Michael Sartisky, Ph.D., Editor of the new book, A Unique Slant of Light: the Bicentennial History of Art in Louisiana, was the President and Executive Director of the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. As such, Dr. Sartisky has devoted his efforts to developing the statewide program in the humanities that includes the LEH state of the art Louisiana Humanities Education Center. With its Prime Time Family Reading program, LEH has become the major family literacy provider in Louisiana and its summer teacher institute program is the most extensive humanities teacher professional development program in any state. During this period the LEH has raised its annual operating budget from $400,000 to $4.5 million and awarded more than 3,000 grants and projects totaling in excess of $68 million to organizations and institutions which foster the humanities in Louisiana. Dr. Sartisky three times has won the Ashton Phelps Memorial Award for Editorial Writing as well as six first and second place awards for editorial writing from the New Orleans Press Club. He has written on a wide variety of humanities issues and has been the founding editor of the award-winning quarterly magazine, Louisiana Cultural Vistas since 1990 and Editor in Chief of KnowLA, the Digital Encyclopedia of Louisiana since 2009. His interviews with major writers—such as Ernest Gaines, Robert Olen Butler, Richard Ford, and Rick Bragg– have been included in collections published by Oxford University Press and the University Press of Mississippi. His critical afterword to Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s novel, Doctor Zay was published by the Feminist Press at the City University of New York in 1987, and he wrote the Introduction toFading Textures, the Photographs of Lee Estes, published by the Center for Louisiana Studies, 2000. Dr. Sartisky, who has been a member of the Faulkner Society’s Advisory Council and also a member of the board of the Tennessee Williams Festival, a Trustee for his alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College, and on the Rhodes Scholarship Selection Committee for Louisiana. He has served as a grant panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education and currently serves on the Louisiana Folklife Commission and the Planning Committee of the $900 million Louisiana Educational Quality Trust Fund. Dr. Sartisky also directed the first statewide Louisiana literacy conference in 1990, and served on the board of the national Responsibilities of Literacy conference of the Modern Language Association and the Federation of State Humanities Councils. A native of Pittsburgh, PA, he grew up in New York City. After graduating from Sarah Lawrence, he received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Buffalo, majoring in American literature. He taught at the University of New Orleans for four years.