Keline Adams (Play Director) — Playwright, most recently of, Finding Home, a staged reading directed by Marlies Yearby (Rent Tony Award Nominated choreographer), at New York Theater Workshop, & Couch Side Chats, presented at NYC’s John Houseman Studio Theater Too. Playwright & director of “A History to Life,” project, creating plays & videos about historic figures for museums & education boards to incorporate African American History into education. Former artistic director of the Little Theatre in Rutherford where she produced original plays, held workshops. Teaches playwriting. Directed the 2005 Symposium’s performance of WCW’s A Dream of Love.
Neil Baldwin (Panel Moderator) — Author, most recently of The American Revelation: Ten Ideals that Shaped Our Country from the Puritans to the Cold War (St. Martin’s Press). Compiled descriptive catalogue of WCW manuscripts & letters at Buffalo & Yale (GK Hall, 1978, w/ preface by Robert Creeley). Biography of WCW, To All Gentleness: William Carlos Williams, The Doctor-Poet (Atheneum, 1984, w/ intro by William Eric Williams), received the Hands Across the Sea Award from the British-American Foundation. Published essays on WCW in American Literature, University of Texas at Austin Humanities Review, Paideuma, William Carlos Williams Review & other journals. Wrote biographies on Man Ray, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford. Published three volumes of poetry (Salt-Works Press). Served as editor & publisher of The Niagara Magazine, a journal of contemporary poetry. Founder & Executive Director for 15 years of the National Book Foundation. PHD in Modern American Poetry from SUNY/Buffalo. Currently a Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at Montclair State University.
Lee Ann Brown (Featured Poet) — Poet, Assistant Professor of English at St. John's University in Queens. Author of two books of poetry, The Sleep That Changed Everything (Wesleyan, 2003) & Polyverse (Sun & Moon, 1999), which won the New American Poetry Series Award. Founding Editor & Publisher of Tender Buttons Press. Recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Fund for Poetry, The A & A Fund for Arts & Education, & the George A. & Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation. Has taught at The New School, Lesley University, Naropa Institute, Bard, Barnard, and held residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Artists Residency, Foundation Royaumont, the Rocky Mountain Women¹s Institute, Yaddo, & the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
John Dollar (Presenter) — Professor Emeritus of Humanities, Fairleigh Dickinson University. Member of the Polytopic Club of Rutherford and former President of the Friends of the Library of Rutherford. Participated in the WCW Centennial Conference held in August 1983 and published the article “William Carlos Williams and the Polytopic Club” that appeared in William Carlos Williams: Man and Poet monograph published to commemorate the Conference. M.A. in Latin and Greek, Ph.L., Philosophy, St. Louis University.
Kerry Driscoll (Panel Member) — Associate Professor of English at St. Joseph College, West Hartford, NT. Author of William Carlos Williams and the Maternal Muse (UMI Research Press, 1987), a book about wcw’s mother, & contributing editor of the WCW Review. Most recent publications include an afterword & notes to Mark Twain’s classic A Tramp Abroad (Modern Library Classics, 2003). Recent essay, "Inversions, Evasions, Strange Machinations of Desire: William Carlos Williams and the Baroness Revisited," appeared in William Carlos Williams & the Language of Poetry (National Poetry Foundation, 2002) Currently working on an essay about Twain’s representations of native Americans, for which she finds WCW ’s In the American Grain helpful. Ph. D., SUNY/Buffalo.
Michael Golston (Panel Member) — Assistant Professor of English & Comparative Literature, Columbia University specializing in 20th century poetry & poetics, modern cultural history, avant-garde & experimental writing. Recently published an article, “Weathered Measures and Measured Weathers: W.C. Williams and the Allegorical Ends of Rhythm” (Textual Practice, vol. 18, issue 2, Summer 2004). Has served on several panels discussing WCW, recently the National Poetry Foundation's June 2004 conference, "Poetry of the '40s," for which he chaired a panel on “Poetry and the Bomb” & gave a talk on “William Carlos Williams’s Atomic Prosody: The Bomb as Allegorical Form.” Ph. D., Stanford University.
Rod Leith (Presenter) — Rutherford Borough Historian, former Chair of the Historic Preservation Commission. Established Commission’s “Houses of Worship Lecture Series.” Presenter, “William Carlos Williams’ Rutherford: Growing Up and Living in a Small Town,” a slide program of Rutherford, 1883-1963, focused on poet’s birthplace & his home at 9 Ridge Rd, which was followed by a bus tour of those places. Presented related slide program 9/11/05 on Unitarian Church, founded by WCW’s father & attended by Williams family.
