A-D | E-I | J-L | M-P | R-Z

SHIRLEY ABBOTT wrote Love’s Apprentice, Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South, and The Bookmaker’s Daughter: A Memory Unbound. She studied at the University of Grenoble on a Fulbright Scholarship.

ANNE V. ADAMS, Director of Cornell University’s Africana Institute, is a specialist in African and Caribbean studies and in African-American women’s literature. She edited Fifty African and Caribbean Women Writers, Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature, and The African Experience in Community Development: The Continuing Struggle in Africa and the Americas.

SAMUEL ADLER is a composer of operas, symphonies, string quartets, concerti, chamber music, and choral music. He has taught at the Eastman School of Music, Ithaca College, the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and the University of Cincinnati. He is now on the faculty at the Juilliard School of Music.

ARNOLD ADOFF is a poet and anthologist of Black American poetry. His first picture book, MA nDA LA, was named an ALA Notable Children’s Book, and his second, Black Is Brown Is Tan, was a School Library Journal Best Children’s Book in 1973.

CHRISTINE AHMED-SAIDI is a historian who uses linguistics in her study of early African and Afro-Mexican history. She is also a documentary filmmaker who focuses on international gender issues.

AMA ATA AIDOO is the author of Changes, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Africa, and Someone Talking to Sometime, which won the Mandela Prize for Poetry. Distinguished Professor of English at Oberlin College, she has served as UNESCO/International PEN Women’s Committee Travel Fellow and has been a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence.

KEN ALBERS is an actor and director with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. His acting and directing have been seen throughout the nation at the American Player’s Theatre, the Actors Company of Cleveland, The Cleveland Play House, The New American Theater, The National Theater of the Deaf, Deaf West Theater Company in Los Angeles, and the Missouri Rep among many others.

LAURA KEECH ALLEN is the editor of At Home in Arkansas.

SUZANNE SISSON ALSTADT graduated from Hendrix in 1995 with a Bachelor of Arts in religion.   She then earned a Master's in Public Administration from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 2003.   She has worked for UAMS since then and is currently the Senior Grants Administrator.   She has performed in The Elephant Man, A Little Night Music, and Jeffrey at the Weekend Theatre in Little Rock. She also acted in The Art of Dining, Pentecost, All My Sons, and Unchanging Love as a Hendrix Player.

MEADE ANDREWS is on the faculty of the Studio Theatre Acting Conservatory, where she recently choreographed the award-winning revival of the musical Hair. She is the former Director of the Dance Program at American University, and she has taught workshops worldwide, including residencies at the Penland School and the American College Dance Festival.

MAYA ANGELOU is Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University. Her autobiographical I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings won the National Book Award, the North Carolina Award in Literature, and Sara Lee Corporation’s Frontrunner Award. Her most recent memoir is A Song Flung up to Heaven. In 1998 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She has appeared in, written, and directed numerous films.

PETER APPLEBOME is the author of Dixie Rising, an account of Southern culture’s influence on the United States, and A Father’s Unlikely Foray Into the Woods. He is Deputy Metropolitan Editor for the New York Times.

ARKANSAS COUNTRY DANCE SOCIETY was founded by University of Central Arkansas mathematics professor David Peterson and his wife, Donna. The group, along with the Arkansas Scottish Country Dance Society, hosts the annual Twelfth Night Ball and Revels in Little Rock.

GER'SHUN AVILEZ is a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.

NATALIE BABBITT is a writer and illustrator of children’s books, including Herbert Rowbarge, Tuck Everlasting, The Devil’s Storybook, Phoebe’s Revolt, and Nellie: A Cat on Her Own.

MICHAEL BARON teaches English at Birkbeck College, University of London, and has published and edited books on Romantic and post-Romantic literature.

WESLEY BEAL is a graduate student at the University of Florida.

MARCK L. BEGGS is Associate Professor at Henderson State University, where he also directs the Master of Liberal Arts Program. He is the founder and poetry editor of the Arkansas Literary Forum. He was awarded the Arkansas Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry in 1997.

