Conference Panelists

Deirdre Bair. Deirdre Bair is the author of four biographies (Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, Anais Nin and C.G. Jung). Her work has earned her many prizes and awards, among them the National Book Award, the New York Times Best Book of the Year, New York Times Notable Books ad the Gravia Award. She has written and reviewed for such publications as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and Book Forum and has written introductions to The Second Sex and Kate Chopin's The Awakening. In addition she has conducted many workshops and been visiting writer at numerous universities in several countries. Her latest project is a book about late divorce scheduled for publication by Random House in 2006.

Emily Bernard. Emily Bernard is Assistant Professor of English and Alana U.S. Ethnic Studies at the University of Vermont. Her first book, Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten was published in 2001 and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her second, Some of My Best Friends: Writers on Interracial Friendship, will be released in paperback in July 2005. Bernard has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and was a resident fellow at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University.

Valerie Boyd. Assistant Professor of Journalism at the University of Georgia and the former arts editor at The Atlanta Journal – Constitution, Valerie Boyd is the author of Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (Scribner, 2003). Her articles, essays and reviews have been published in various publications including Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature, Ms. magazine, The Oxford American, Book magazine, The Washington Post, The New Crisis, Creative Nonfiction and African American Review. For her work on Wrapped in Rainbows, Boyd received the 2004 Georgia Author of the Year Award for nonfiction, an American Library Association Notable Book Award and the 2003 Southern Book Award for best nonfiction of the year.

Thadious M. Davis. Thadious M. Davis is Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of Games of Property: Race, Gender, Law and Faulkner’s Go Down Moses (2003), Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance (1994; paper 1996) and Faulkner’s Negro: Art and the Southern Context (1982), and the editor of numerous reference texts, including Penguin Classic Editions of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1997) and Quicksand (2002), and the co-edited Satire or Evasion: Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn (1992), she has been a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman enter for Scholars and Writers and at the Huntington Library where she held the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellowship. Currently co-editor of the Gender and American Culture Series, University of North Carolina Press, she is writing a monograph on the American South and the geographies of race and religion.

Langdon Hammer. Professor of English at Yale University, author of Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism (1993), co-editor of O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane (1997) and editor of the forthcoming Library of America edition of Complete Poetry and Selected Prose and Letters of Hart Crane, Langdon Hammer has written essays on Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Thom Gunn, Geoffrey Hill and numerous other poets. In 2003-04 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his current project, a biography of James Merril.

Jeanne Heuving. Jeanne Heuving is on the faculty of the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences program at the University of Washington, Bothell, as well as on the graduate faculty of the Department of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is a recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation and the Simpson Center for the Humanities and was the Beinecke Library’s H.D. Fellow for the year 2003. The author of Omissions Are Not Accidents: Gender in the Art of Marianne Moore and numerous articles on twentieth century women’s avant garde texts, she recently published the experimental, cross-genre work Incapacity (which she describes as combining elements of poetry, fiction, autobiography and biography) and is currently working on a book-length manuscript entitled The Transmutation of Love in Twentieth Century Poetry.

Bruce Kellner. Bruce Kellner is Professor Emeritus of English at Millersville University and the author and editor of several books about literature and art. Among them are books about friend and mentor Carl Van Vechten, including Letters of Carl Van Vechten, The Splendid Drunken Twenties: Selections from the Daybooks, 1922-1930, and the seminal biography Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades. He is also the author of The Harlem Renaissance: A Historical Dictionary of the Era and books about Ralph Barton, Charles Demuth, Gertrude Stein, and Donald Windham, and a memoir Kiss Me Again: An Invitation to a Group of Noble Dames.

Linda Leavell. Linda Leavell is Associate Professor of English at Oklahoma State University. Her first book, Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts: Prismatic Color (LSU 1995), won the SCMLA book award and her articles on Moore have appeared in various publications, among them American Literary History and Twentieth Century Literature. She is co-editor of the forthcoming Marianne Moore: “A Right Good Salvo of Barks”, is currently guest-editing a special issue of South Central Review devoted to biography in addition to writing the first biography of Marianne Moore to enjoy the support of the Moore estate. Leavell has been awarded fellowships by both APS and NEH for this project.

Diane Middlebrook . Diane Middlebrook is a professional writer and Professor of English Emerita at Stanford University. Her Anne Sexton, A Biography (1991) was a finalist for the National Book Award and for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her biography of a cross-dressing jazz musician (Suits Me: The Double Life of Billy Tipton,1998) was a finalist for the Lambda Foundation Literary Award, which honors work in gay and lesbian history. Middlebrook’s most recent book is Her Husband: Hughes & Plath, a Marriage (2003), a biography of the creative partnership of the English writer Ted Hughes and the American writer Sylvia Plath. Middlebrook lives in San Francisco and London, where she was recently elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Tim Redman. Now in his fifteenth year as Professor of Literary Studies at the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, Tim Redman, author of Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism published by Cambridge University Press, is a former Beinecke Fellow and began his research on Pound at the Beinecke in 1978. For the past twelve years he has been working on a biography of Pound.

Joan Schenkar . Playwright and biographer Joan Schenkar is the recipient of some 40 grants, honors and awards for playwriting. Her plays have enjoyed more than 400 productions throughout the world and she has been a guest artist in numerous North American theatres and universities. Her best known plays are collected in Signs of Life: 6 Comedies of Menace (Wesleyan University Press 1998) and her first biography Truly Wilde: the Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s Unusual Niece published by Basic Book[s] /Virago Press in 2000 was nominated for the National Book Award, the Samuel Johnson Prize and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. She is currently writing a literary biography of Patricia Highsmith entitled The Talented Miss Highsmith scheduled for publication by St. Martin’s Press/ Diogenes Verlag in 2006.

Joseph Thompson. Joseph Thompson is Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on the representation of education in twentieth-century African American literature and examines how schools shaped black writers’ fictional articulations of racial consciousness. He is currently at work on a book that explores these issues by focusing on the lives and works of Arna Bontemps, Jessie Fauset, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay. He received the H.B.A., summa cum laude, from the University of Delaware in 1994, and a Ph.D. in English and African American Studies from Yale in 2001.

Brenda Wineapple. On the faculties of Columbia University and Union College, Brenda Wineapple is the author of A Biography of Janet Flanner (Houghton Mifflin, 1989), Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (John’s Hopkins, 1996, Putnam’s, 1997), and most recently the award-winning biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne Hawthorne: A Life (Knopf 2003, Random House 2004). She has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and twice from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. Her essays, articles and reviews appear regularly in The American Scholar, Parnassus, The New York Times Book Review, Poetry and The Nation. She is currently writing a book on Emily Dickinson to be published by Knopf.

Timothy Young. Timothy Young is assistant curator of modern books and manuscripts at the Beinecke Library. Among his collecting areas are: children's literature, modernism, artists' books, and playing cards. He writes about modern culture and ephemera and recently published a catalog exploring the life and work of J. M. Barrie.