2007 Nonfiction Participants

Listed in alphabetical order

Deborah Cramer

For All the Water in the Sea: The Future of the Oceans - Saturday 12:30 PM

Deborah Cramer writes about science and the environment. Her book, Great Waters: An Atlantic Passage, was called "lyrical…a wonderful account that reveals an eclectic, comprehensive intelligence." She lives in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Mark Feeney

The Biographer and the Icon - Saturday 3:30 PM

Mark Feeney started as a researcher in the Boston Globe's library in 1979. He has been assistant book editor, book editor, editor of the Globe’s weekly section of news analysis and commentary, and a staff writer for the Boston Globe Magazine. Currently an arts writer and photography reviewer for the Globe's Living/Arts section, Feeney has also written for the paper's news, food, and “At Home” sections and its editorial page. His work has appeared in the New Republic, Commonweal, the Los Angeles Times, Newsday, Harper's, The American Scholar, The Washington Monthly, and the New York Observer.

A past vice president for publications of the National Book Critics Circle, Feeney was a finalist for the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for “Wing tips on the beach,” an essay about Richard Nixon's life and career on the occasion of the former president's eightieth birthday. His book Nixon at the Movies: A Book about Belief was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2004.

Born in Winchester and raised in Reading, Massachusetts, he graduated from Harvard College in June 1979. Since 2004, he has been a lecturer in American Studies at Brandeis University. This spring, he is Robbins Professor of Writing at Princeton University. He lives with his wife and their son in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Bill Flanagan

Crossing Over: How the Music of Juke Joints, Churches, Street Corners, Elks Clubs, the Chitlin Circuit and Concert Halls Found the Mainstream - Saturday 10:00 AM

Bill Flanagan is Senior Vice President of MTV International where he oversees the development of TV shows for the dozens of MTV and VH1 channels around the world.  He is also an on-air correspondent on CBS News' Sunday Morning. He is the author of U2 at the End of the World, a book about two years he spent circling the globe with Bono, and Written in My Soul, a critically acclaimed collection of conversations with Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, Mick Jagger and other rock songwriters.  He has written for Esquire, Spy, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, GQ, Men's Journal, and many other magazines and newspapers. 

Flanagan's first novel A&R was published by Random House in 2000 and his newest novel, New Bedlam, will be published by The Penguin Press in August 2007.

Nelson George

Crossing Over: How the Music of Juke Joints, Churches, Street Corners, Elks Clubs, the Chitlin Circuit and Concert Halls Found the Mainstream - Saturday 10:00 AM

Nelson George is an author, music and culture critic, journalist, and filmmaker. He has been nominated twice for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Nelson served as a music editor for Billboard magazine from 1982 to 1989, during which time he published several influential books, Where Did Our Love Go: The Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound, and The Death of Rhythm & Blues. He has authored fifteen non-fiction books, including the bestseller The Michael Jackson Story in 1984, Blackface: Reflections on African-Americans and the Movies in 1994, Elevating the Game: Black Men and basketball in 1992 and Hip Hop America in 1998. His works of fiction include Urban Romance, Seduced:  Life & Times of a One Hit Wonder, One Woman Short, Show & Tell, and Night Work.

He first got involved in film when, in 1986, he helped to finance director Spike Lee's debut feature She's Gotta Have It. In 1991 he co- wrote the Halle Berry vehicle Strictly Business and in 1993 Nelson was co-creator of the movie CB4 starring comedian, Chris Rock. In 2004, he made a short called To Be a Black Man, starring Samuel L.. Jackson, and a documentary called A Great Day in Hip Hop. Both titles have been aired in festivals in New York, London, and Amsterdam. In 2004, he executive produced the HBO film Everyday People that debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004. Nelson's directorial debut, Life Support, starring Queen Latifah, aired on HBO on March 10, 2007.

Peter Guralnick

A Conversation with Peter Guralnick - Friday 6:00 PM
Crossing Over: How the Music of Juke Joints, Churches, Street Corners, Elks Clubs, the Chitlin Circuit and Concert Halls Found the Mainstream - Saturday 10:00 AM
The Biographer and the Icon - Saturday 3:30 PM
Black, White & Blues - Saturday 7:00 PM

Peter Guralnick has been widely hailed as the preeminent chronicler of twentieth-century American roots music. He has been called "a national resource" by Nat Hentoff for work that has argued passionately and persuasively for the vitality of this country's intertwined black and white traditions (blues, gospel, country, soul, and rock 'n' roll) as well as for their integral place in mainstream culture. His books include the prize-winning two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love, which the New York Times Book Review declared to be "not simply the finest rock-and-roll biography ever written; it must be ranked among the most ambitious and crucial biographical undertakings yet devoted to a major American figure of the second half of the twentieth century." Other books include an acclaimed trilogy on American roots music, Sweet Soul Music, Lost Highway, and Feel Like Going Home; the biographical inquiry Searching for Robert Johnson; and the novel Nighthawk Blues. His latest book, Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke, has been hailed as "monumental, panoramic, an epic tale told against a backdrop of brilliant, shimmering music, intense personal melodrama, and vast social changes." Guralnick lives on Massachusetts’ North Shore.

