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.
ANNETTE HANDLEY CHANDLER is the Director of the Southampton Screenwriting Conference and teaches Screenwriting through the MFA Writing & Literature program. She has produced films for Paramount Pictures, Disney, PBS, ABC and CBS. Among them, the 2001 Emmy Award winning Ansel Adams: A Documentary directed by Ric Burns. A former literary agent and ABC programming executive in Los Angeles, Handley Chandler taught screenwriting at UCLA and Pepperdine University. Locally, she has written, directed and produced Plum TV's documentary on vintner/sculptor Walter Channing. She writes fiction and has been published in numerous publications including the East Hampton Star, The Southampton Press and HamptonStyle Magazine.
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).
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 most recent novel, The Worst Thing I've Done, was published in 2007.
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.
THOMAS LUX has published more than 10 collections of poetry, the most recent being God Particles in 2008. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A previous poet in residence at Emersion College, Lux has also sat on the faculty at Sarah Lawrence College and at the Warren Wilson MFA Program. Currently he resides as the Bourne Chair in poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
EMILY MANN is in her nineteenth season as Artistic Director of McCarter Theatre. Ms. Mann wrote and directed Having Our Say, adapted from the book by Sarah L. Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany with Amy Hill Hearth. The Broadway production was nominated for three Tony awards, an Outer Critics and a Drama Desk award. Ms. Mann also wrote the teleplay for Having Our Say which received a Peabody Award, a Christopher Award and was a nomination for outstanding achievement in television and radio by the Writers Guild of America. Her other plays include Annulla, Meshugah, An Autobiography, Greensboro (A Requiem), Mrs. Packard and Execution of Justice. She received an Obie Award for her direction of the New York run of Edward Albee’s All Over. She received a Bay Area Theatre Critics Award, a Playwriting Award from the Women’s Committee of the Dramatists Guild, a Burns Mantle Yearbook Best Play Citation, and a Drama Desk nomination. Her play, Still Life, won six Obie Awards, including Distinguished Playwriting and Distinguished Directing. A recipient of the prestigious Hull-Warriner Award and the Edward Albee Last Frontier Directing Award, Ms. Mann is a member of the Dramatists Guild and serves on its Council. She received an Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts from Princeton University. A collection of her plays, Testimonies: Four Plays, has been published by Theatre Communications Group, Inc.
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.
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.
JULIE SHEEHAN's honors include a 2008 Whiting Writer’s Award, a 2009 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, the Barnard Women Poets Prize for her second collection of poems, Orient Point, and the Poets Out Loud Prize for her first book, Thaw. Her third collection, Bar Book: Poems & Otherwise, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.
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/.
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 eight novels, which include The Ten-Year Nap; The Position; and The Wife, among others. Her short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize. Wolitzer has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, Columbia University, Skidmore College, the University of Houston, and Boston University. In the fall she will teach an advanced fiction class at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd St. Y.
*Participating authors subject to change. Schedule of events will be forthcoming.