MARVIN BELL is Flannery O’Connor Professor of Letters at the University of Iowa. He has published seventeen volumes of poetry and essays including Nightworks: Poems 1962-2000; Stars Which See, Stars Which Do Not See, a National Book Award Finalist; and A Probable Volume of Dreams, awarded the Lamont Prize.

ERIC BENTLEY is a renowned playwright, critic, and translator. He was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 1998. His works include Bentley on Brecht, Rallying Cries, The Kleist Variations, The Life of the Drama, and Thinking About the Playwright. He is also featured in the original cast recording of four Brecht plays.

AJ BERNA is winner of the 2005-2006 Playwriting Contest for The Santa Claus Cometh.

MARTIN BERNAL is Professor of Government Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization; Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-1985 and Volume II, Greece: Aryan or Mediterranean?

DAVID BEVINGTON, Professor of English at the University of Chicago, specializes in medieval and renaissance drama. His publications include editions of medieval and Shakespearean drama, From Mankind to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England; Action is Eloquence: Shakespeare’s Language of Gesture; Henry IV, Parts I and II: Critical Essays, and a critically acclaimed edition of Shakespeare’s complete works.

MAXWELL BLOOMFIELD III is Professor Emeritus of History and Law at The Catholic University of America and author of such books as American Lawyers in a Changing Society, 1776-1876 and Alarms and Diversions: The American Mind through American Magazines, 1900-1914.

BARBARA BOSCH is Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has acted in and directed plays in California, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and the Netherlands. Her credits include productions of the work of William Shakespeare, Jean Racine, Thornton Wilder, Jules Feiffer, Harold Pinter, Arthur Miller, and Eugene O’Neill.

RICHARD BRAUTIGAN was a poet and novelist. His work includes Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar, and Please Plant This Book.

KEVIN BROCKMEIER won the 2003 Porter Fund Literary Prize for his works of poetry and fiction. A former University of Arkansas Little Rock faculty member, Brockmeier is the author of the story collection Things That Fall From the Sky and the City of Names, a children’s novel. His first novel was The Truth About Celia. A second children’s novel, Grooves: or The True-Life Outbreak of Weirdness, is forthcoming.

CLEANTH BROOKS, the late Professor Emeritus of Yale University, inaugurated the Murphy programs at Hendrix in 1978. An authority on modern British and American literature, he helped found the Formalist school of literary criticism. His books include William Faulkner: First Encounters, Understanding Poetry, Modern Poetry and the Tradition, and The Language of the American South.

GWENDOLYN BROOKS was the first black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize. She served as Poet Laureate of Illinois. She was Consultant-in-Poetry to the Library of Congress, received the Poetry Society of America’s highest honor, as well as the National Book Foundation Medal for “distinguished contribution of American letters.”

JULIA BUDENZ is a poet and classicist who has assisted with research, translation, and editing in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. She has held residencies and fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Departments of Comparative Literature and of English at Harvard University, the Djerassi Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Yaddo.

ANDREA HOLLANDER BUDY, Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, is author of three chapbooks and two full-length collections of poems including The Other Life and House Without a Dreamer. She has won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, the WORDS Award in Poetry, the Porter Fund Award for Literary Excellence, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Arkansas Arts Council, and both the Wesleyan and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.

RALPH BURNS edits Crazyhorse and co-directs creative writing at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He has been awarded Arkansas’s Porter Prize, the Field Poetry Prize, the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Award for the Best First Book in Poetry, and two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts.

R.L. BURNSIDE is a singer and musician who is considered a musical descendant of Robert Johnson, John Lee Hooker, and Muddy Waters. His CDs include Wish I was in Heaven Sitting Down, Come on In, and Too Bad Jim.

HÉLÈNE BUTEUX of Gravelines, France, completed her B.A. and M.A. at the University of Charles DeGaulle-Lille 3, and she studied at Hendrix as an exchange student. Her major field of study is English and American Society.

