Elizabeth (Beth) Schultz grew up in Flint, Michigan, spending all of her summers at her family's beloved cottage on Higgins Lake in northern Michigan. Encouraged by her parents to read and to appreciate nature, she experienced the best of childhoods, and remained always blessed by her parents as well as by her grandparents and two aunts. Beth graduated from Wellesley College with her BA in 1958 and from the University of Michigan with her MA in 1962. Her long teaching career included Baika Jo Gakuen in Japan (1958-1961), a Fulbright semester at Bejing Foreign Studies University in China (2007), numerous universities in Japan, China, Russia, and Poland, in addition to thirty-four years in the English Department at the University of Kansas. SinElizabeth (Beth) Schultz grew up in Flint, Michigan, spending all of her summers at her family's beloved cottage on Higgins Lake in northern Michigan. Encouraged by her parents to read and to appreciate nature, she experienced the best of childhoods, and remained always blessed by her parents as well as by her grandparents and two aunts. Beth graduated from Wellesley College with her BA in 1958 and from the University of Michigan with her MA in 1962. Her long teaching career included Baika Jo Gakuen in Japan (1958-1961), a Fulbright semester at Bejing Foreign Studies University in China (2007), numerous universities in Japan, China, Russia, and Poland, in addition to thirty-four years in the English Department at the University of Kansas. Since her retirement from KU, Beth has become an advocate for both the arts and the environment in Douglas County. In 2006, she established the Elizabeth Schultz Environmental Foundation, which encourages citizens of Douglas County to apply for funding to support creative means for preserving and educating others about the environment. Today, Beth continues to write on Melville, but she has also become a memoirist, a poet, and an environmental writer. She has published poems in numerous journals as well as in five volumes of poetry. She served for many years on the local committee for selecting winners of the Langston Hughes awards in fiction and poetry. She also supported the environment through teaching nature writing, through her writing, and through establishing a column, "Sense of Place," in the Kansas Land Trust's Stewardship News, where she wrote primarily about specific sites in Kansas. A long-time supporter of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, she was the co-organizer for the first ecocritical conference in Beijing in 2009....more