Writers' Biographies*
In the 11 years ALAN ALDA starred in the television series, M*A*S*H, he was nominated for 21 Emmy Awards, winning five. He wrote (or co-wrote) twenty episodes and he was the first person to win Emmy Awards for acting, writing, and directing for the same series. In addition to his Emmys, Alda has won the Writer's Guild Award twice and received the coveted Humanitas Award for writing the "Dreams" episode of M*A*S*H (from a story by Alda and James Jay Rubinfier). His memoir, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, was published by Random House in September 2005.
MELISSA BANK is the author of The Wonder Spot (2005) and the best-selling The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing (1999). She was the winner of the 1993 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction and has published stories in The North American Review, Zoetrope, The Chicago Tribune, Ascent, and Other Voices. Her work has been heard on "Selected Shorts" on National Public Radio. Bank holds an MFA from Cornell University, and divides her time between New York City and Sag Harbor.
CLARK BLAISE is the former head of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He is the author of sixteen books, most recently Southern Stories and Time Lord: Sir Sanford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time.
BILLY COLLINS has published eight collections of poetry, including Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New & Selected Poems, and Nine Horses. He also edited two anthologies of contemporary poetry: Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. His work has appeared in such periodicals as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and The American Scholar. His newest book, The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems, was released by Random House in October 2005. Collins has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the NEA, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has also been awarded the Oscar Blumenthal Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize, and the Levinson Prize—all awarded by Poetry magazine. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College, City University of New York, where he has taught for the past 30 years. In June 2001, Collins was appointed United States Poet Laureate (2001-2003). He is currently the New York State Poet Laureate (2004-06).
E.L. DOCTOROW is widely recognized as one of America's great masters of the historical novel. He is the author most recently of The March (2005). He has won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award (twice), the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Humanities Medal. The March recently received the 2006 PEN/Faulkner Award and the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award.
CHRISTOPHER DURANG’s plays, The Nature and Purpose of the Universe, Titanic, A History of the American Film, Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, Beyond Therapy, and Baby With the Bathwater, among others, have appeared both on and off Broadway. His screenplays include Beyond Therapy, The Nun Who Shot Liberty Valence, and The Adventures of Lola and The House of Husbands (co-authored with Wendy Wasserstein). Durang has received numerous honors, including an Obie Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and a Tony nomination. A graduate of both Harvard and the Yale School of Drama, he now co-chairs the playwriting program at Juilliard.
JULES FEIFFER is a cartoonist, playwright, and screenwriter. Feiffer’s Pulitzer-winning and internationally syndicated 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 (a prophetic vision of random urban violence), to his screenplay for Carnal Knowledge (a controversial examination of the sex wars), to his Oscar-winning anti-military short subject animation, Munro, to his award-winning children’s book, The Man in the Ceiling.
Other works include: the plays Knock Knock (a Tony Award nominee) and Grown-Ups (nominated for a Pulitzer Prize); the novels Harry the Rat with Women and Ackroyd; and the screenplays Popeye and I Want to Go Home, winner of the best screenplay award at the Venice Film Festival.
Feiffer’s cartoons have been collected into 19 books, and have appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Playboy, and The Nation. He was commissioned by The New York Times to create its first op-ed page comic strip which ran monthly until 2000, when Feiffer decided to start off the new millennium by giving up cartooning. Taking inspiration from his three daughters spanning three generations, he has reinvented himself as a children’s book author. His first book, The Man in the Ceiling, was selected by Publisher’s Weekly and the New York Public Library as one of the year’s best children’s books. Two other award-winning books, Bark George, and I Lost My Bear, are being adapted into animated cartoons. Presently, Feiffer is at work creating a full-length animated feature for Sony Pictures.
URSULA HEGI is the author of eleven books. Several of her novels, including Stones from the River and Floating in My Mother's Palm, explore German and German-American identity in the 20th century. Hegi's work has been translated into many languages, and her awards include the Italian Grinzane Cavour, an NEA Fellowship, and a PEN/Faulkner Award. She is Professor Emeritus at Eastern Washington University, and she has taught as a visiting writer at Barnard College, the University of California at Irvine, and Bread Loaf. She has also served as a juror for the National Book Awards and the National Book Critics Circle. Her new novel, The Worst Thing I've Done, is scheduled for October 2007 publication.
AMY HEMPEL is the author of Tumble Home, Reasons to Live, and At the Gates of the Animal Kingdom, and the coeditor of Unleashed. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Vanity Fair, the New York Times Magazine, Elle, GQ, Harper's, Grand Street, the Quarterly, and Mother Jones, among others. Hempel has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hobson Medal, and the silver medal from the Commonwealth Club of California.