JACK BUTLER teaches creative writing at College of Santa Fe and has published several novels and volumes of poetry, including Dreamer, Jujitsu for Christ, Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock, and The Kid Who Wanted to Be a Spaceman.

BROOKS CARUTHERS currently works for the Central Arkansas Library System, Terry Branch, in Little Rock. A published playwright and author, he has worked with a Little Rock theater group called Red Octopus in the past 12 years in various capacities. He was also instrumental in forming the Alumni and Student Playwriting Contest at Hendrix in 1985, which led to the creation of Playwright's Theatre as a venue to showcase the winning plays.

CANDANCE DENISE CAULEY is a former Hendrix student who presented her play, NO! at the annual Playwright's Theatre reading, an extension of the Foundation's Playwriting Contest that produces a dramatic reading of a new, previously unproduced play by a current or former Hendrix student.

DAVID CHAPMAN is Director of the Writing Across the Curriculum program at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, and has conducted writing workshops in colleges in Alabama, Virginia, Texas, Wisconsin, and elsewhere.

NGUYEN BA CHUNG is a poet of the William Joiner center for the Study of War and its Social Consequences (University of Massachusetts-Boston). As a writer, poet, and translator, Chung, a research associate at the center, has published volumes of poetry in his native Vietnamese and his essays and translations have appeared in several journals.

JOHN CHURCHILL, nationally recognized philosopher and scholar and Secretary of the Phi Beta Kappa national honor society has written extensively about the importance of the study of liberal arts. He has taught philosophy at Hendrix College for 28 years and was Dean of the College for 17 of those years, serving twice as Interim President.

LEROY CLARK is Professor and Director of Theatre, Chair of the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Speech at Florida International University. He has worked as a playwright and director in theaters across the United States, having directed more than 80 productions. His plays have taken top honors in regional competitions and have been produced in professional, community, and university theatres.

ANDREI CODRESCU is a poet and Professor of English at Louisiana State University. He appears frequently on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered.” Volumes of poetry include License to Carry a Gun and Comrade Past and Mister Present. Editor of Exquisite Corpse: A Monthly Review of Books and Ideas, he also wrote A Hole in the Flag, The Blood Countess, and Zombification, a collection of his NPR essays. His movie Road Scholar earned a Peabody Award.

TODD CONNER, Hendrix class of 1983, is an actor and playwright. His play, The Grendelmas, won the 1991 Hendrix-Murphy playwriting award. He was Artistic Director of The Playwrights Project in Dallas. Conner’s adaptation and direction of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe drew popular and critical acclaim. He performed in Arthur Miller’s After the Fall for The Great American Play Series in Los Angeles.

HOPE NORMAN COULTER teaches creative writing at Hendrix College. Her published work includes novels, Dry Bones: A Novel, The Errand of the Eye: A Novel, and a children’s book, Uncle Chuck’s Truck, as well as several short stories and poems. Honors include Phi Beta Kappa, Arkansas’s Porter Fund for Literary Excellence, the Munn Prize for English studies, and several awards for her fiction. She earned a bachelor’s degree cum laude in English at Harvard.

LOUISE COWAN studies Southern literature, Russian literature, and comedy. Her published books include The Southern Critic and The Fugitive Group.

RAMONA PIPKIN CRIPPEN is currently working with the compliance department for Nuvell Financial Services in Little Rock. She appeared in After the Fall at Hendrix in 1986, and in several one-act plays while a student. She helped establish the Rosemary Henenberg Theatre Arts Scholarship at Hendrix.   She is an active member of the CARE for Animals' Board of Directors and serves as Class Agent for the Hendrix Alumni Association.

WILLIAM CRONON is an environmental historian whose books include Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England; Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West; Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature; and Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past. He teaches at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

BLAND CROWDER is the Ima Graves Peace Professor of English at Hendrix College. He teaches and publishes on Victorian literature, Browning, Shakespeare, and poetry.

