Conference Faculty
Billy Collins, Poetry
Billy Collins is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning and Picnic, Lightning. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York and a visiting writer at Sarah Lawrence College. Mr. Collins was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2001-2002.
Bharati Mukherjee, Fiction
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.
Frank McCourt Memoir
Frank McCourt is the author of Angela's Ashes, for which he won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Boston Book Review's Non-Fiction Prize, the ABBY Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Mr. McCourt taught in the New York City public schools for twenty-seven years, the last seventeen of which were spent at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. He is also the author of 'Tis.
Clark Blaise, Short Story
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 Time Lord: Sir Sanford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time.
Roger Rosenblatt, Literary Essay
Roger Rosenblatt is a contributing editor and writer for Time and The New Republic and he appears as a regular essayist on PBS' NewsHour. He is the author of numerous books, most recently Anything Can Happen: Notes on My Inadequate Life and Yours, and the recipient of numerous awards, including the Emmy, two George Polk Awards and the Peabody Award.
 Matthew Klam and Melissa Bank, Fiction
Matthew Klam was named one of the twenty best young fiction writers in America by The New Yorker in 1999. He's a recipient of a Robert Bingham/PEN Award, a National Endowment of the Arts, a Whiting Writer's Award, and an O Henry Award. His first book, Sam The Cat and Other Stories, was selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times, among others, and by Borders for their New Voices series. He has taught creative writing at St. Albans School, American University, Stockholm University in Sweden and Southampton Graduate Campus.
 Melissa Bank is the author of the best-selling The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing. She was the winner of the 1993 Nelson Algren Award for short fiction and has published stories in The North American Review, Zoetrope, Ascent, and Other Voices. Bank holds an MFA from Cornell University, and divides her time between New York City and Sag Harbor. She is currently working on a new novel.
Carol Muske-Dukes, Poetry
Carol Muske (Carol Muske Dukes in fiction) is a poet, novelist and essayist whose most recent publication is the collection of poetry, Sparrow, released by Random House in 2003. She is the Director of the new PhD Program in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, where she teaches English and Creative Writing. Muske Dukes, a critic for the New York Times Book Review and the LA Times Book Review, is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the Castagnola award from the Poetry Society of America and several Pushcart Prizes. She lives in Los Angeles.
Christopher Durang, Playwriting
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, 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 currently co-chairs the playwriting program at Juilliard.
Robert Reeves, Writers Conference Director
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, who regularly teaches at Southampton Graduate Campus, has also taught writing at Harvard and Princeton.
Guest Speakers
Nora Ephron
Nora Ephron is the author of two collections of essays, Crazy Salad and Scribble, Scribble. Her screenplays include Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally and Sleepless in Seattle. Ephron graduated from Wellesley College and worked as a reporter for the New York Post before beginning a career as an essayist and screenwriter. She is a member of the Writers Guild of America, the Authors Guild, the Directors Guild of America, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Annette Gordon-Reed
Annette Gordon-Reed became interested in Thomas Jefferson in elementary school after reading a children's biography of him, narrated by a fictional slave boy. At fourteen, she joined the Book-of-the-Month Club (after having concealed her status as a minor) to receive Fawn Brodie's biography, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Portrait. She continued her study of Jefferson's life at Dartmouth College, where she majored in History, graduating in 1981. She attended Harvard Law School, where she was a member of the Law Review. Gordon-Reed is Professor of Law at New York Law School. She is the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy and the editor of Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History.
Bruce Jay Friedman
Bruce Jay Friedman's brand of Jewish humor lies somewhere between Woody Allen's dark, paranoid musings and Henny Youngman's quick-fire one-liners. An author, screenwriter and playwright, Mr. Friedman started his career as an editor and short story writer. Friedman began writing novels in the early 1960s. He turned to the screen in 1971 with The Owl and the Pussycat, adapted from William Manhof's play. He went on to provide the story for Neil Simon's The Heartbreak Kid (1972) and to write the successful comedies Stir Crazy and Doctor Detroit. Friedman's book, The Lonely Guy's Book of Life, provided the basis for the Steve Martin vehicle, The Lonely Guy (1984). Neil Simon did the adaptation, while TV veterans Ed Weinberger and Stan Daniels (of Taxi fame) wrote the screenplay. In 1984, Friedman enjoyed a major success with Splash (Friedman was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay). As an actor, Friedman has appeared in two films directed by Woody Allen: Another Woman (1988) and Husbands and Wives (1992).
Kaylie Jones
Born in Paris, Kaylie Jones received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her MFA 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, and fiction at Southampton Graduate Campus. Jones lives with her husband and daughter in Manhattan.
Peter Matthiessen
Joyce Carol Oates
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."
Photo Credit: ©Jacques Lowe
Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe will be the 2004 Conference key note speaker. He is the author of Hooking Up, published by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux in 2000.
Chip Cooper
Chip Cooper is an award-winning photographer with four published photography books. He has shown his work in exhibitions from France to Costa Rica to Washington, D.C. He is a past recipient of an art fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts. His images from Silent in the Land were included in Communications Arts Photography Annual. He is currently an instructor in the Art Department and Director of Photography at the University of Alabama. His photography can be found in Common Threads: Photographs and Stories from the South and Silent in the Land.
More information:
Summer Programs
Southampton Graduate Campus of Long Island University
239 Montauk Highway
Southampton, New York 11968
Phone: 631-287-8175
Fax: 631-287-8253
writers@southampton.liu.edu
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