His heart was with the underprivileged. When he did preach, he attacked modern Pharisaism, adapting biblical passages to a Mormon ear: "As your treading is upon the poor, . . . I hate, I despise your f[ast] days, and I will not [dwell in] your solemn assemblies . . . Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear . . . Woe unto them that are at ease in Zion." Bennion passed away in 1996 just after this biography was released, leaving an enormous void where he had been a beacon to humanitarian and liberation causes in his community.

Mary Lythgoe Bradford, M.A., English, University of Utah, is the author of Leaving Home: Personal Essays; editor of Personal Voices: A Celebration of Dialogue and Mormon Women Speak; and a contributor to Harvest: Contemporary Mormon Poems, Tending the Garden: Essays on Mormon Literature, A Thoughtful Faith, A Little Lower than the Angels, and A Time to Weep and a Time to Sing. She is a former editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, and her own articles have appeared in BYU Today, This People, The Deseret News, The Journal of Pastoral Counseling, and elsewhere. She has received awards from the Association for Mormon Letters, the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies (the Evans Award), and a recent "independent scholarship grant" from the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies to research and write a biography of Virginia Sorensen.

Emma Lou Thayne holds a graduate degree in creative writing from the University of Utah, where she has taught English. She is recipient of the Distinguished Alumna Award from the University of Utah, the David O. McKay Humanities Award from Brigham Young University, and the Salt Lake City Chamber of Commerce Honors in the Arts award. She is currently listed in Contemporary Authors and A Directory of American Poets. She is a lecturer, peace activist, and writer. Her books include Spaces in the Sage; Until Another Day for Butterflies; On Slim, Unaccountable Bones; With Love, Mother; Never Past the Gate; The Family Bond; A Woman's Place; Once in Israel; How Much for the Earth? A Suite of Poems: About Time for Considering; As For Me and My House; and Things Happen: Poems of Survival. Her poetry has appeared in Ensign, Exponent II, and Dialogue. She is a contributing author to Lowell L. Bennion: Teacher, Counselor, Humanitarian and The Owl on the Aerial: Poems and Diaries of Clarice Short. Thayne has served on the boards of the Utah Arts Council, the Utah Endowment for the Humanities, the Young Women's Mutual Improvement Association, and currently the Deseret News. She and her husband reside in Salt Lake City. They have five daughters and sixteen grandchildren.