JERRY L. CRAWFORD is Professor Emeritus of Theatre Arts and Barrick Distinguished Scholar at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He is also Director of Literary Seminars at the Utah Shakespearean Festival and Dean of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre at the Kennedy Center. He has written many plays and is co-author of a major book on acting, Acting In Person and In Style.

HARRY CREWS is a novelist whose work includes Celebration, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place, Blood and Grits, A Feast of Snakes, The Knockout Artist, All We Need of Hell, Scar Lover, Classic Crews: A Harry Crews Reader, and The Mulching of America.

CAROL BOYCE DAVIES is an Associate Professor at the State University of New York, Binghamton. She researches and teaches African-American and African literature, black women’s writing, Caribbean oral literature and folk culture, and feminist aesthetics. She is an editor of Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature.

CEDELL DAVIS is a musician and songwriter rooted in the blues. He cites Robert Nighthawk and Robert Johnson as influences on his own playing. His CDs include Feel Like Doin’ Something Wrong and The Horror of it All.

ROBERT DAWSON is a professor in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Texas, Austin. He has published on eighteenth-century French literature.

ANDREW DELBANCO is Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities and a member of the History Department at Columbia University. A Fellow of the New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers, he writes frequently on American culture for numerous national journals and newspapers and has co-directed a number of seminars for high school and college teachers at the National Humanities Center and under the sponsorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities. His books include Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now and The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope.

TOMIE DEPAOLA is an artist and children’s author, as well as Creative Director of Whitebird Books for Putnam Books. His Strega Nona was a Caldecott Honor Book, and his Charlie Needs a Cloak was a Children’s Book Showcase title. Other publications include The Art Lesson, Haircuts for the Woolseys, Too Many Hopkins, Mary: The Mother of Jesus, and The Holy Twins: Benedict and Scholastica, which he illustrated for another former Murphy visitor, Kathleen Norris.

J. L. DILLARD is a scholar of Black English at Northwestern State University of Louisiana. A leading linguist, Dillard is author of Black English, Its History and Usage in the United States; Perspectives on Black English; and Black Names.

WENDY DONIGER is Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions and Chair of the Area of History of Religions at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. Her publications include Dreams, Illusion, and Other Realities; Tales of Sex and Violence; Other Peoples’ Myths: The Cave of Echoes; and Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts. She is also the author of a new translation of the Kamasutra.

DAVID DOOLEY is a poet and a paralegal in San Antonio. His published work includes The Volcano Inside and The Revenge by Love.

RITA DOVE is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia. She was the first African American Poet Laureate of the United States, and she has won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the NAACP Great American Artist Award, the National Humanities Medal, and the Heinz Award. Her many publications include Mother Love, The Poet’s World, The Darker Face of the Earth, Selected Poems, Through the Ivory Gate, Grace Notes, and On the Bus with Rosa Parks.

ROBERT DRAKE was a professor of English at the University of Tennessee. He wrote several books, including Amazing Grace, The Single Heart, The Burning Bush, The Home Place, and Survivors and Others, and a number of short stories.

ALAN DUNDES is a folklorist. His honors include the Pitrè Prize, the Distinguished Teaching Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEH Senior Fellowship. He is author of The Morphology of North American Indian Folktales, Life Is Like A Chicken Coop Ladder: A Study of German National Character Through Folklore, Parsing Through Customs, Folklore Matters, Cracking Jokes, From Game to War, and Holy Writ as Oral Lit: The Bible as Folklore.

DAVID DUNLAP uses his own journal as a jumping off point for his art, which has been exhibited in venues across the country, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Illinois. Dunlap is recently retired from the University of Iowa.

RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS is a poet and scholar of modern and contemporary writing. Her many publications include Writing Beyond the Ending, H.D.: The Career of That Struggle, and The Pink Guitar: Writing As Feminist Practice.

Hendrix College • 1600 Washington Avenue
Conway, AR 72032-3080