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Throughout the summer, Great Books Summer Program welcomes special guests, authors and educators to campus to join our discussion. This series is a major feature of the program and brings fascinating and sometimes well-known visitors to engage with our young people.
2010 Guest Speakers include:
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 Dr. Richard Reeves
Richard Reeves, Senior Lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, is an author and syndicated columnist whose column has appeared in more than 100 newspapers since 1979. A new column also appears on Yahoo! News each Friday. He has received dozens of awards for his work in print, television and film. He has written for numerous publications, becoming National Editor and Columnist for Esquire and New York Magazine along the way. Named a "literary lion" by the New York Public Library, he has won a number of print journalism awards and has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist and juror.
(Stanford, session 1)
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Janis Cooke Newman
Janis Cooke Newman is the author of the Bay Area Bestseller, Mary, a historical novel about Mary Todd Lincoln. Mary was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist, chosen as USA Today's Best Historical Fiction of the Year, and a Booksense Year-End Highlight. Newman is also the author of The Russian Word for Snow, a memoir about adopting her son from a Moscow orphanage. Her writing has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Secret Lives of Lawfully Wedded Wives and four Travelers' Tales editions. Newman's travel writing has been published in numerous newspapers and magazines, including the LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Backpacker. Janis Cooke Newman lives in San Francisco, where she teaches classes in creative writing. (Stanford wk2)
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Amity Gaige
Amity Gaige was born in 1972 in Charlotte, North Carolina. She spent her childhood years in Missouri and New Jersey before her family settled in Reading, Pennsylvania. Amity graduated from Brown University in 1995, and in 1997, she received the Truman Capote Fellowship to the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop. There she began her first novel, O My Darling. O My Darling was published in 2005. Following its publication, Amity was honored as one of the “5 Under 35” outstanding emerging novelists by the National Book Foundation. Her second novel, The Folded World, was published in the spring of 2007. In 2007, The Folded World was named ForeWord Book of the Year, best book of fiction in the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and one of the best books of the year by the Chicago Tribune. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a McDowell Colony Fellowship, and a Baltic Writing Residency Fellowship, and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Mt. Holyoke College. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with her family. (Amherst wk1)
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Kurt Anderson
Kurt Andersen is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Heyday and national bestseller Turn of the Century. He is now at work on a new novel.
Last year he published Reset, an essay about how America might change for the better coming out of the economic and financial crises of 2008 and 2009. He has also written for film, television and the stage. He has written screenplays for Walt Disney Pictures and Village Roadshow. From 2004 through 2008 he wrote a column called "The Imperial City" for New York, and contributes to Vanity Fair. He was previously a columnist for The New Yorker and Time. He began his career in journalism at Time, where during the 1980s he was an award-winning writer on politics and criminal justice before becoming, for eight years, the magazine’s architecture and design critic.
He is also host and co-creator of Studio 360, the Peabody Award-winning cultural magazine show produced by Public Radio International and WNYC and broadcast on 140 stations to 500,000 listeners each week. He served as editor-in-chief of New York during the mid-90s, and he is editor-at-large for Random House, responsible for finding, conceiving, and overseeing non-fiction books. Kurt graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College, where he was an editor of the Lampoon. He received an honorary doctorate from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005, and in 2009 was Visionary in Residence at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. New Yorkmagazine named him one of the 100 People Who Changed New York. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Anne Kreamer, and his daughters Kate and Lucy. (Amherst wk3)
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Dr. Joseph J. Ellis
Nationally recognized scholar of American history. The author of seven books, including the National Book Award-winning American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation. He is the Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College. (Amherst, session 2)
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Dennis Lehane
Dennis Lehane grew up in the Dorchester section of Boston’s inner-city. Since his first novel, A Drink Before the War, won the Shamus Award, he has published seven more novels with William Morrow & Co. that have been translated into more than 30 languages and become international bestsellers: Darkness, Take My Hand; Sacred; Gone Baby Gone; Prayers for Rain; Mystic River; Shutter Island, and The Given Day.Morrow also published Coronado, a collection of five stories and a play, and both Mystic River and Gone Baby Gone have been made into award-winning films, while “Coronado” has received stage productions in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, and Genoa, Italy. In February 2010, Columbia Pictures released the motion picture adaptation of Shutter Island, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Kingsley, and Mark Ruffalo. He and his wife divide their time between St. Petersburg and Boston (Amherst, session 4)
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Juan Mandelbaum
Juan Mandelbaum has been recognized as a documentary filmmaker, and has also worked as teacher, curator and consultant. He is President and Creative Director of Geovision, a Massachusetts multicultural communications agency.
Written, produced and directed by Juan Mandelbaum Our Disappeared / Nuestros Desaparecidos is Mandelbaum’s personal search for the souls of friends and loved ones who were caught in the vise of the military and “disappeared” in his native Argentina during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship. The film is a personal journey into the past to reflect on the political and personal contexts that led so many young people to fight for a more just Argentina.
Juan's work has been broadcast on a variety of venues, from American Playhouse to Sesame Street, and has won multiple awards, including EMMY awards and nominations, CINE Golden Eagles, Gabriel awards, CHRIS award, and Silver Apple award. Juan was a producer/director at WGBH-Boston on Americas, a 10-part series on Latin America and the Caribbean for PBS and Channel 4-UK, for which he co-produced In Women's Hands and produced Builders of Images.
Juan studied sociology in his native Argentina, and worked as a journalist, photographer and educator until he left for the US in 1977 to leave behind the military dictatorship. He holds an MA in Communications from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, which in 1998 gave him the Merrill Panitt Citizenship Award, given every year to a distinguished alumnus. Juan is past president of International Film Seminars, organizers of the Flaherty Film Seminars. (Amherst Great Films) |
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Guest Speakers from previous summers included:
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Daniel Asa Rose
The executive editor of the international literary magazine The Reading Room and a regular book reviewer for The New York Observer and New York Magazine. A 2006 NEA Literary Fellow, he has won an O. Henry Prize and two PEN Fiction Awards.
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Dr. Debby Applegate
The winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for her biography of Henry Ward Beecher, The Most Famous Man in America. Her writing has won her numerous prizes and has appeared in publications from the Journal of American History to The New York Times. She has been a Sterling Fellow at Yale University and has taught at both Yale and Wesleyan Universities.
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Howard Greene and Dr. Matthew Greene
President and Educational Director (respectively) of the nation's leading independent educational consulting company. They are the authors of numerous books, including the Greenes' Guides to Educational Planning Series; and the hosts of the PBS television’s "Ten Steps to College with the Greenes" and "Paying for College with the Greenes." |
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Martin Espada
Called "the Latino poet of his generation" and "the Pablo Neruda of North American authors," Martín Espada has published sixteen books in all as a poet, editor, essayist and translator, including two collections of poems last year: Crucifixion in the Plaza de Armas and La Tumba de Buenaventura Roig. The Republic of Poetry, a collection of poems published by Norton in 2006, received the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Another collection, Imagine the Angels of Bread (Norton, 1996), won an American Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has received numerous awards and fellowships and his poems have appeared in the The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Harper's, The Nation and The Best American Poetry.
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