Scott McLemee
Inside Higher Ed
"Motives of the Public Intellectual; or, Confessions of an Unlicensed Burkean."

Scott McLemee writes the weekly column "Intellectual Affairs" for Inside Higher Ed. He was a contributing editor at Lingua Franca and he covered the humanities as a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education. In 2004, he received the National Book Critics Circle award for excellence in reviewing, and began serving on that organization's board of directors in 2008. Besides editing two volumes of writings by C.L.R. James, he has contributed to numerous magazines and newspapers in the United States and abroad. He discovered Kenneth Burke in adolescence, which was not recently. Read A Puzzling Figure in Literary Criticism Is Suddenly Central at the Chronicle of Higher Education (login required).

Jack Selzer
Penn State University
"Kenneth Burke, MLK, and Me: Taking a Comic Perspective on August 28, 1963"

Jack Selzer earned the Kenneth Burke Society Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005 for service to the organization, for mentoring colleagues and graduate students in their archival research on Burke, and for his publications Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village (Wisconsin, 1997); Kenneth Burke in the 1930s (South Carolina, 2007, with Ann George); and Kenneth Burke and His Circles (Parlor, 2007, edited with Robert Wess). Currently past president of the Rhetoric Society of America, he has taught courses on rhetoric, composition, technical writing, and Kenneth Burke at Penn State since 1978. He is currently working with Keith Gilyard on a book on the rhetoric of the civil rights movement, and researching another book on Burke's later career.