Ted Olson is a cultural historian, editor, poet, photographer, and musician. The author or editor of numerous books, he has also published articles, essays, encyclopedia entries, poems, creative nonfiction pieces, reviews, and oral histories in literary and scholarly anthologies and periodicals. Two of Olson's books won the Appalachian Book of the Year Award from the Appalachian Writers Association, and a book he edited received the Thomas D. Clark Memorial Foundation Book of the Year Award. Webpages about his poetry can be found at http://www.celticcatpublishing.com/revelations.htm and also at http://windpub.com/books/breathingindarkness.htm Olson has produced and compiled several documentary recordings of traditional and popular music, and he has written liner notes for various albums of American vernacular music. He received the 2010 International Bluegrass Music Association's Best Liner Notes for a Recorded Project Award for the 2009 album Appalachia: Music from Home. In 2011 he was nominated for two Grammy Awards for producing and writing notes for the 5-CD boxed set The Bristol Sessions, 1927-1928: The Big Bang of Country Music (Bear Family Records); in 2012 he was nominated for a Grammy Award for producing Old-Time Smoky Mountain Music: 34 Historic Ballads, Songs, and Instrumentals Recorded in the Great Smoky Mountains by "Song Catcher" Joseph S. Hall (Great Smoky Mountains Association); while in 2015 Olson was nominated for a Grammy Award for his liner notes for Tennessee Ernie Ford: Portrait of an American Singer (Bear Family Records). Olson has also served as a producer and liner notes writer for other albums, including The Johnson City Sessions, 1928-1929: Can You Sing or Play Old-Time Music? (Bear Family Records, 2013); The Folk Box: 50th Anniversary Edition (Rhino Records, 2014); Carroll Best and The White Oak String Band: Old-Time Bluegrass from the Great Smoky Mountains, 1956 and 1959 (Great Smoky Mountains Association, 2014); and Blind Alfred Reed: Appalachian Visionary (Dust-to-Digital, 2016). Olson teaches in the Department of Appalachian Studies and in the Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Country Music Studies Program at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tennessee. In recent years he was the Editor of The Journal of Appalachian Studies, a publication sponsored by the Appalachian Studies Association, and he wrote monthly columns on American music for The Oxford American magazine and on poetry for Rapid River magazine. Currently, Olson serves as Book Series Editor for the Charles K. Wolfe American Music Series (University of Tennessee Press). From 1999-2004 he directed ETSU's Appalachian, Scottish, and Irish Studies program, and in 2008 he was Fulbright Senior Scholar in American Studies at the University of Barcelona and the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Barcelona, Spain.