Kenneth Bilby, Ph.D., is a Research Collaborator in the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution. He has taught anthropology and music at Bard College, Regis University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Fellowship, and numerous other awards. His books include True-Born Maroons (which received the Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association in 2006) and Words of Our Mouth, Meditations of Our Heart (2016). He has carried out extensive ethnographic research in various parts of the Caribbean and South America, and has published many articles and recordings based on this work. He has recently been reflecting on his early fieldwork among the Maroons of Jamaica (descendants of Africans who fought their British enslavers and won their freedom and independence in 1739). He intends to take up these reminiscences, which center on his apprenticeship to a number of Maroon ritual specialists and spiritual healers, in future writings. (2018)