Williams College

James MacGregor Burns is an historian and political scientist, presidential biographer, and authority on leadership studies. He is the Woodrow... Wilson Professor of Government Emeritus at Williams College and Distinguished Leadership Scholar at the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1971, Professor Burns received the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for history for his biography of America's 32nd president, Roosevelt: Soldier of Freedom, 1940-1945. Burns has shifted the focus of leadership studies from the traits and actions of great men to the interaction of leaders and their constituencies as collaborators working toward mutual benefit. He is best known for his contributions to the transactional, transformational, aspirational, and visionary schools of leadership theory. Burns' research regarding the transformational theory focuses on how leaders approach power.
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Stacy Madeleine Schiff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American nonfiction author and guest columnist for The New York Times. Schiff, born in Adams,... Massachusetts, is a graduate of Phillips Andover Academy preparatory school, and earned her B.A. degree from Williams College in 1982. She was a Senior Editor at Simon & Schuster until 1990. Her essays and articles have appeared in, among other places, The New Yorker, The New York Times and The Times Literary Supplement. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, which noted that she has been "regularly praised for both her meticulous scholarship and her witty style." Schiff has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. and was a Director's Fellow at the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers. Schiff won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Vera, her biography of Vera Nabokov, wife and muse of Lolita and Pale Fire author Vladimir Nabokov. She was also a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Saint-Exupéry: A Biography about Antoine de Saint Exupéry.
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Stephen Joshua Sondheim is an American composer and lyricist for stage and film. He is the winner of an Academy Award, multiple Tony Awards ... including the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, multiple Grammy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize and the Laurence Olivier Award. Described by Frank Rich of the New York Times as "the greatest, and perhaps best-known artist working in musical theatre", his most famous scores include A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, and Assassins. He also wrote the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy. In addition to theatre, he has contributed to movies as well, including the 1981 Warren Beatty film Reds, contributing the song "Goodbye For Now". He also wrote five songs for the 1990 movie Dick Tracy, including Sooner or Later , which won the Academy Award for Best Song. He was president of the Dramatists Guild from 1973 to 1981.
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John Willard Toland was an American author and historian. He is best known for his bestselling biography of Adolf Hitler and for his Pulitzer... Prize-winning World War II history of Japan, The Rising Sun. Toland was a graduate of Williams College, and he also attended the Yale School of Drama for a time. His original goal was to become a playwright. In the summers between his college years, he travelled with hobos and wrote several plays with hobos as central characters, none of which achieved the stage. In 1961, Toland said that in his early years as a writer he had been "about as big a failure as a man can be". He claimed to have written six complete novels, 26 plays, and a hundred short stories before successfully completing his first sale, a short story he sold to The American Magazine in 1954 for $165. At one point he managed to publish an article on dirigibles in Look magazine; it proved extremely popular and led to his career as a historian. Dirigibles were also the subject of his first full published book, entitled Ships in the Sky and published in 1957.
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Jim Shepard is an American author and professor of creative writing and film at Williams College. Shepard was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. He... received a B.A. at Trinity College in 1978, his MFA from Brown University in 1980. He currently teaches creative writing and film at Williams College. His wife, Karen Shepard, is also a novelist. They are on the editorial board of the literary magazine The Common, based at Amherst College. Shepard's work has been published in McSweeney's, Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Harper's, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Triquarterly, and Playboy. His short story collection — Like You'd Understand, Anyway — won the Story Prize in 2008, and was nominated for a National Book Award in 2007. The novel Project X won the 2005 Massachusetts Book Award. Along with writing novels and short stories, Shepard has also drafted two screenplays, one about Kenneth Donaldson and the O'Connor v. Donaldson case, and the other a movie adaptation of Project X.
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Louise Elisabeth Glück is an American poet of Hungarian Jewish heritage. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of... Congress in 2003, after serving as a Special Bicentennial Consultant three years prior in 2000. Glück was born in New York City and grew up on Long Island. Her father, an immigrant from Hungary, helped invent and market the X-Acto Knife. Glück graduated in 1961 from George W. Hewlett High School, in Hewlett, New York. She went on to attend Sarah Lawrence College and later transferred to Columbia University. Glück won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1993 for her collection The Wild Iris. Glück is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award , the Academy of American Poet's Prize , as well as numerous Guggenheim fellowships. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was previously a Senior Lecturer in English at Williams College in Williamstown, MA. Glück currently teaches at Yale University, where she is the Rosencranz Writer in Residence, and in the Creative Writing Program of Boston University.
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