Changing Representation of Non-Han Peoples in Chinese History Textbooks, 1951-2003," will be published by Modern China and The Journal of Asian Studies, respectively, early next year.

Mark Bender, who will introduce Aku Wuwu's poetry, is an associate professor in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures, at The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. His areas of interest include Chinese professional storytelling, ethnic minority epics, antiphonal folksongs, ethnic minority poetry in Southwest China, and material culture studies.

Pema Bhum is Director of the Latse Contemporary Tibetan Cultural Library in New York City, which is a project of the Trace Foundation, where he has worked since 1997. He holds an M.A. in Tibetan Studies from the Northwest Nationalities Institute in Lanzhou, Gansu Province (PRC), where he also taught Tibetan language and literature. After his arrival in India in 1988, he founded the first independent Tibetan language newspaper in exile, Dmangs-gtso, and the Tibetan literary magazine, Ljang-gzhon. From 1992-1996, he served as founding director of the Amnye Machen Institute in Dharamsala, India, and for two years taught Tibetan language and literature at Indiana University. He is author of two memoirs of the Cultural Revolution -- Six Stars with a Crooked Neck (2001), and Dran tho rdo ring ma ( 2006)--as well as Heartbeat of a New Generation, now translated into three languages. He has also authored several articles, the most recent of which are published in issues of the Latse Library Newsletter.

I am an anthropologist of China and Taiwan, and have taught at the University of Washington since 1974. My first research in Taiwan in 1972-73 was on individual differences in folk religion. At the same time, I was interested in family, kinship, demography, and political economy. My first monograph Ploughshare Village, a later synthetic work Human Families, and several edited volumes resulted from this research. In the 1980s, I turned my attention to Sichuan, where I became interested in ethnicity and ethnic relations. I conducted collaborative international fieldwork in minority areas, particularly with the Nuosu, or Liangshan Yi. This led to several edited volumes, as well as to a regional ethnography, Ways of Being Ethnic in Southwest China. My interest in ethnic identity led to interest in ethnic arts, and from 1999-2007 I was Curator of Asian Ethnology at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. I curated Mountain Patterns: Survival of Nuosu Culture in China jointly with Ma Lunzy and Bamo Qubumo, along with other exhibits at the Burke and at the Bellevue Arts Museum. Working in Liangshan, I became interested in environmental sustainability and community development through education. I helped found the Yangjuan Primary School in 2000. At the same time, I became active in educational exchange programs. I now head the UW Worldwide Program, exchanging undergraduates with Sichuan University and involving many of them in ecological fieldwork and community service at the Yangjuan School. In 2005, with a group of students, I founded the Cool Mountain Education Fund, a small NGO that gives scholarships to graduates of the Yangjuan School.

Lauran R. Hartley is Tibetan Studies Librarian for the C.V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University and co-editor of Modern Tibetan Literature and Social Change (Duke University Press, 2008). She holds a Ph.D. in Tibetan Studies from Indiana University, and has taught courses on Tibetan literature and religion at Indiana, Rutgers and Columbia universities. She also serves as Inner Asian Book Review Editor for the Journal of Asian Studies. Her dissertation, "Contextually Speaking: Tibetan Literary Discourse and Social Change in the People's Republic of China (1980-2000)," is available through ProQuest. Her published articles include "Ascendancy of the Term rtsom-rig [literature] in Tibetan Literary Discourse," chap. 1 in Contemporary Tibetan Literary Studies, Proceedings of the Tenth Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2007); and "'Inventing Modernity' in A mdo: Views on the role of traditional Tibetan culture in a developing society, " chap. 1 in Amdo Tibetans in Transition: Society and Culture in the Post-Mao Era (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2002). She has also published several translations of Tibetan literary works, including Pema Bhum's Six Stars with a Crooked Neck (Dharamsala: Tibet Times, 2001).

Anne Henochowicz is a PhD student in Chinese literature and folklore at The Ohio State University. She is interested in Mongol-Han Chinese cultural exchange and dialogue, particularly through music. She is currently studying the bang Hanggai and its punk/folk/world music approach to Mongolian music and identity. She earned her BA in Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied the history of the Chinese zither (guqin) under Dr. Victor Mair. She holds an MA in Chinese literature from The Ohio State University and an MPhil in Ethnomusicology from the University of Cambridge.

Li Chi is a highly accomplished performing artist on the erhu, the Chinese two-string bowed fiddle. After graduating from the Conservatory of Chinese Music in 1982, she served as erhu soloist for the National Traditional Orchestra of China (the most renowned orchestra of Chinese musical instruments). In the 1980s, she frequently performed in presidential concerts in Beijing. In the United States she has been featured in concerts held at prestigious venues such as Madison Square Garden, the Lincoln Center, the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington DC, the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York and the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York. She is co-founder of the American Chinese Performing Arts Institute, adviser to the Los Angeles Chinese Music Ensemble, and director of the San Fernando Valley Chinese Music Ensemble.

Hsin-chun Lu is now an assistant research fellow in the Institute of Ethnology at Academia Sinica, Taiwan. She received her Ph.D. in ethnomusicology in 2007 from the University of California, Los Angeles, with a dissertation entitled "Constructing Musical Identities among Burmese Classical Musicians in Burma and Its Diasporas." Although her principal geocultural specialty is Burma and its diasporas, her past research also focused on Asian American music and avant-garde musical fusions among artists across the Asia-Pacific region. In addition, she has drawn much scholarly attention to the Sino-Burmese musical practices. As of August 2009, her major ongoing project is a comparative musical study concerning the Sino-Burmese musical practices in Yangon, as well as those in Taiwan and Macau. Her latest publications are "Festivalizing Thingyan, Negotiating Ethnicity: Burmese Chinese Migrants in Taiwan" (The Journal of Burma Studies 2008) and "The Burmese Classical Tradition: An Introduction" (Fontes Artis Musicae 2009). Issues of her interests are representation, globalization, and identity as exemplified by modern cultural performances.

Peter K. Marsh is an ethnomusicologist and music historian who specializes in the music and culture of Mongolia and Inner Asia. He has written extensively on issues related to musical tradition and modernity in Mongolia. His latest book, The Horse-head Fiddle and the Reimagination of Tradition in Mongolia, Current Issues in Ethnomusicology Series (New York: Routledge Press, 2009) examines the development of two-string folk fiddles and their "folklorization" in Mongolia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He has presented his research widely in the fields of ethnomusicology and Mongolian Studies, and has lectured about Mongolian music at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, American Museum of Natural History, National University of Mongolia, and as part of the Annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering. He recently served as the founding Resident Director of the American Center for Mongolian Studies, an academic-oriented non-government organization based in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. He is currently Assistant Professor of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at California State University, East Bay.

Helen Rees is a professor of ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Since 1989 she has conducted extensive fieldwork on Han and minority music in southwest China. She is the author of Echoes of History: Naxi Music in Modern China (OUP, 2000), and editor of Lives in Chinese Music (U. Illinois Press, 2009). She is currently completing a new book on the musico-ritual Dongjing associations of southwest China, and has interpreted and presented for Yunnanese musicians at the Amsterdam China Festival (2005) and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival (2007). In 2008 she was a visiting professor at the Yunnan Art Institute in Kunming, China, lecturing on world music and music ethnography.