Christopher MacGowan (Panel Member) — Chair of the English department at College of William & Mary (teacher since 1984). Co-edited The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Vol I, 1909-39 & edited Vol II, 1939-1962 (New Directions), a new edition of Paterson (1992), & WCW’s correspondence w/ Denise Levertov. Catalogued WCW materials at the Rutherford Library. Past president of the WCW Society. Editorial board of the WCW Review. Edited WCW poetry for series Poetry for Young People (Sterling). Most recent book is Twentieth Century American Poetry (Blackwell, 2004). Degrees from King’s College, Cambridge, Princeton. Dissertation on WCW & painting published 1984.
Judith Malina (Play Host) — Stage & film actress, director, author of several books. Cofounder, with husband Julian Beck, in 1947, of The Living Theatre, a New York City based company whose unconventional stagings marked the start of the Off-Broadway theater movement. The oldest experimental theater group still existing in the US (currently at 49 th St & 9 th Ave in NYC), with 3 Obie Awards & 80 worldwide productions, it ran WCW’s play Many Loves in repertoire for a year in 1959. Ms. Malina will host the performance of A Dream of Love, discussing her experiences with WCW.
Bob Perelman (Panel Member; Featured Poet) — Professor of English at University of Pennsylvania. Poet with 16 published volumes, most recently, The Future of Memory (Roof Books), Ten to One: Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press), & Playing Bodies, a painting/poem collaboration with Francie Shaw (Granary Books). Critical works focus on poetry & modernism: The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton University Press), The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofsky (University of California Press). Edited Hill Talks & Writing/Talks (Southern Illinois University Press), two collections of talks by poets.
Lytle Shaw (Panel Member; Featured Poet) — Poet, essayist; Assistant Professor of English, NYU, specializing in contemporary literature, art, & urban culture, poetry, & poetics. His books of poetry include Cable Factory 20, The Lobe and several collaborations with artists Emilie Clark and Jimbo Blachly. One critical book, Frank O'Hara: The Poetics of Coterie, and one anthology, 19 Lines: A Drawing Center Writing Anthology were published in 2006. His essays and reviews have appeared in Cabinet, Artforum, Art on Paper, and in catalogs for The DIA Center for the Arts, The Drawing Center, and The Sculpture Center. He lives in New York City, where he is Curator of the Line Read Series at The Drawing Center and Assistant Professor of English at New York University. Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley.
Emily Mitchell Wallace (Panel Member; Presenter) — An interdisciplinary scholar at the Bryn Mawr College Center for Visual Culture.Taught literature at the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore, Yale, & Curtis Institute of Music. Author of the descriptive bibliography of first publications of WCW’s writings (Wesleyan, 1968). Currently editing a book of essays (with numerous photographs) on WCW by his son William Eric Williams for New Directions. A contributing editor of the WCW Review from its beginning & first president of the WCW Society, she has lectured on WCW & other poets & painters at conferences, museums, & academic institutions worldwide, & has published numerous essays on WCW & his contemporaries Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, H.D., Wallace Stevens, & Ernest Hemingway. On a personal note, she stayed w/ Dr. & Mrs. Williams while working on his bibliography & traveled to Greece and later to Nova Scotia with Mrs. Williams after the doctor’s death. Panelist & presenter of “Poet Among Painters: Williams and His Artistic Parents and Brother,” a double-screen documentary emphasizing his family’s contributions to his development as a painterly poet. She has spoken about Williams’s poems & paintings at the Whitney, National Collection of Fine Arts, British Art Center at Yale, Rosenbach, & other major museums. Educated in Missouri & Cambridge, England with M.A & Ph.D. in comparative literature from Bryn Mawr College.
Lewis Warsh (Featured Poet) — Associate Professor of English, Long Island University in Brooklyn. Editor and publisher of United Artists Books for 28 years. Author of five books of fiction, most recently Ted’s Favorite Skirt (Spuyten Duyvil, 2002), three autobiographies, including Bustin’s Island ’68 (Granary Books, 1996), & 18 books of poems, including Reported Missing (United Artists, 2003). Recent works include The Angel Hair Anthology, co-edited with Anne Waldman (Granary Books, 2001). Has taught at SUNY Albany, The New School, The Naropa Institute, & The Poetry Project.
