SOUTHAMPTON LECTURES
Wednesday, October 21
Panel Discussion with Pulitzer Prize-winning Author Jonathan Weiner
Avram Theater, 7:30 pm
Join us as Mary Pearl, Dean and Vice President of SB Southampton, and President Stanley lead a discussion about Weiner's book, The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time. Reception to preceed lecture at 7:00 pm.
 Mary Pearl, an internationally known and respected conservationist, is Dean and Vice President of Stony Brook Southampton. For the previous 15 years, she was President of Wildlife Trust. She has edited and co-edited both books and journals, in addition to publishing numerous scientific papers. She received her undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Yale University and holds an honorary doctorate from Marist College. |
 Samuel L. Stanley, Jr. is President of Stony Brook. He received a BA in biology from the University of Chicago, and MD degree from Harvard Medical School. Previously, he was Vice Chancellor for Research with Washington University in St. Louis, the Director of the Midwest Regional Center of Excellence in Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases, and a Professor in the Departments of Medicine and Molecular Microbiology at Washington University School of Medicine. |
 Jeffrey Levinton, Distinguished Professor, Department of Ecology & Evolution, has done research on a wide variety of topics in marine ecology. His major interest is in relating feeding biology of marine bottom animals to population and community-level processes. Currently, he is working on feeding selectivity in suspension-feeding bivalves using flow cytometry and video endoscopy. In the last few years, he has also worked on the evolution of resistance to toxic substances and physiological adaptation of growth strategies to temperature regimes. |
Jonathan Weiner’s books have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and many other honors. The Beak of the Finch, his exploration of evolutionary biology, is the First Year Reading for Stony Book’s class of 2013. While working on His Brother's Keeper, he was writer-in-residence at Rockefeller University. Now he teaches science writing at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. He lives in New York with his wife, Deborah Heiligman, the children's book author, and their two sons.
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Thursday, October 22
Inauguration "Writers Speak" Festival
Stony Brook Southampton, Duke Lecture Hall, 7:30 pm
With President Stanley, Robert Reeves, Roger Rosenblatt, and MFA faculty and alumni, who will share excerpts from their upcoming books. Reception to follow.
Jules Feiffer’s Pulitzer-winning cartoon ran for 42 years in The Village Voice. His sensibility permeates a wide range of creative work: from his Obie Award-winning play Little Murders, to his screenplay for Carnal Knowledge (a controversial examination of the sex wars), to his Oscar-winning anti-military short subject animation Munro. Other works include screenplays for Popeye and I Want to Go Home, best screenplay winner at the Venice Film Festival. He is about to publish his newest book, Backing into Forward: A Memoir (Nan Talese/Doubleday). |
Elena Gorokhova grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia, although for most of her life it was known to her as Leningrad. At the age of 24 she married an American and came to the United States with only a 20 kilogram suitcase to start a new life. Now a writer who lives in New Jersey, Gorokhova is an alumni of the Southampton Writers Conference. Her account of her childhood in Soviet Russia, A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir, (created under the tutelage of the late Frank McCourt) is forthcoming in January from Simon & Schuster. |
Roger Rosenblatt’s essays for Time and PBS have won two George Polk Awards, a Peabody, and an Emmy. He is the author of six Off-Broadway plays and thirteen books, including Rules for Aging and Children of War, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His two satirical novels are Beet and Lapham Rising, also a national bestseller. His memoir, Making Toast, will be out in February, 2010. In 2008, he was appointed Distinguished Professor of English and Writing at Stony Brook University. He is one of three finalists for the Robert Cherry Award, given by Baylor University to the best university teacher in the country.
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Julie Sheehan's honors include a 2008 Whiting Writer’s Award, 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, the Barnard Women Poets Prize for her second collection, Orient Point, and the Poets Out Loud Prize for her first, Thaw. She has published poems in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including Paris Review, which awarded her the Bernard F. Connors prize, Southwest Review, which awarded her the Elizabeth Matchett Stover prize, Best American Poetry, and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. Her third collection, Bar Book: Poems & Otherwise, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton. A graduate of Yale and Columbia, she grew up in small-town Iowa and teaches in the MFA program at SB Southampton. |
Helen Simonson was born in a small village in East Sussex, England. A U.S. resident for more than twenty years, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, John, her two sons, Ian and Jamie, and a pug named Sir JJ. A graduate of the London School of Economics and former travel advertising executive, she recently completed her MFA work at SB Southampton. She has also received scholarship awards at the Southampton Writers Conference. Her short stories and essays have been published in The Southampton Review, the North Atlantic Review, the East Hampton Star, Proteus, and broadcast on WLIU radio. Her novel, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, received the Bronx Writers Studio First Chapter Award and will be published by Random House in spring 2010. |