Issue 9—2007

Robert Bray

Middle Tennessee State University

Robert Bray, professor emeritus at Middle Tennessee State University, is founding and consulting editor of the Tennessee Williams Annual Review and founding director of the Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference. He has written dozens of essays and entries on Williams’s work and is the coauthor (with Barton Palmer) of Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America (2009) and author-editor of Tennessee Williams and His Contemporaries (2007). Bray also coedited (with Palmer) Modern American Drama on Screen (2013) and Modern British Drama on Screen (2013).

Tennessee Williams

Philip C. Kolin

University Distinguished Professor
University of Southern Mississippi

Philip C. Kolin is the University Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Southern Mississippi. He has published extensively on Williams’s canon and life, including Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia (Greenwood P, 2004), The Influence of Tennessee Williams: Essays on Fifteen American Playwrights (McFarland, 2008), The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams (P. Lang, 2002), and Confronting Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire: Essays in Critical Pluralism (Greenwood P, 1993). His articles on Williams have appeared in Modern Drama, Theatre History Studies, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and Michigan Quarterly Review.

Ralph F. Voss

Professor of English
University of Alabama

Ralph F. Voss is Professor of English at the University of Alabama, where he teaches classes in Rhetoric, Composition, and American Literature. He is the author of A Life of William Inge (UP of Kansas, 1989) and editor of Magical Muse: Millennial Essays on Tennessee Williams (UP of Alabama, 2002). He has published articles about the friendship between Williams and Inge in the Tennessee Williams Literary Journal and American Drama. Voss is a member of the National Advisory Board for the annual William Inge Festival in the playwright's hometown of Independence, Kansas.

Brian Parker

Emeritus Professor of English
University of Toronto

Brian Parker is emeritus professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he has also served as director of graduate English studies, dean of arts, and vice provost of Trinity College. His wide ranging scholarship includes books and articles on Elizabethan drama and the works of Tennessee Williams.

Annette J. Saddik

Professor of Theatre and Literature
City University of New York and
New York City College of Technology

Annette J. Saddik is CUNY Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Literature, with a dual teaching appointment at the Graduate Center PhD Program in Theatre and New York City College of Technology Department of English. She specializes in twentieth- and twenty-first-century drama and performance, particularly the work of Tennessee Williams, and has published four books, as well as numerous essays in scholarly journals, international theater playbills, newspapers, anthologies, and encyclopedias. Her most recent book, Tennessee Williams and the Theatre of Excess: The Strange, The Crazed, The Queer (2015), contextualizes Williams’s plays through what she terms a “theatre of excess,” which seeks liberation through grotesque exaggeration, chaos, and ambivalent laughter. Saddik lectures and advises on productions both nationally and internationally as a dramaturge, participates regularly in audience “talk-backs” for Broadway and Off-Broadway performances, and serves on the boards of academic journals and as a voter for the Lucille Lortel Theatre Awards. She is currently working on her fifth book, Clowning Around? Reimagining Political Transformation in Late-Twentieth-Century Grotesque Theatre, which centers on the ambiguous figure of the clown as a site of resistance and transformation in plays that reacted to systems of oppression on various continents during the second half of the twentieth century.

Raymond-Jean Frontain

Professor of English
University of Central Arkansas

Raymond-Jean Frontain is professor of English at the University of Central Arkansas. Among his recent publications are The Theater of Terrence McNally: Something about Grace (2019) and an edition of McNally’s writings about theater titled Muse of Fire (2020). He is currently at work on a study of Williams’s sexual ethic.

Craig Clinton

Reed College
Director of Theatre

Dr. Craig Clinton is Director of Theatre at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. His publications include studies of works by Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Trevor Griffiths and John Arden. Clinton’s plays have been produced regionally and in New York City at Playwrights Horizons and the Manhattan Theatre Club. His recent book, Mrs. Leslie Carter, a biography of the turn of the twentieth century American stage star, was published in the fall of 2006 by McFarland and Company.

James Francis

James Francis is a Ph.D. candidate at Middle Tennessee State University. He completed his B.A. and M.A. in English (short fiction creative writing) at Texas A&M University, College Station, TX. His fields of study include children’s literature and horror film adaptations, narratological studies in television and film, applications of gender and queer theory in popular culture, and creative writing—poetry, short fiction, and screenplays.

Thomas P. Adler

2007 Tennessee Williams Annual Review Cover