2023 Conference Faculty
- Laura Geringer Bass
As publisher of the award winning imprint, Laura Geringer Books, editor, story advisor, teacher and writer, Laura Geringer Bass has collaborated with many celebrated authors and artists in the field of children’s books. She has worked with numerous publishing houses and entertainment studios including HarperCollins, Simon and Schuster, Scholastic, Houghton Mifflin, Hyperion/Disney, Dreamworks, Fox, and CBS.
She develops picture books, illustrated novels and YAs in partnership with Shannon Associates LLC, a global talent agency representing over 200 writers and artists worldwide. She teaches writing workshops privately and at the JCC and is a faculty member of New York Writer’s Workshop (NYWW), an instructor for Prison Writes serving teens at risk through New York City's Administration for Children’s Services' Close to Home program (ACS), and a mentor for Girls Write Now.
Laura is the author of twenty books for children including the bestselling A Three Hat Day, an ALA Notable Book illustrated by Arnold Lobel, a Top Ten featured selection on LeVar Burton’s Reading Rainbow. Her YA fantasy, Sign of the Qin, an ALA Best Book was shortlisted for the Printz award. Myth Men, her popular series of graphic novels was adapted by CBS as an animated TV show. Her novel for middle graders, The Girl with More than One Heart, is was published by Abrams in 2018. Laura’s love of story informs her service on the board of First Book, a non-profit organization that has delivered over 150 million books into the hands of children in need.
- Sarah Bowlin
Sarah Bowlin joined Aevitas Creative Management as an agent in 2017. Before becoming an agent, she spent a decade as an editor of literary fiction and nonfiction, first at Riverhead Books and most recently at Henry Holt & Company.
She is interested in work that simultaneously captivates and challenges and in her time as an editor she worked with many acclaimed and award-winning writers including Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Sheila Heti, Salvatore Scibona, Helen Phillips, Rachel Khong, and Julie Buntin. As an agent, she works with emerging and established voices including the Giller Prize-winning Souvankham Thammavongsa, PEN Bingham Award-winning novelist Vanessa Veselka, and acclaimed voices in fiction and nonfiction including Aysegul Savas, Lynn Steger Strong, Gene Kwak, Ashley Nelson Levy, Jasmin Hakes, R.K. Russell, Sabrina Orah Mark, Elisa Albert, Ismail Muhammad, Janika Oza, and Kevin Nguyen, among others. She is interested in bold voices and work that bends genre or forms—specifically stories of strong or difficult women and unexpected narratives of place, identity, and the shifting ways we see ourselves and each other. Originally from the South, she now lives in Los Angeles.
- Billy Collins
Billy Collins, no stranger to the Southampton Writers’ Conference, is a former distinguished professor at Lehman College (CUNY). He has also been a visiting writer at Sarah Lawrence, Columbia, Ohio State, Beloit College and Arizona State. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and he served as U.S. Poet Laureate. His latest collection of poems, Musical Tables, was published last year.
- Lilly Dancyger
Lilly Dancyger is the author of Negative Space(2021), a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards; and the editor of Burn It Down (2019), a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women's anger. She is currently at work on First Love, a collection of essays about the power and complexity of female friendship, forthcoming from The Dial Press. Lilly's writing has been published by Guernica, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Longreads, The Washington Post, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. She lives in New York City, and you can find her on Twitter at @lillydancyger.
- Carmen Gimenez
Carmen Giménez is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the NBCC Award in Poetry and Be Recorder (Graywolf Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry, the PEN Open Book Award, the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She was awarded the Academy of American Poets Fellowship Prize in 2020. A 2019 Guggenheim fellow, she served as the publisher of Noemi Press for twenty years. She now serves as publisher and director for Graywolf Press.
- Julie Hedlund
Julie Hedlund is an award-winning children’s book author from Boulder, Colorado.
Her titles include: Over, Bear! Under Where? (Philomel, 2021), My Love for You is the Sun (Little Bahalia Publishing, 2014), A Troop is a Group of Monkeys (Little Bahalia Publishing, 2013) and the forthcoming Song Afer Song: The Musical Life of Julie Andrews (Little Bee Books, 2023).
Julie the founder of the 12 x 12 Picture Book Writing Challenge, which boasts more than 2000 members. She is also a co-founder of Picture Book Summit, an annual online conference celebrating its 9th anniversary in 2023, and the co-creator (with Emma Walton Hamilton) of The Complete Picture Book Submissions System. Julie is a sought-after speaker at writing industry events, schools and libraries, bookstores, and book festivals.
