Michael Basinskiis the curator of The Poetry Collection, State University of New York at Buffalo. He has published 33 books of poetry as well as numerous broadsides and recordings. With more than 500 appearances in little literary magazines, he also performs his work with his performance ensemble, BuffFluxus. His visual poetry has been featured in gallery shows in Boston, Miami, Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Paul, and in Buffalo. He has also published scholarly articles on underground poetry, small press magazines and presses, and progressive poetics. He is writing a book on Charles Bukowski.
He will present a paper at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 4.
Stephen Edington is an independent scholar with a longstanding interest in the Beats. The author of The Beat Face of God, an exploration of Beat spirituality, and Kerouac's Nashua Connection, which traces Kerouac's French-Canadian ancestry and looks at its impact on his writings, he is the minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua, N.H. He is also a long-time member of the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! committee and has served as project manager for the "On the Road in Lowell" Scroll Exhibit. He teaches an occasional course on "The Literature of the Beat Movement" at UML.
He will chair the roundtable discussion at 2 p.m on Friday, Oct. 5.
Ronna C. Johnson is a lecturer in English, American Studies, and Women’s Studies at Tufts University, where she has also been director of Women's Studies. Her latest book is Breaking the Rule of Cool: Interviewing and Reading Women Beat Writers (2004), which is the companion text to her other book in that area, Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation (2002). She is working on a book-length study, Gender and Narrative in Jack Kerouac: Beat Anticipations of the Postmodern while finishing another book titled Inventing Jack Kerouac: Reception and Reputation 1957-2004, (forthcoming 2008). One of the founders of the Beat Studies Association, she teaches a bi-annual seminar, Writing in the Beat Generation, at Tufts.
Michael Hoermanreceived the artist grant in poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in 2004. His recent poetry appears in Arkansas Literary Forum, Chiron Review, Potomac Review, the anthologies Mischief, Caprice and Other Poetic Strategies, Off the Cuffs, and The Bedside Guide to No-Tell Motel, and in a Pudding House chapbook. A native of Missouri, he lives in Lowell.
He will read his poetry at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 5.
Hilary Holladayis professor of English and the director of the Jack and Stella Kerouac Center for American Studies at UMass Lowell. She is also founding director of the Kerouac Conference on Beat Literature, begun in 1995. Her books include Wild Blessings: The Poetry of Lucille Clifton (2004) and a collection of poems, The Dreams of Mary Rowlandson (2006). She is currently writing a biography of the Beat Movement icon Herbert Huncke and co-editing, with Robert Holton, a collection of critical essays about On the Road.
Robert Koppelmanis assistant professor of English at Broward Community College (Florida) and Lecturer of English at Florida International University. His publications include Robert Penn Warren's Modernist Spirituality (1995) and "Sing out, Warning! Sing out, Love!": The Writings of Lee Hays (2003). He has also released two CDs of his own music: Hymn to St. Cellular (2002) and We Survive (2007). He is currently working on a book about the new movements in American oral performance after World War II, with much emphasis on the public readings by Beat writers.
He will present a paper at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 4.
Joshua Kupetz teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he works on the Beat writers and teaches poetry writing and contemporary American literature courses focusing on disability studies.
He will participate in the round-table discussion at 2 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 5.
William Lawloris professor of English and the writing emphasis coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. He is the editor of Beat Culture: Lifestyles, Icons, and Impact (2005). With Wen Chu-an, he is the editor of Beat Meets East (2005), an anthology based on presentations made at an international conference on the Age of Spontaneity held in Chengdu, China, in 2004. During the 2006-2007 academic year, Lawlor was a fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
He will deliver his paper at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 4.
Rachel Ligairi graduated with distinction from Brigham Young University (BYU) in August 2006 with an M.A. in English. Her research examines twentieth-century American literature, specifically encounters with Mexico in the works of Katherine Anne Porter, Jack Kerouac, and Cormac McCarthy. She lives in Provo, Utah, where she works as a part-time instructor at BYU and a full-time editor for ProQuest.
She will give her paper at 10 a.m. on Friday, Oct. 5.
Jon Lipsky teaches theater at Boston University. His play "Maggie's Riff," based on Jack Keruoac's novel, Maggie Cassidy, was commissioned by the Merrimack Repertory Theater in 1994 and has been produced subsequently at the American Contemporary Theater Festival and at the Vineyard Playhouse. He is a director and Artistic Associate at the Vineyard Playhouse on Martha’s Vineyard, where he lives, and has been playwright-in-residence at the Merrimack Rep, TheaterWorks/Boston and Boston’s Museum of Science. In 2007 he won the Boston Critic’s Eliot Norton Award for Best Direction in a small company. His award-winning collaboration with jazz musician Stan Strickland, “Coming Up For Air,” was presented at the Boston Center for the Arts in September and will be touring later this year.
