Mount Holyoke College

Wendy Wasserstein was an American playwright and an Andrew Dickson White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. She received the Tony Award for... Best Play and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1989 for her play The Heidi Chronicles. Wasserstein was born in the Brooklyn section of New York City to Morris Wasserstein, a wealthy textile executive, and his wife, Lola Schleifer, an amateur dancer who moved to the United States from Poland when her father was accused of being a spy. Lola Wasserstein reportedly inspired some of her daughter's characters. Wendy was one of five siblings, including brother Bruce Wasserstein, a well-known investment banker. Her maternal grandfather was Simon Schleifer, a yeshiva teacher in Wloclawek, Poland, who moved to Paterson, New Jersey and became a Hebrew school principal. Claims that Schleifer was a playwright are probably apocryphal, as contemporaries didn't recall this and the assertion only appeared once Wasserstein had won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A graduate of the Calhoun School, Wasserstein earned a B.A. in history from Mount Holyoke College in 1971, an M.A.
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Suzan-Lori Parks is an African American playwright and screenwriter. She received the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in 2001, and the 2002... Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, Topdog/Underdog. Parks was born in Fort Knox, Kentucky into a military family. She spent part of her childhood in Germany and "attended German high school instead of the English speaking school for military children. The experience, in addition to teaching her the fundamentals of language, showed Parks what it feels like to be neither white nor black, but simply foreign." She eventually returned to the United States and graduated from The John Carroll School in 1981. She later attended and graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1985 with a B.A. in English and German literature . Parks noted in an interview that her name is spelled with a "Z" as the result of a misprint early in her career: Parks would credit the impact of Mount Holyoke on her career later in life. While she was an undergraduate, her Mount Holyoke English professor Mary McHenry introduced Parks to Five Colleges faculty member James Baldwin.
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Nancy Bond is an American author of children's literature. Bond was born in Maryland and was raised in the United Kingdom and Massachusetts. She... received her B.A. in English Literature from Mount Holyoke College in 1966 and a graduate degree from the College of Librarianship in Wales in 1972. She taught at the Simmons College Center for the Study of Children's Literature from 1979 to 2001. She is the author of a number of books for children. In 1977 she received the Newbery Honor for A String in the Harp. Her second book, The Voyage Begun, won the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award. She has also written The Best of Enemies, Country of Broken Stone, The Love of Friends, A Place to Come Back To, and Another Shore.
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Sabina Murray is an award-winning Filipina American screenwriter, and a novelist currently a Professor in the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at... The University of Massachusetts, Amherst. The daughter of an American father and a Filipina mother, Murray grew up in Australia, Pennsylvania, and the Philippines. She received her B.A. in art history from Mount Holyoke College in 1989 and her M.A. in English and creative writing from The University of Texas in 1994. She also completed post-graduate study in fiction from The University of Texas in 1994. She has previously been a Roger Muray Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Academy and was published in Ploughshares, Ontario Review, and the New England Review. She was also the fiction judge for the Drunken Boat’s First Annual Panliterary Awards. Murray currently lives in western Massachusetts, where she is on the fiction faculty at University of Massachusetts Amherst . She is on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College.
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Peter Robert Edwin Viereck , was an American poet and political thinker, as well as a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College for five decades.... Viereck was born in New York, the son of George Sylvester Viereck. He received his B.A. summa cum laude in history in 1937 from Harvard University. He then specialized in European history, receiving his M.A. in 1939 and his Ph.D. in 1942 in history, again from Harvard. Viereck was prolific in his writing, publishing much since 1938. He was a respected poet, who published numerous poetry collections. In addition, a number of his poems were first published in Poetry Magazine. His collection of poetry, Terror and Decorum, won the 1949 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Viereck was an early leader in the conservative movement, but by 1951 was feeling that this movement strayed from true conservatism .
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Iosif Aleksandrovich Brodsky ; 24 May 1940 – 28 January 1996, was a Russian poet and essayist. In 1964, 23-year-old Brodsky was arrested and... charged with the crime of "social parasitism" He was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972 and settled in America with the help of W. H. Auden and other supporters. He taught thereafter at universities including those at Yale, Cambridge and Michigan. Brodsky was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Literature "for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity". He was appointed American Poet Laureate in 1991. Brodsky was born into a Jewish family in Leningrad. His father, Aleksandr Brodsky, was a professional photographer in the Soviet Navy and his mother, Maria Volpert Brodsky, was a professional interpreter whose work often helped to support the family. They lived in communal apartments, in poverty, marginalized by their Jewish status. In early childhood Brodsky survived the Siege of Leningrad where he and his parents nearly died of starvation; an aunt of his did die of hunger.
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Joseph John Ellis is a Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College whose work focuses on the lives and times of the founders of the United States... of America. His books American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson and Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. Both those books were bestsellers with hundreds of thousands of copies. He received his B.A. from the College of William and Mary, where he was initiated into Theta Delta Chi. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University in 1969. He served in the United States Army as a captain and taught for two years at West Point until 1972. That year Ellis joined the faculty at Mount Holyoke College; in 1979 he was made full professor. He is also Ford Foundation Professor. His work has concentrated on the founding fathers of the United States, including biographies of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, the revolution and the early federalist years. Ellis served as dean of faculty at Mount Holyoke ; following that, he was named by the trustees to the endowed Ford Foundation Chair in history.
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Christopher Benfey is an American literary critic and Emily Dickinson scholar. He is the Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College.... Benfey was born in Merion, Pennsylvania but spent most of his childhood in Richmond, Indiana and attended The Putney School. He began his undergraduate studies at Earlham College, where his father was a professor in the Chemistry department, and completed his B.A. at Guilford College. Benfey holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University. Benfey is a specialist in 19th and 20th century American literature. He is also an established essayist and critic who has been published in The New York Times Sunday Book Review, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and The Times Literary Supplement.
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