Special Guests

Cynthia J. Tong is a Tony-nominated Broadway producer and is currently the Senior Associate Producer at Tom Kirdahy Productions. She has worked on several Broadway shows including the new psychological thriller Grey House; New York, New York [9 Tony Award noms]; The Piano Lesson [2 Tony Award noms]; and The Inheritance [Tony Award, Best Play]. Cynthia has also produced several shows and concerts off-Broadway including the Drama League-nominated A Thousand Ways by 600 Highwaymen (presented across 29 venues internationally and nationally). She is a founding member of The Industry Standard Group, a BIPOC-led organization innovating Broadway by creating new pathways to investment and producing.

Cynthia is originally from Rancho Palos Verdes, CA, but now lives in a place much better suited to her anxieties: New York City. Wesleyan University, B.A. in Sociology.

John Rocco studied illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design and School of Visual Arts in New York City. Upon graduating he collaborated with actor/comedian Whoopi Goldberg creating the picture book Alice.

He was the pre-production art director at Dreamworks for the top-grossing animated film Shrek, where he created hundreds of illustrations that helped the animators develop the final look of the film. He also held positions on several museum projects including media creative director for Paul Allen’s Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame where he was responsible for designing the first film ever produced for exhibition on a completely spherical screen.

In 2005 he shifted his focus back to children’s books and created Wolf! Wolf!, Moonpowder, Fu Finds the Way, Blackout, and more. Among the many cover illustrations he has done, are the covers for Rick Riordan’s multi-million copy international bestselling YA series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, as well as The Kane Chronicles and The Heroes of Olympus, also by Riordan.

Sharon Robinson is the author of many works of fiction and nonfiction. She has written several widely praised books about her father, baseball legend Jackie Robinson, including Jackie’s Nine: Jackie Robinson’s Values to Live By, Promises to Keep: How Jackie Robinson Changed America, and her new picture book, Testing the Ice, illustrated by Kadir Nelson.

Ms. Robinson is Vice Chairman of the Jackie Robinson Foundation and serves on the boards for the Roberto Clemente Sports City Complex in Carolina, PR, Metropolitan Opera, and Urban America. Sharon Robinson received her Bachelor’s degree from Howard University in 1973 and her Master’s degree from Columbia University in 1976. She went on to receive a post-Master’s Certificate in Teaching from the School of Nursing at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1998, Ms. Robinson has honorary degrees from Medaille College (1998), Dowling College (2004), and Monmouth College (2005). She lives in Florida, and New York City.

Lois Lowry is an award-winning American author of several books for children and young adults.  She won the John Newbery Medal for her novel Number the Stars in 1990 and again in 1994 for her best known work, The Giver, the first of a quartet of novels.  Lois Lowry is also the winner of the 2002 Rhode Island Children’s Books Award.  Though her work has varied in content and style, the common thread is the importance of human connections.

Dr. Matthew Farmer is an expert on Greek comedy. He came to academia as a neuroscientist until Aristophanes’ Wasps lured him to a career in the Classics. Before joining Haverford’s faculty in 2018 as an assistant professor of classics, he was an Assistant Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Ancient Mediterranean Studies at the University of Missouri.

Wesley Morris is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and a cultural critic at large at The New York Times. Morris formerly wrote for the website Grantland, and in 2012 won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his film critic work at The Boston Globe.  He is working on a book for Random House about race in popular culture, from the 1960s to the present.

Chris Columbus visited students at Stanford Summer 2011. He is best known to audiences as the director of the runaway hit Home Alone, which won a British Comedy Award for Best Comedy Film, its sequel Home Alone 2, and more recently, the first two films in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Naomi Jackson is the author of The Star Side of Bird Hill, published June 2015. The Star Side of Bird Hill was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and long-listed for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize. It was selected for the American Booksellers Association’s Indies Introduce and Indies Next List programs. The book has been reviewed by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, NPR.org and Entertainment Weekly, which called Star Side “a gem of a book.” Publishers Weekly named Jackson a Writer to Watch.

Piper Huguley attended our Guest Speaker event at Pepperdine University. She is a 2013 and 2014 Golden Heart finalist for two novels in her Migrations of the Heart series and is the author of the Reconstruction Era novel series, Home to Milford College. Her latest novel, By Her Own Design, was released in June of 2022. Piper lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her family. 

Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published almost twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. His latest collection of poems from Norton is called Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016). Other books of poems include The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000), Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993) and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (1990). His many honors include the 2018 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, an American Book Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed.

Sarah Kay is the founder and co-director of Project VOICE, an organization that uses spoken word poetry to entertain, educate, and inspire students and teachers in schools and communities worldwide. She was a featured poet on HBO’s “Russell Simmons presents Def Poetry Jam” in 2006, and that year she was also the youngest poet to compete in the National Poetry Slam. Since then, Sarah has shared her poetry in venues and classrooms around the world.

Anita Diamant visited with students at Amherst in Summer 2011. Her writing career began in Boston in 1975. As a freelance journalist, she contributed to local magazines and newspapers, including The Boston Phoenix, The Boston Globe, and Boston Magazine, branching out into regional and national media, with articles in New England Monthly, Yankee, Self, Parenting, Parents, McCalls, and Ms. Diamant’s novel, Day After Night, returns to the land of The Red Tent to tell the stories of women who lived through the Holocaust and await the future in a British internment camp. It is a story of loss, hope, and courage set in the days before the founding of the state of Israel.

Maile Meloy is the author of the story collection Half in Love, the novels Liars and Saints and A Family Daughter, and the collection Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, which was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2009 by The New York Times Book Review and the best book of the year by the Los Angeles Times and Amazon.com. It also won the California Book Awards Silver Medal for Fiction.

Meloy’s stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and other publications, and she has received The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2007, she was chosen as one of Granta’s 21 Best Young American Novelists. Her new novel, The Apothecary, is her first for young readers. She grew up in Helena, Montana, and now lives in Los Angeles.

Torrey Maldonado, author of Secret Saturdays, published by Putnam Juvenile, was named one of ten “new” Latino authors to watch and read in 2012 and was one of three individuals featured in CNN’s Rareview: Black Latinos Balance Two Worlds.

A veteran NYC school teacher, his novel was inspired by his own and his students’ lives and in it, he writes about youth struggles with: “fronting”, bullying, friendship, absent fathers, and tough choices. Secret Saturdays has been spotlighted by ALA (2011 Quick Pick for Young Adults), NBC and others. The novel is praised for its current feel and generation-transcending themes. It made Pennsylvania’s and Kansas’s recommended reading lists for Middle & High School students, has been incorporated into curricula across the country, and is assigned alongside The Outsiders by Queens College.

Shannon Sun-Higginson is a documentary filmmaker from New York City. She attended Wesleyan University, where she graduated in 2010 with a degree in Film Studies and English.

She has worked as a Production Coordinator at Zero Point Zero Production on the documentary television programs No Reservations on The Travel Channel and Parts Unknown on CNN, starring Anthony Bourdain. She has also worked as an Associate Producer on such programs as city.ballet on AOL On and The Getaway on Esquire Network.

Jane Smiley’s novel A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992, and her novel The All True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton won the 1999 Spur Award for Best Novel of the West. She has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1987. Her novel Horse Heaven was short-listed for the Orange Prize in 2002, and her latest novel, Private Life, was chosen as one of the best books of 2010 by The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post. She has contributed to a wide range of magazines and newspapers, including The New Yorker, Elle, Outside, The New York Times, Harper’s, The American Prospect, Practical Horseman, The Guardian, The Nation, Real Simple, and Playboy, and she regularly blogged for The Huffington Post between 2005 and 2008.

Allyson Hobbs is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Stanford University. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and received a PhD with distinction from the University of Chicago. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Allyson teaches courses on American identity, African American history, African American women’s history, and twentieth century American history. She has won numerous teaching awards including the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize. She has appeared on C-Span and National Public Radio and her work has been featured on cnn.com and slate.com. Allyson’s first book, A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life, published by Harvard University Press, examines the phenomenon of racial passing in the United States from the late eighteenth century to the present.

Tom Barbash is an educator, award-winning, critically acclaimed author, and critic with many notable literary successes under his belt. His novel, The Last Good Chance, won the California Book Award and was named a Publishers Weekly and Book Sense Book of the Year. His nonfiction title, On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, and 9/11; A Story of Loss and Renewal was a New York Times bestseller and, most recently, the story collection Stay Up With Me has received accolades from The New York Times, among other publications.

