About the Authors

Mary E. Guy

Mary worked in government for the first decade of her career and has been teaching and writing about public service ever since. Focusing on the human processes involved, she has lectured around the world on the subject of democratic administration and the everyday experience of public service professionals. With a focus on frontline workers, she studies the work lives of street-level public servants to learn how they cope with emotionally intense work, such as that encountered by disaster response teams who respond to unpredictable horrors, emergency dispatchers who answer 911 calls, detectives and social workers who must remove children from abusive families, and law enforcement officers who must respond to whatever situation arises, often amid chaotic circumstances. Their experiences illuminate the daily demands of public service and inform Professor Guy’s work. She has been honored with the Waldo Award, Van Riper Award, and Distinguished Research Award, honors that acknowledge research that has changed the way scholars think about the field. She is past editor-in-chief of the Review of Public Personnel Administration, a fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, and past president of the American Society for Public Administration. She is Professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver and taught previously at the Askew School of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University and at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Todd L. Ely

Todd is associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver and Director of the Center for Local Government Research and Training. His research and teaching focuses on the financing of state and local public services, municipal debt, education finance and policy, and public and nonprofit financial management. His background uniquely qualifies him for coauthoring an introductory public administration text. While earning an MPA degree, he gained a broad perspective on public service with early work experience at multiple levels of government. With an MPA in hand, he went to work in the private sector as a management consultant. After transitioning back to public service through a stint with AmeriCorps in rural Indiana, Todd became the program coordinator for the MPA program at the University of Arizona where he was responsible for the recruiting, retention, and career services of MPA students before earning his PhD in public administration from New York University and joining the faculty at the University of Colorado Denver. He has since received awards for his teaching, service, and research. His writing targets both practice and theory, with grant-funded research from the American Educational Research Association, Colorado Evaluation and Action Lab, Ford Foundation, and Governmental Accounting Standards Board. Recent publications can be found in The American Review of Public Administration, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Municipal Finance Journal, National Tax Journal, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, Nonprofit Management and Leadership, Public Administration Review, Public Budgeting & Finance, Review of Policy Research, State and Local Government Review, and Urban Affairs Review. Media outlets and public agencies frequently call on his research and expertise.