Michael Zantovsky is the chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defense and Security of the Czech Senate, and vice chairman of ODA, a Czech parliamentary political party. He was the founding member of the Civic Forum, an umbrella organization that coordinated the overthrow of the communist regime, before becoming press secretary, spokesman, and political director for Czech President Vaclav Havel. For almost five years, he served as the Czech ambassador to the United States. Mr. Zantovsky has also contributed to the samizdat press and served as Prague correspondent for Reuters, the international news agency. A trained psychologist, Mr. Zantovsky conducted research and published in the fields of non-verbal behavior and theory of motivation. He also translated into Czech more than thirty works of contemporary English and American fiction, poetry, and drama. Mr. Zantovsky served as a faculty member at Salzburg Seminar Session 306, Literature as a Political Force, 1993.