Paul Marion is the author of several collections of poetry, including What Is the City? (2006), and editor of Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings by Jack Kerouac (1999). His poems and essays have appeared in Massachusetts Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Carolina Quarterly and many other journals. As executive director of Outreach at UMass Lowell, he represents the campus in its outreach activities and helps establish partnerships that connect the talent and resources of UML to the community. A graduate of UML, he has a B.A. in political science and an M.A. in community social psychology.
He will read his poetry at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 5.
Eftychia Mikelli is starting her third year of Ph.D. study at the University of Durham in the UK. Her research focuses on an exploration of the quest motif in Kerouac's literature. She concentrates on an examination of the ways in which Kerouac addresses issues such as identity, authenticity, and spirituality in a post-war context.
She will present a paper at 10 a.m. on Friday, Oct. 5.
Quentin Miller is an associate professor of English at Suffolk University in Boston. He has published critical essays and/or books on contemporary American authors such as James Baldwin, John Updike, Toni Morrison, and Richard Powers. His most recent publications are a co-edited literature for composition textbook (Connections: Literature for Composition) and an essay in Forum for Modern Language Studies on Arthur Miller's rendition of Tituba in The Crucible. He is currently working on a book-length study of James Baldwin and on a novel.
He will chair the 10 a.m. panel on Friday, Oct. 5.
Michael Millner is assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Lowell where he teaches American studies and American literature. He is currently working on a book manuscript called New Sensations: Celebrity, Conspiracy, Obscenity and the Transformation of the Antebellum Public Sphere. It examines the revolution in media, reading, and minorities' use of mass culture in the pre-war years. He also has a long-time interest in post-War World II American culture.
He will chair the 3:30 p.m. panel on Thursday, Oct. 4.
Keith Mitchellis an assistant professor of English and ethnic literatures at UMass Lowell. He is co-editor, with Fiona Mills, of After the Pain: Critical Essays on Gayl Jones (2006) and the author of articles about contemporary African diasporic literatures. This year he also served as guest editor of an issue of The Xavier Review titled Sex and Spirituality, which focuses on the convergences of sexuality and spirituality in cross-cultural literatures and the arts.
He will moderate the poetry reading at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 5.
George Mouratidis is one of the four editors of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road: The Original Scroll" and is currently completing his Ph.D. on the literature of the Beats at the University of Melbourne, in Australia. He has recently written on Kerouac and the Beats for major Australian newspapers and participated in a panel discussion with Joshua Kupetz and Hettie Jones at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.
He will participate in the round-table discussion at 2 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 5.
Anne Murphy received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Boston College. For the past 25 years, she has been teaching writing courses at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. She has written poetry sporadically throughout her life, but has paid more intense attention to the craft the last few years. She has been published in the Notre Dame English Journal, Renovation Journal, and The Offering.
She will read her poetry at 3:30 on Friday, Oct. 5.
Richard Pickering is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Connecticut. He is currently the associate director for Corporate and Foundation Relations at Plimoth Plantation. His museum work involves the research, design, and funding of exhibitions, public programs, and educational services. In recent years his personal research has focused on Katherine Anne Porter's involvement with the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Fund and her 50-year attempt to write about the trial. He is also on the board of trustees of the Cape Cod Center for the Arts that oversees the Cape Playhouse, America's oldest Equity summer theater.
He will present a paper at 10 a.m. on Friday, Oct. 5
Michael Skauis a professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He wrote one of the first dissertations on the Beat Generation writers and has published books on Ferlinghetti and Corso, as well as articles on those two writers and Kerouac, Burroughs, and Brautigan.
He will present a paper at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 4, at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum.
Matt Theadois an associate professor of English at Gardner-Webb University, which is near Charlotte, N.C. He has a Ph.D. in English from the University of South Carolina, where he wrote his dissertation on Kerouac. He is the author of two books, Understanding Jack Kerouac (2000) and The Beats: A Literary Reference (2003). This is his fourth appearance at the Kerouac Conference on Beat Literature.
He will present the keynote lecture at noon on Friday, Oct. 5.
Penny Vlagopoulos is completing her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. She has taught at Columbia, Barnard, and New York University.
She will participate in the 2 p.m. round-table discussion on Friday, Oct. 5.
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