Joseph Featherstone was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and grew up in post- war Japan. A Harvard graduate, he has been many things: a political activist (speechwriter for the anti-Vietnam War candidate, Sen. Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 Democratic primaries), and for many years a literary critic and editor of The New Republic, where he also wrote about politics and education. He served as the headmaster of the Commonwealth School in Boston. He has taught at Harvard, Brown, and Michigan State, where he and his colleagues pioneered a progressive, school-based teacher education program, about which he co-authored a book with Helen Featherstone and other colleagues, Transforming Teacher Education: Reflections from the Field (Harvard Education Press, 2007). He has written a number of other books on education, including Dear Josie: Witnessing the Hopes and Failures of Democratic Education (Teachers College Press, 2003) This book was declared a distinguished foreign contribution to education, and was translated and published by the East China Normal University Press in Shanghai. Besides The New Republic his writings and poems have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, The Harvard Education Review, Ploughshares, The Harvard Review, and The Nation. His first poetry collection is Brace’s Cove (New Issues, 2000). He convenes regular meetings of the Off Season, a poetry group in Cambridge, Mass, and is active in the Gloucester Writers Center. He is married to the writer and educator, Helen Featherstone. They have three grown children and 5 grandchildren.