Joseph Pearce
A native of England, Joseph Pearce is the internationally-acclaimed author of dozens of books, including The Quest for Shakespeare, Tolkien: Man and Myth, C. S. Lewis and The Catholic Church, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile and Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc. An edition of Longfellow’s Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie with essays by Joseph and Christopher Check, was recently published by the American Chesterton Society. A sought-after speaker, he has hosted two thirteen-part television series about Shakespeare on EWTN, and has also written and presented documentaries on EWTN on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. His verse drama, Death Comes for the War Poets, was performed off-Broadway to critical acclaim. He is a Visiting Fellow of Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, the editor of the St. Austin Review, series editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions, senior instructor with Homeschool Connections, and senior contributor at the Imaginative Conservative and Crisis Magazine.
James Matthew Wilson
James Matthew Wilson is the Cullen Foundation Chair in English Literature and the founding director of the MFA program in Creative Writing at the University of Saint Thomas. The author of sixteen books, his most recent collection of poems is Saint Thomas and the Forbidden Birds (Word on Fire, 2024). The Strangeness of the Good (2020), won the poetry book of the year award from the Catholic Media Awards. The Dallas Institute of Humanities awarded him the Hiett Prize in 2017; Memoria College gave him the Parnassus Prize, in 2022; and the Conference on Christianity and Literature twice gave him the Lionel Basney Award. In addition to his role at the University of Saint Thomas, he serves as poet-in-residence of the Benedict XVI Institute, scholar-in-residence of Aquinas College, editor of Colosseum Books, and poetry editor of Modern Age magazine. He has also served as writer-in-residence at Grace College, Hillsdale College, and Oklahoma Baptist University and as distinguished visiting professor at Holy Cross College.
Matthew Mehan
Dr. Matthew Mehan is the Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Government for the Van Andel Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College’s Washington, D.C., location on Capitol Hill. He has been teaching and designing humanities curricula for twenty-five years. Dr. Mehan has written for various outlets both scholarly and popular, including Moreana and The Wall Street Journal. He is also the author of The Handsome Little Cygnet as well as Mr. Mehan’s Mildly Amusing Mythical Mammals, an illustrated, best-selling book of poems that James Matthew Wilson called ‘a new classic’ in children’s literature. He is currently working on The American Family’s Book of Fables (Sophia Press, 2026) to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our country. He lives with his lovely wife and their passel of children in Virginia.
Jeremy Beer
Jeremy Beer is a native of Milford, Indiana, the only place in America where his last name is not considered strange. From 2000 to 2008 he served as the top editor at ISI Books, where he was privileged to publish authors like Fr. James Schall, David Schindler, Eugene Genovese, John Lukacs, Chantal Delsol, and Bill Kauffman. He acted as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s English-language agent for more than a decade and was instrumental in getting more of his work published in English.
In 2009, Jeremy cofounded AmPhil, a consultancy where he is now executive chairman. In 2025, Jeremy cofounded a new publishing house called Creed & Culture, which will publish works by such authors as J. Budziszewski, Aaron Kheriaty, and Malcolm Muggeridge. Jeremy is the author of Beyond the Devil’s Road: Francisco Garces and the Spanish Encounter with the American Southwest and Oscar Charleston: The Life and Legend of Baseball’s Greatest Forgotten Player, among other books.
He and his wife, Kara, live in Phoenix, Arizona, with two ungrateful cats. They are parishioners of St. Mary’s Basilica in downtown Phoenix.
Amy Fahey
Dr. Amy Fahey teaches literature and writing at the Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, where she also serves as the Director of the Center for the Restoration of Christian Culture, a public outreach of the College. She is a Fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America and a Fellow of the Albertus Magnus Institute. She was recently named an Inklings Project Fellow of the McGrath Institute for Religion and Public Life at Notre Dame University. She has taught and lectured on literature for all ages, from preschool through university. Her writings have appeared in First Things, Crisis, The Catholic Herald, Columbia Magazine, and other publications. She has been an invited speaker for the C. S. Lewis Study Center, the Russell Kirk Center, Catholic Answers, the Prairie Troubadour, the Knights of Columbus Museum, the IHE Oxford Graduate Study Program, Thomas Aquinas College, and the DeNicola Center of Notre Dame University, among others.
Optional Suggested Readings
Joseph Pearce, “Longfellow’s Evangeline: An American Odyssey”
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, with essays by Joseph Pearce and Christopher Check (Society of G. K. Chesterton).
Matthew Mehan, “Hawthorne’s Rose: A Protoevangelium for America”
- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, “Young Goodman Brown,” “The Maypole of Merry Mount” in Collected Novels and Tales and Sketches (The Library of America), or any edition.
Jeremy Beer, “‘The Life of Men’s Souls’: Rediscovering Booth Tarkington”
- Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons, in Novels and Stories (The Library of America, Vol. 319).
- Also recommended: America Moved: Booth Tarkington’s Memoirs of Time and Place, 1869-1928, edited by Jeremy Beer (Front Porch Republic).
Amy Fahey, “A Good Reader is Hard to Find: Flannery O’Connor and the American Short Story”
- Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” from The Complete Stories. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1970).
- Also recommended: The House of Fiction, edited by Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate (Cluny, ) and The Art of the Short Story, edited by Dana Gioia, especially selections by Raymond Carver (“A Small, Good Thing” and “Cathedral”), Hemingway (“The Killers”), and Eudora Welty (“Why I Live at the P.O.), plus “A Long Fourth” by Peter Taylor in The Complete Stories (Library of America).
James Matthew Wilson, “The River of the Immaculate Conception: Poetry and Place in Catholic America”
- James Matthew Wilson, The River of the Immaculate Conception (Wiseblood Books).