Born in Paris, KAYLIE JONES received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her M.F.A. from Columbia University. She attended the Pushkin Institute of Russian Language Study in Moscow. Jones is the author of A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, which is loosely based on her experiences growing up in an expatriate artistic home as the daughter of famed novelist James Jones. Included in her other publications are the novels Celeste Ascending and Speak Now. She currently teaches poetry and fiction in the New York City public schools, where she is a writer in residence. Jones lives with her husband and daughter in Manhattan.
MATTHEW KLAM was named one of the 20 best young fiction writers in America by The New Yorker in 1999. He is a recipient of a Guggenheim, a PEN/Robert Bingham Award, an NEA grant, a Whiting Writers' Award, and an O. Henry Award. His first book, Sam the Cat and Other Stories (Vintage), was selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and Esquire, was chosen by Borders Books for their New Voices Series, and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, GQ, Harper’s, Nerve, and The New York Times Magazine, where he is a contributing writer. He has taught creative writing at the University of Michigan, American University, and Stockholm University in Sweden.
PATRICIA MARX writes books and magazine pieces. She also writers for film and television and her television credits include Saturday Night Live and Rugrats. Among her books are: How To Regain Your Virginity, Blockbuster, You Can Never Go Wrong By Lying, and several children’s books illustrated by New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, including Now Everybody Really Hates Me and Now I Will Never Leave the Dinner Table.
FRANK MCCOURT is the author of Angela's Ashes (1996), for which he received the 1997 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, Salon Book Award, American Library Association Award, Los Angeles Times Book Award, and Boston Book Review's Anne Rea Jewell Nonfiction Prize, and American Booksellers Association Book of the Year. The book was adapted as a major motion picture in 1999. McCourt taught in New York City public schools for 27 years, the last 17 of which were spent at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. His recent book, Teacher Man (2006) is the third in a trilogy that includes Angela's Ashes and 'Tis (1999).
BHARATI MUKHERJEE has taught creative writing at Columbia University, New York University, and Queens College. She is currently a professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley. The author of several books of fiction, Ms. Mukherjee won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1988 for The Middleman and Other Stories.
CAROL MUSKE-DUKES is the author of seven books of poems (her most recent poetry collection, Sparrow, was a National Book Award finalist in 2003) and three novels (a fourth, Channeling Mark Twain is forthcoming from Random House in late Spring 2007) and two essay collections, including Married to the Icepick Killer: A Poet in Hollywood and Women & Poetry. She is bi-coastal–Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California and founder of the Ph.D. program in Literature/Creative Writing there–and teaches in Columbia University's MFA Writing Program in New York City. She has been a regular critic both for the LA Times Book Review (a regular monthly poetry column) and the New York Times Book Review, plus the New York Times Op Ed and New York Times Magazine. She has received awards from Guggenheim, NEA, Ingram-Merrill, and the Library of Congress, among others. Published and anthologized widely–and on-line participated most recently in Quick Muse (July 12)–on-line instant poetry composition. Her Web site is http://www.carolmuskedukes.com.
MARSHA NORMAN was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, Hull-Warriner, and Drama Desk Awards for 'Night Mother; a Tony Award and Drama Desk Awards for The Secret Garden; and the John Gassner Medallion, Newsday Oppenheimer award, and the American Theatre Critics Association Citation for Getting Out. Other plays includeThird and Oak, The Laundromat, The Poolhall, The Holdup, Traveler in the Dark, Sarah and Abraham, Loving Daniel Boone, and Trudy Blue. She also wrote the book for The Color Purple, currently on Broadway. Published work includes Four Plays and a novel, The Fortune Teller. Television and film credits include Face of a Stranger, starring Gena Rowlands and Tyne Daley. Norman is co-chair, with Christopher Durang, of the Playwriting Department of the Juilliard School and vice president of the Dramatists Guild of America.
In the early 1980s, JOYCE CAROL OATES surprised critics and readers with a series of novels, beginning with Bellefluer, in which she reinvented the conventions of Gothic fiction, using them to reimagine whole stretches of American history. Just as suddenly, she returned, at the end of the decade, to her familiar realistic ground with a series of ambitious family chronicles, including You Must Remember This, and Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart. To date, she has published 37 novels and novellas, including a series of experimental suspense novels under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith. She has also published 23 volumes of short stories, seven volumes of poetry, four volumes of plays and many volumes of short stories, as well nonfiction works on literary subjects ranging from the poetry of Emily Dickinson, the fiction of Dostoyevsky and James Joyce, to studies of the gothic and horror genres, and on such non-literary subjects as the painter George Bellows and the boxer Mike Tyson. She is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University, and continues to live in Princeton, with her husband of over 35 years. In 1996, Joyce Carol Oates received the PEN/Malamud Award for "a lifetime of literary achievement."
