The Institute Director
Robert Atwan
Robert Atwan is the series editor of The Best American Essays, the highly acclaimed annual collection he founded in 1985. His essays, reviews, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and such literary journals as The Kenyon Review, The Iowa Review, Denver Quarterly, and River Teeth. His college anthologies and textbooks include Popular Writing in America; The Harper American Literature; The Writer's Presence; Thinking in Writing: Our Times; America Now; Left, Right, and Center; and Convergences. He has served as a consultant to the National Endowment for the Humanities, to the Ford Foundation, where he helped develop the Library of America series, and he has judged the Associated Writing Program's Award for Creative Nonfiction. Recent publications include Chapters Into Verse, a two volume edition of poetry inspired by the Bible; Divine Inspiration, a collection of world religious poetry based on the gospels; introductory essays to new editions of Hamlet and Julius Caesar; The Best American Essays of the Century (with Joyce Carol Oates), and a sequence of poetry anthologies celebrating the seasons: A Mind of Winter; The Language of Spring; The Heart of Autumn, and A Dream of Summer.
Sandy Kaye
Sandy Kaye received his A.B. from Harvard University and his M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Writing Under Pressure and Writing as a Lifelong Skill. He teaches memoir at Harvard University, and is Chair of Humanities and Coordinator of the Writing Program at Curry College. He received the Excellence in Teaching award at M.I.T., where he was co-recipient of the Sizer Award for Innovation in Education, the Conway Prize for teaching at the Harvard University Extension School, and the Curry College teaching prize.
Allan Hunter
Allan Hunter was born in England, educated at Oxford University (where he gained his doctorate in English literature) and after traveling in India and Africa came to the U.S. in 1986. For more than twenty years he has been a teacher and a counselor. He has worked for Fairleigh Dickinson University; the University of Massachusetts, Boston; Boston University and for the past twenty two years at Curry College. He is the author of two books on writing —The Sanity Manual and Life Passages—both of which use his revolutionary techniques of writing for personal exploration. He is also the co-author of his father’s wartime memoir From Coastal Command to Captivity, has written a full length critical study of Joseph Conrad and a novel, How They Met. His most recent book, Stories We Need To Know, explores the way archetypes work in the literature of the Western Canon.
Connie Griffin
Connie Griffin teaches creative writing courses at Boston College, including Creative Nonfiction, Feature and Magazine Writing, Literary Journalism, and Memoir and Travel Writing. She has published essays, articles, reviews, features, and profiles and has presented numerous papers on memoir and autobiography. Dr. Griffin received her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Massachusetts, an M.A. from Boston College, and a B.A. from University of Tulsa.
Kathleen Hirsch
Kathleen Hirsch received her M.F.A. from Brown University’s Writing Program, and has taught spiritual journaling workshops throughout the Boston area. Her writing career has included four books devoted to women’s lives, including A Sabbath Life: One Woman’s Search for Wholeness, Songs From the Alley, a story of homeless women, and A Home in the Heart of the City, a tale about those attempting to live in meaningful urban community. She has published numerous articles in national and regional magazines, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Boston Phoenix, Ms., The Georgia Review, Five Points and The New Age Journal. She is co-editor of Mothers: Contemporary Stories of Motherhood and is currently at work on a novel about women’s art-making and meaning. Ms. Hirsch has taught writing at Brown and Harvard Universities, and teaches currently at Boston College.
Suzanne Strempek Shea
Suzanne is the author of two recent memoirs, Songs From a Lead-lined Room, an account of her radiation treatments for breast cancer, and Shelf Life: Romance, Mystery, Drama and Other Page-Turning Adventures from a Year in a Bookstore. She has also published five novels: Selling the Lite of Heaven, Hoopi Shoopi Donna, Lily of the Valley, Around Again, and Becoming Finola. A graduate of the former Portland (Maine) School of Art (now the Maine College of Art), Suzanne was the 2000 recipient of the New England Book Award for Fiction and has been a staff writer for both the Springfield (MA) newspapers and the Providence (R.I.) Journal-Bulletin. Her work has appeared in Yankee Magazine, The Boston Globe Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer and the former New England Monthly. A member of the faculty at the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing, she also teaches in the MFA program at Emerson College in Boston. Suzanne is a native of Western Massachusetts, where she still lives, in the village of Bondsville.