As a novelist, Peter Hedges has written: What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, An Ocean in Iowa, and The Heights, which have been published in 15 languages. His first novel, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, which he adapted for the screen, starred Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio, who was nominated for an Academy Award. Peter was co-writer for the screenplay adaptation of Jane Hamilton’s A Map of the World, and for his work on Nick Hornby’s About a Boy, he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He made his feature film directorial debut with Pieces of April. The acclaimed film garnered numerous awards and Peter was named by Variety as one of the “10 Directors to Watch”. In 2007, he directed and co-wrote Dan in Real Life starring Steve Carell and Juliette Binoche.

Jodi Picoult, 46, is one of the top-selling novelists in the world with multiple #1 bestsellers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and South Africa. My Sister’s Keeper was a 2009 New Line Cinema movie directed by Nick Cassavetes and starring Cameron Diaz and Abigail Breslin. Salem Falls, The Tenth Circle, The Pact, and Plain Truth were made into television movies for the Lifetime Network, garnering the network some of its biggest ratings.

Nell Scovell is a journalist, speechwriter, television writer, producer, and director. Nell is the creator of the hit 90’s television series Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, which ran for seven years. Other TV writing credits include The Simpsons, Monk, Murphy Brown, and NCIS. She has directed cable movies and the MTV series Awkward. As a journalist, Nell started her career as a sports writer at The Boston Globe. She is a long-time contributing editor at Vanity Fair and has also written for The New York Times Magazine and Grantland.

Andre Dubus III is the author of six books: The Cage Keeper and Other Stories, Bluesman, and the New York Times bestsellers, House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, and his memoir, Townie, a New York Times bestseller and a New York Times “Editors Choice”. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, Two Pushcart Prizes, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Fontaine, and their three children.

Educated at St. Michael’s College, Castleknock College, and University College Dublin, Barry McGovern is an award-winning actor who has been featured widely on the stage and screen. McGovern has played all the major Beckett plays. His two one-man Beckett shows, I’ll Go On and Watt, has toured worldwide. In 2012, McGovern played in Waiting for Godot at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, where he was nominated as “best actor” in the Ovation Awards. McGovern frequently gives readings of, and lectures on, Beckett’s work.

Laurence Michael Yep is a prolific Chinese-American writer, best known for children’s books. In 2005, he received the biennial Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal for his career contribution to American children’s literature. Laurence Yep’s most notable collection of works is the Golden Mountain Chronicles, documenting the fictional Young family from 1849 in China to 1995 in America. Two of the series are Newbery Honor Books, or runners-up for the annual Newbery Medal: Dragonwings and Dragon’s Gate.

Chris Hansen joined the American Civil Liberties Union in 1973.  He spent 10 years at the NYCLU specializing in complex litigation seeking reform of the mental retardation and mental health systems. Most recently, he led the ACLU’s effort to invalidate patents granted on human genes. Mr. Hansen has argued cases in the US Supreme Court, and many of the federal courts of appeals, federal district courts, and state trial and appellate courts.  Mr. Hansen retired from the ACLU in 2013.

Dr. Debby Applegate is the winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Henry Ward Beecher, The Most Famous Man in America, which was 20 years in the making. She first discovered Beecher as an undergraduate in the college archives at Amherst College, from where she graduated, and continued that work as a Sterling Fellow in American Studies at Yale, where she earned her PhD.

Doris Kearns Goodwin visited with students at Amherst in Summer 2007. She is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, American biographer and historian. She is the author of biographies of several U.S. Presidents, including Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream; The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys: An American Saga; No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt (which won the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1995); and most recently, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, which is one of Bill Gates’ 2022 holiday picks.

Dr. Joseph John Ellis is one of the nation’s foremost scholars of American history. He is the author of eight books, including bestsellers American Sphinx, which won the National Book Award in 1997; Founding Brothers: the Revolutionary Generation, which received the Pulitzer Prize in history in 2000; and His Excellency: George Washington. His book, American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic is a study of political creativity in the founding era, and his book, First Family: Abigail and John Adams, is drawn from over 1200 letters exchanged between the couple and brings their story to life against the backdrop of the Republic’s tenuous early years.

