Thomas S. Hischak is an internationally recognized writer and teacher in the performing arts and the author of thirty-eight published plays that are performed in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and Australia. He is emeritus professor of theatre at the State University of New York College at Cortland, a Fulbright scholar, and the author of twenty-six nonfiction books about theatre, film, and popular music, including The Rodgers and Hammerstein Encyclopedia (2007), The Oxford Companion to the American Musical (2008), and Musicals in Film: A Guide to the Genre (2016). Hischak is also the author of The Encyclopedia of Film Composers (2015) and Theatre as Human Action: An Introduction to Theatre Arts, Second Edition (2016), both published by Rowman & Littlefield.