Wil Haygood

Wil Haygood Reads from In Black and White: The Life of Sammy Davis, Jr.
- Saturday 1:00 PM
The Biographer and the Icon - Saturday 3:30 PM

Wil Haygood has been acclaimed for both his journalism and biographies. His recent biography of Sammy Davis Jr., In Black and White, was lauded by Kirkus Reviews as "an American life considered with art and understanding in a major work of biography." The Davis biography went on to win the Zora Neale Hurston–Richard Wright Legacy Award, the ASCAP–Deems Taylor Award for Outstanding Music Biography, and the Nonfiction Book of the Year Award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. (Oscar winner Denzel Washington purchased movie rights to Haygood's sweeping narrative.) Haygood's other books are King of the Cats: The Life and Times of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; The Haygoods of Columbus, a family memoir that was awarded the Great Lakes Book Award; and Two on the River, which chronicles a 2,000-mile trip down the Mississippi.

Haygood is currently a staff writer for the “Style” section of the Washington Post. For seventeen years prior to joining the Post, he was a feature writer and national and foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe. Among his journalism honors are the Sunday Magazine Editors Award, the New England Associated Press Award, the National Headliners Award, and the National Association of Black Journalists Award for International Reporting.

Donald Kroodsma

Birds Being Birds: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Birds and Birdsong
- Saturday 10:00 AM

Donald Kroodsma, winner of the 2006 John Burroughs Medal Award and professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, has studied birdsong for more than thirty years. He was recognized as the “reigning authority on the biology of avian vocal behavior” in the citation for his 2003 Elliot Coues Award from the American Ornithologists’ Union. The author of more than one hundred articles in both scholarly journals and popular magazines, his book, The Singing Life of Birds, has been hailed as "a groundbreaking book, a classic that will forever alter your experience of the natural world."

Mark Hamilton Lytle

Celebrating Rachel Carson - Sunday 1:00 PM

Mark Hamilton Lytle is Professor of History and Environmental Studies and Department Chair of the Historical Studies Program at Bard College, and Mary Ball Washington Professor of American History at University College Dublin. He is the author of America's Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon.  His recent book, The Gentle Subversive: Rachel Carson, Silent Spring , and the Rise of the Environmental Movement, was hailed as a "beautifully written environmental biography of this imposing subversive who challenged us all with her writing," by Library Journal.

Elvis Mitchell

A Conversation with Peter Guralnick - Friday 6:00 PM
Fiction into Film - Saturday 3:30 PM

Elvis Mitchell is the entertainment critic for NPR's Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. He also hosts NPR's nationally syndicated arts program, The Treatment. He has written for Esquire and the New York Times Sunday Magazine and is currently editor-at-large at Interview magazine. For the Independent Film Channel, he hosts the "Independent Focus" interview program.

From 2000 to 2004, Mitchell served as film critic for the New York Times. Prior to that he was film critic for the Fort Worth Star- Telegram where he won the 1999 AASFE Award for criticism. He also was film critic for the Detroit Free Press, the LA Weekly and California magazine.

A graduate of Wayne State University with a degree in English literature, Mitchell is a Visiting Lecturer on African and African American Studies and on Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University.

Peter Nichols

True Tales of the Sea - Saturday 9:30 AM
Peter Nichols Reads from Maybe, Baby - Saturday 2:30 PM

Peter Nichols is a journalist and writer. His most recent book, Evolution's Captain, was published in 2003 by HarperCollins, and was cited as one of the 25 best books of 2004 by the Seattle Times. His other books include A Voyage for Madmen (HarperCollins, 2001), the novel Voyage to the North Star (Carroll and Graf, 1999), which was nominated for the 2000 Dublin IMPAC award, and a memoir, Sea Change; Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat (Viking, 1997).

Peter has taught creative writing at Bowdoin, NYU, and Georgetown University. His articles and criticism have been published in the New York Times, London Review of Books, GQ, Outside, Cruising World, Salon.com, Voyaging, and most broadsheet national newspapers in Britain. “Incident in a Nowhere Place,” published by Outside magazine, won first place in category and first place overall awards in the 2002 Boating Writers International Writing Contest. “To the Abacos with Pablo,” published by Cruising World, won first place in category in 2003.

Before turning to writing full time, he spent 10 years working as a professional yacht captain, living and cruising aboard his own sailboat.

Mike O’Connor

Birds Being Birds: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Birds and Birdsong
- Saturday 10:00 AM

In 1983, Mike O'Connor opened the Bird Watcher's General Store on Cape Cod, which may well have been the first store devoted solely to birding in the United States. Since that time he has answered thousands of questions about birds, both at his store and while walking down the aisles of the supermarket.

Mike's column, "Ask the Bird Folks," appears in The Cape Codder, and his writing has been included in 2004 Best American Science and Nature Writing. He lives in Orleans, Massachusetts.