DAVID RAKOFF is the author of the essay collections Fraud and Don't Get Too Comfortable. He is a regular contributor to Public Radio International's "This American Life," Outside Magazine, and is writer-at-large for GQ. He has also written for The New York Times Magazine, Wired, Salon, Slate, The New York Observer, and Seed Magazine, among others.
ROBERT REEVES is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, both published by Crown, as well as short fiction, essays, and literary criticism. Kirkus Review hailed Doubting Thomas as "a zesty, classy original," and Patricia Holt of the San Francisco Chronicle called Peeping Thomas "funny, disturbing, and brilliant." Reeves, a professor and Director of the MFA in Writing and Literature Program at Stony Brook Southampton, has also taught writing at Harvard and Princeton.
ROGER ROSENBLATT is a journalist, author, playwright, and teacher. He was the Edward R. Murrow Visiting Professor of the Practice of the Press and Public Policy at Harvard University and held the Parsons Family Chair at the Southampton Graduate Campus of Long Island University. His essays for The NewsHour on PBS have won a Peabody and an Emmy award. His essays for Time magazine have won two George Polk Awards, awards from the American Bar Association, the Overseas Press Club, and others.
A Fulbright scholar with five honorary doctorates, Roger has a Ph.D. from Harvard, where he taught writing and modern literature from 1968-73 and was, at age 29, the youngest House Master in Harvard's history. He is the author of ten books that have been published in thirteen languages, including a collection of his writings, The Man in the Water, Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969, and the national bestseller, Rules for Aging. His Children of War (1983) won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize. His first novel, Lapham Rising, was published February 2006.
AMY TAN is author of the bestselling novel, The Joy Luck Club (1989). The Joy Luck Club was nominated for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Award. It was adapted into a feature film in 1994, for which Tan was a co-screenwriter with Ron Bass. She has written several other books, including The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), The Hundred Secret Senses (1995), and The Bonesetter's Daughter (2001), and a collection of non-fiction essays The Opposite of Fate (2003). Her newest book, Saving Fish From Drowning, was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in October 2005. In addition, she has written two children's books, The Moon Lady (1992) and The Chinese Siamese Cat (1994). For more information, please visit her Web site at http://www.amytan.net/.
GARRY TRUDEAU is the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of "Doonesbury," as well as a playwright and animated cartoon-maker for film and television. He is also the recipient of an Oscar in the category for Animated Short Film, for The Doonesbury Special, with John Hubley. His other awards include the National Cartoonist Society Newspaper Comic Strip Award for 1994, and their Reuben Award for 1995. For more information, please visit his Web site at http://www.doonesbury.com/.
Poet, playwright and Caribbean-born scholar DEREK WALCOTT is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992. Born in St. Lucia, his experience of the Caribbean and of living between two cultures has strongly influenced his work. His books of poetry include, In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960, The Gulf and Other Poems, The Castaway and Other Poems, The Prodigal and Omeros, which won the WH Smith Literary Award in 1990. His plays include the Obie award-winning Dream on Monkey Mountain, Ti-Jean and his Brothers, and Pantomime, along with several musicals that he has collaborated on. His most recent poetry collection, A Selected Poems was published in 2007.
LOU ANN WALKER's book, A Loss for Words, a memoir, won a Christopher Award. Her other books include Hand, Heart & Mind. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Life, Allure, Parade, The Chicago Sun-Times, The New York Times Book Review, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Writer, and The Hopewell Review. Formerly an editor at Esquire and New York Magazine, Walker has lectured on writing at Smith College and Yale University, and taught at Marymount Manhattan College, Southampton College, and Columbia University. The author of several screenplays, she ís a member of the Writers Guild of America.
HILMA WOLITZER is the author of several novels, including The Doctor's Daughter, Hearts, and Summer Reading, as well as a book on the craft of fiction writing, The Company of Writers. She has taught The Iowa Writers Workshop, Columbia University, N.Y.U, and the Breadloaf Writers Conference. Among her honors and awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, and The Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award.
MEG WOLITZER is the author of six novels, including The Wife, Surrender, Dorothy, and This is Your Life (which was made into a motion picture, directed by Nora Ephron, and co-written by Ephron and her sister, Delia Ephron). Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize, and she is a frequent contributor of short plays and personal essays on WNYC’s The Next Big Thing. Her new novel, The Position was published by Scribner in March 2005.
*Participating authors subject to change. Schedule of events will be forthcoming.