- Ladee Hubbard
Ladee Hubbard is the author of two novels: The Talented Ribkins which received the 2017 Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction and the 2018 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, and The Rib King, which was named one of the most important books of 2021 by Time Magazine. The Last Suspicious Holdout, her collection of short stories, was published in 2022. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Award, The Berlin Prize and a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship and has also received fellowships from Hedgebrook, MacDowell and the Sacatar Foundation, among other organizations. She received a BA in English from Princeton University, a MFA in Creative Writing from The University of Wisconsin, Madison and a PhD in Folklore and Mythology from the University of California, Los Angeles. She currently lives in New Orleans.
- Matthew Klam
Matthew Klam was named one of the twenty best fiction writers in America under 40 by The New Yorker. He’s a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Robert Bingham/PEN Award, a Whiting Writer’s Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts. His first book, Sam The Cat and Other Stories, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year in the category of first fiction, was selected as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, Esquire Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The Kansas City Star, and by the Borders for their New Voices series. His second book, Who Is Rich?, was selected as Notable Book of the Year by The New York Timesand The Washington Post, and was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Esquire, GQ Magazine, and The New York Times Magazine. He is a graduate of the University of New Hampshire and Hollins College, and has taught creative writing in many places including Johns Hopkins University, St. Albans School, American University, and Stockholm University in Sweden.
- Maya Shanbhag Lang
Maya Shanbhag Lang is the author of What We Carry, named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a best memoir of the year by Amazon, Bookshop.Org, "Good Morning America," and others. She is also the author of The Sixteenth of June, a satire of James Joyce's Ulysses, long listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Lang holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and lives in New York with her daughter.
- Frederic Tuten
Frederic Tuten grew up in the Bronx and later lived in Latin and South America and Paris. He wrote about Brazilian CinemaNovo and taught film and literature at the University of Paris 8.
He has written about art, literature and film in ArtForum, The New York Times, Vogue; was an actor in an Alain Resnais movie; taught with Paul Bowles in Morocco; co-wrote the cult-classic Possession, and along the way, earned three Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry award, a PhD in literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He is the author of five novels (The Adventures of Mao on the Long March; Tintin in the New World; Tallien: A Brief Romance; Van Gogh’s Bad Café; The Green Hour), a memoir (My Young Life) and a book of inter-related short stories: Self Portraits. In 2022, he released two books: a collection of short stories, The Bar at Twilight, and On a Terrace in Tangier, a book of forty drawings and stories.
- Meg Wolitzer
Meg Wolitzer’s novels include The Female Persuasion, The Interestings, The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife, which was made into a film that garnered Glenn Close an Academy Award nomination. Wolitzer, who has also written books for young readers, was guest editor of The Best American Short Stories 2017. Her short fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, The Pushcart Prize, and The Best American Short Stories. She has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Columbia University’s School of the Arts. Skidmore College, and the 92nd Street Y, and along with singer-songwriter Suzzy Roche, Wolitzer was a guest artist in the Princeton Atelier at Princeton University.
- Emma Walton Hamilton
Emma Walton Hamilton is a best-selling and award-winning author, editor, stage, television and podcast writer/producer and arts educator. Together with her mother, Julie Andrews, she has co-authored over thirty books for children and adults, nine of which have been on the New York Times best-seller list, including The Very Fairy Princess series (#1 NY Times Bestseller), Andrews’ second memoir, Home Work: A Memoir of My Hollywood Years and most recently, The First Notes: The Story of Do, Re, Mi.A Bridport Prize-winning poet, Emma recently published a poetry collection entitled Door to Door (Andrews McMeel Publishing) and her book for parents and caregivers, Raising Bookworms: Getting Kids Reading for Pleasure and Empowerment, premiered as a #1 best-seller on Amazon.com in the literacy category and won a Parent’s Choice Gold Medal.
Emma was a two-time Emmy Award nominee for her role as Executive Producer and Writer for Julie’s Greenroom, a children’s television program about the performing arts created for Netflix, starring Julie Andrews and co-produced by the Jim Henson Company. Emma is also a Grammy Award-winning voice-over artist, having provided voicing for numerous audiobooks, including Julie Andrews’ Collection of Poems, Songs and Lullabies (2010 Grammy Award, Best Spoken Word Album for Children), as well as numerous radio, television, theater and industrial spots. She and her mother co-host and co-produce Julie’s Library, a story-time podcast for family audiences produced by American Public Media.
A faculty member for Stony Brook University’s MFA in Creative Writing and Literature, Emma teaches all forms of children’s book writing and serves as Director of the annual Children’s Literature Conference, as well as Executive Director of the Young Artists and Writers Project (YAWP), an interdisciplinary writing program for middle and high school students.
Other guests include:
Sarah Bedingfield - Levine Greenberg Rostan
Sarah Bowlin - Aevitas
Vanessa Cuti - Author
Annelise Finegan - Translator
Lucas Hnath - Playwright
Vijay Seshadri - Poet
Victoria Skurnick - Levine Greenberg Rostan
Kendall Storey - Editor
Sabrina Taitz - WWE
Meg Wolitzer - Author
and more
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