Ben Pickard

Whittier as a Local Poet - Saturday 1:00 PM
Whittier and His Elizabeths - Sunday 2:00 PM

Ben Pickard, a former Professor of English at the University of Florida, taught there for thirty-three years before he retired in 1996. He earned his Ph.D. from Wisconsin and taught at the University of California and Rice University before coming to Florida. His special interest has always been in American Literature and he has published or edited thirteen books, mainly on nineteenth-century authors like John Greenleaf Whittier and Emily Dickinson. He has also been active in the teaching of film and served as a movie columnist for the Gainesville Sun. He helped found a preservation society, Historic Gainesville, Inc., served as its president, and published three books on local history for that organization; one of them, Florida's Eden: An Illustrated History of Alachua County, was the first comprehensive history of the county. In addition he has served as president of the Alachua County Historical Society, helped found the Matheson Historical Center, and then wrote histories of both societies. In 1999 he organized the Alachua Press, Inc., served as its first president until 2004, and oversaw its publishing of eight books on local history.

Diana Preston

Taj Mahal: Passion and Genius at the Heart of the Moghul Empire -
Saturday 11:00 AM

Diana Preston is an Oxford-trained historian who lives in London. She is the author of A First Rate Tragedy: Robert Falcon Scott and the Race to the South Pole, The Boxer Rebellion, Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy, and Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima, which won the 2006 Los Angeles Times prize for science and technology. She and her husban Michael co-authored A Pirate of Exquisite Mind, a biography of the great 17th-century adventurer, William Dampier.

Cheryl Richardson

From Inspiration to Publication: How to Get Your Book Published -
Saturday 11:30 AM

Cheryl Richardson is the author of New York Times bestselling books Take Time for Your Life, Life Makeovers, Stand Up for Your Life and The Unmistakable Touch of Grace. As a professional coach and speaker, her work has been covered widely in the media including “The Today Show,” “Good Morning America,” “CBS This Morning,” the New York Times, USA Today, Good Housekeeping, and O Magazine. Cheryl was the team leader for the Lifestyle Makeover Series on the “Oprah Winfrey Show” and she accompanied Ms. Winfrey on the "Live Your Best Life" nationwide tour.

Cheryl served as the producer and host of "The Life Makeover Project with Cheryl Richardson" on the Oxygen Network, and as producer and host of two Public Television Specials: "Stand Up for Your Life" and "Create an Abundant Life." She writes a monthly column for Martha Stewart's Body & Soul Magazine, and hosts her own Internet talk-radio show called “Coach on Call” on hayhouseradio.com. Cheryl also hosts a large online community at www.cherylrichardson.com.

Hazel Rowley

Hazel Rowley Reads from Tête-à-Tête - Saturday 12:00 PM
The Biographer and the Icon - Saturday 3:30 PM

Hazel Rowley was brought up in England and Australia and now lives in  New York City. She moved to Paris to write Tête-à-Tête: The Tumultous Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (Harper Collins, 2005). The book has been translated into over a dozen languages, and has garnered considerable international acclaim—and controversy! It is among the Washington Post's Best Books of 2005. In Brazil the book was on the bestseller lists for weeks. In France, the prestigious literary magazine Lire has named it "the best literary essay of 2006."

Richard Wright: The Life and Times (Henry Holt, 2001) was written while Rowley was affiliated with the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro American Studies at Harvard. The book received cover reviews in the New York Times and Washington Post and was listed among the 2001 Washington Post Book World Raves.

Christina Stead: A Biography was published by Heinemann, Australia, in 1993, where it won that year’s National Book Award for Nonfiction, Australia's equivalent of the Pulitzer. In the United States, it was a 1994 New York Times Notable Book. In the U.K. it was lavishly praised by the nation's top critics.

Rowley's essays have twice appeared in The Best Australian Essays. She has published articles in Partisan Review, Mississippi Quarterly, Antioch Review, Contemporary Literature, Prose Studies, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Southerly and Westerly, and reviews books for the London Times Higher Education Supplement, Boston Globe, Washington Post, The Nation, and the Los Angeles Times.

T. D. Thornton

T. D. Thornton Reads from Not by a Long Shot - Saturday 3:00 PM

T. D. Thronton has written for several newspapers, most notably the Boston Globe and the national thoroughbred daily Racing Times. His work has appeared in an array of literary journals, and he often comments on racing on television and radio. He lives outside of Boston.

Colin Woodard

True Tales of the Sea - Saturday 9:30 AM
For All the Water in the Sea: The Future of the Oceans - Saturday 12:30 PM

Colin Woodard, an author and award-winning journalist, writes for the Christian Science Monitor and the Chronicle of Higher Education. A native of Maine, he is the author of The Lobster Coast, a cultural and environmental history of coastal Maine, and Ocean's End, an account of the deterioration of the world's oceans. His new book is The Republic of Pirates, the true story of the pirates of the Caribbean.