Paul Salerni is the NEH Distinguished Chair in the Humanities and Professor of Music at Lehigh University in Bethlehem (PA), where he teaches composition, theory, and directs the Lehigh University Very Modern Ensemble (LUVME). He is also founder and Artistic Director of the Monocacy Chamber Orchestra, a professional ensemble in the Lehigh Valley.

Salerni’s numerous commissioned orchestral and chamber music works have been performed throughout the US, Canada, Europe and China. Recent commissions include Cape Cod Symphony, San Diego Chamber Orchestra, New Haven Symphony, and the Lehigh Valley Chamber Orchestra. His chamber music and songs are also widely performed. Recent highlights included performances by the Da Capo Chamber Players of two song cycles, Speaking of Love and Bad Pets, at New York City’s Merkin Hall.

As the leading expert on the music of his mentor Earl Kim, Salerni has a long history of collaboration as guest pianist and lecturer with the internationally acclaimed string ensemble, Sejong. He has performed Kim’s music with the ensemble in Korea, at the Kennedy Center, the 92nd St. Y, and the Aspen Music Festival.

Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed poet and critic. He is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, including Interrogations at Noon (2001), which won the American Book Award, and three collections of criticism, most notably Can Poetry Matter? (1992), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. A best-selling literary anthologist, Gioia has edited or co-edited over two dozen collections of poetry, fiction, and drama. He has also written two opera libretti and has collaborated with composers in genres ranging from classical to jazz and rock.

For six years (2003-2009) he served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts where he gained strong bipartisan support for the previously imperiled agency and helped launch the largest literary programs in federal history, including The Big Read, Poetry Out Loud, and Shakespeare in American Communities. He was twice unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate. For two years he directed the arts and culture programs for the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C. and Colorado. He is currently the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California.

Kate Light is also the author of four books of poetry, Einstein’s Mozart: Two Geniuses, Gravity’s Dream, Open Slowly, and The Laws of Falling Bodies. She is currently working on a musical based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses and his life. Her pieces for narrator and chamber ensemble have been performed by the Louisville Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Colorado Chamber Players, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and at the American Museum of Natural History, often with Kate as narrator. Her poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Washington Post Book World, Feminist Studies, New York Sun, and the anthologies Western Wind, Penguin Book of the Sonnet, and Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems for Hard Times, and has been featured four times on Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. Her lyrics to the song Here Beside Me are heard in Disney’s Mulan II. She has been a visiting professor at Cornell University and at Musashino Art University in Tokyo. Also a violinist, she is a member of the orchestra of the New York City Opera.