Dennis Lehane visited students at Amherst in 2010 and Stanford in 2011. Since his first novel, A Drink Before the War, won the Shamus Award, he has published eight more novels with William Morrow & Co. that have been translated into more than 30 languages and have become international bestsellers: Darkness, Take My Hand; Sacred; Gone Baby Gone; Prayers for Rain; Mystic River; Shutter Island, The Given Day and Moonlight Mile.

Tracy Wolff spoke at our Amherst campus and students are still talking about it! Not only is she a #1 New York Times bestselling author, but she is also a #1 International and USA Today bestselling author of over 60 novels. Her newest series, Crave, is a vampire lover’s dream! Tracy currently writes full-time at her home in Austin, Texas with her family.

Yiyun Li is the author of A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, The Vagrants, and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. A native of Beijing and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the recipient of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, the Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Guardian First Book Award. In 2007, Granta named her one of the best American novelists under thirty-five. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Best American Short Stories, and The O. Henry Prize Stories, among others. She teaches writing at the University of California, Davis, and lives in Oakland, California, with her husband and their two sons.

Scott Bukatman is a cultural theorist and Professor of Film and Media Studies at Stanford University. His research explores how such popular media as film, comics, and animation mediate between new technologies and human perceptual and bodily experience. His books include Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, one of the earliest book-length studies of cyberculture; a monograph on the film Blade Runner commissioned by the British Film Institute; and a collection of essays, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century.

Luke Dittrich has been working as a journalist since 1997, and his on-the-job experiences have included running a marathon in Antarctica and walking 340 miles along the United States / Mexico border. He is a contributing editor at Esquire, and his articles have appeared in a variety of anthologies, including Best American Crime Writing, Best American Travel Writing, and Best American Science and Nature Writing.

Sara Nović is the author of the novel Girl at War, now out in paperback and currently being translated into seven additional languages. She studied fiction and literary translation at Columbia University, and teaches writing at Columbia, Wesleyan University, and with the literary nonprofit Words After War. She lives in Brooklyn.

Laura Dave is the author of three books, The First Husband, The Divorce Party and London Is the Best City in America. In addition to writing books, she has also worked steadily as a journalist. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Glamour, Self, Modern Bride, Redbook, ESPN the Magazine, and The New York Observer, as well as on NPR’s All Things Considered.

Laura Dave was born in New York City and received her BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania and continued her studies at The University of Virginia, where she earned her MFA. While in school, Laura received several awards for her writing including The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Intro Award in Short Fiction.

Barry Eisler is a best-selling American novelist and the author of two thriller series, the first featuring anti-hero John Rain, a half-Japanese, half-American former soldier turned freelance assassin, and a second featuring black ops soldier Ben Treven.

His novels have won the Barry Award and the Gumshoe Award for Best Thriller of the Year, have been included in numerous “Best Of” lists, and have been translated into nearly twenty languages.

After graduating from Cornell University Law School, Barry spent three years in a covert position with the CIA, and then worked as a technology lawyer and startup executive in Silicon Valley and Japan, earning his black belt at the Kodokan Judo Institute along the way.

Timothy Ferris is the author of a dozen books, among them Seeing in the Dark, The Whole Shebang, and Coming of Age in the Milky Way, which was translated into fifteen languages. A former newspaper reporter and editor of Rolling Stone magazine, he has written over two hundred articles and essays for publications such as The New Yorker, National Geographic, and Time.

A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Professor Ferris has taught in five disciplines – astronomy, English, history, journalism, and philosophy – at four universities. He is currently an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

An original Saturday Night Live writer, Alan Zweibel, has won multiple Emmy, Writers Guild of America, and TV Critics awards for his work in television which includes It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (which he co-created and executive produced), Monk, PBS’s Great Performances, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Alan has written the 2006 Thurber Prize-winning novel The Other Shulman, the popular children’s book, Our Tree Named Steve, and a collection of short stories and essays titled Clothing Optional. His humor has appeared in such diverse publications as Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Op-Ed page, The Huffington Post, and MAD Magazine.

Co-writer of the screenplays for Dragnet, North, and The Story of Us, Alan recently received an honorary PhD from the State University of New York and in 2010 the Writers Guild of America gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Julia spoke to our students at Great Books Oxford. She is an international bestselling author of historical women’s fiction. Her books have been translated into 13 languages. In addition to writing, she’s been an Emmy-nominated producer, journalist, and marketing professional. Julia has called Los Angeles, Iowa, and New York City home before settling in London.