Jose Rene "J. R." Martinez (born June 14, 1983) is an American actor, motivational speaker and former U.S. Army soldier. Starting in 2008, he played the role of Brot Monroe on the ABC daytime drama All My Children. He is the winner of Season 13 of ABC's Dancing with the Stars. Martinez served as the Grand Marshall of the 2012 Rose Parade.

In 2003, Martinez sustained severe burns to over 40 percent of his body while serving as a United States Army infantryman in Iraq. Following his recovery, he has traveled around the country speaking about his experiences to corporations, veterans groups, schools, and other organizations.

Martinez was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, on June 14, 1983, to his Salvadorian mother Maria Zavala. He has two sisters who were raised with his mother's family in El Salvador, and his sister Anabel died before Martinez ever had the chance to meet her. Martinez has never met his father.

At nine years old, Martinez moved with his mother to Hope, Arkansas. At 17, just before his senior year of high school, he moved to Dalton, Georgia, and played strong safety for the Dalton High School Catamounts. In his senior year, Martinez suffered an injury that derailed his dream to play professional football.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE ( /ˈtɒlkiːn/, US /ˈtoʊlkiːn/; 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.

Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1945 and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature there from 1945 to 1959. He was a close friend of C. S. Lewis—they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings. Tolkien was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.

After his death, Tolkien's son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda, and Middle-earth within it. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these writings.

J R is a novel by William Gaddis published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1975. It was the author's second published book, twenty years after his first, and it won the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.

J R tells the story of the eponymous 11-year-old boy who obscures his identity through payphone calls and postal money orders in order to parlay penny stock holdings into a fortune on paper. The novel broadly satirizes what Gaddis called "the American dream turned inside out". One critic called it "the greatest satirical novel in American literature." Novelist Louis Auchincloss thought it "worthy of Swift"

The writing style of J R is intended to mimic Gaddis' view of contemporary society: "a chaos of disconnections, a blizzard of noise" The novel is told almost entirely in dialogue, and there is sometimes little indication (other than conversational context) of which character is speaking. (Gaddis later said he did this in order to make the reader a collaborator in the process of creating the characters.) There are also no chapters, with transitions between scenes occurring by way of shifts in focalization: for example, a character who is in a meeting may leave the meeting, get in his car, and drive off, passing, as he does so, another character, who becomes the subject of the next scene without any break in the continuity of the narration (though the novel is written in a discontinuous or fragmentary tone). The novel is thus broken only into French scenes (or perhaps "French chapters"). Gaddis later advised the reader not to put too much effort into figuring out each word but to read the novel at a normal talking speed; "it was the flow that I wanted," he said, "for the readers to read and be swept along -- to participate. And enjoy it. And occasionally chuckle, laugh along the way."

Karina Smirnoff (Ukrainian: Карiна Смiрнова; Russian: Кapинa Cмиpнoвa; born Karina Smirnova; January 2, 1978) is a Ukrainian professional ballroom dancer. She is best known for her appearances on Dancing with the Stars, where she held a runner-up title, a semi-final title, and several quarter final titles. Smirnoff finally became the champion professional partner in the thirteenth season, when she was partnered with army veteran and soap opera star J.R. Martinez.

She is also a five-time U.S. National Champion, World Trophy Champion, and Asian Open Champion. Smirnoff has won the title at the UK Open, is a three-time champion at the US Open, two-time champion at the Asian Open, five-time champion at the Dutch Open, and five-time US National Professional Champion. She has taken second at the British Open Blackpool Dance Festival and she is the first woman to also ever make the "British Professional Final" with three different partners.

Smirnoff was born Karina Smirnova in Kharkiv, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union on January 2, 1978. When she was five years old, she began taking ballet lessons, followed by gymnastics, aerobics, figure skating, ballroom dancing and piano. She chose to pursue ballroom dancing. In 1992, Smirnoff immigrated to the United States.