Issue 10—2009

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).

Larry Blades

Larry Blades is an independent scholar. He presented a version of this essay at the 2008 Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference.

Michael Hooper

Michael S. D. Hooper is an independent scholar and private tutor. He is the author of Sexual Politics in the Work of Tennessee Williams: Desire over Protest (2012) and several essays in the Tennessee Williams Annual Review, and he is the editor of the Methuen Student Edition of A Streetcar Named Desire (2009). He wrote the Williams entry for the online Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism (2016) and has contributed to A Student Handbook to the Plays of Tennessee Williams, edited by Katherine Weiss (2014). His essay “Pedro Almodóvar’s Homage to Tennessee Williams” appears in Tennessee Williams in Europe: Intercultural Encounters, Transatlantic Exchanges, edited by John S. Bak (2014), while “A Spectral Future: Dementia and the Nonhuman in Marjorie Prime” is forthcoming in Age and Ageing in Contemporary Speculative and Science Fiction, edited by Sarah Falcus and Maricel Oró-Piqueras.

John S. Bak

Université de Lorraine (France)

John S. Bak, Professor at the Université de Lorraine in France, holds degrees from the universities of Illinois and Ball State and the Sorbonne. A former Fulbright scholar to the Czech Republic in 1995, he has been a visiting fellow at Harvard (2011), Columbia (2013), the University of Texas (2014), and Oxford (2014–16). His books on Williams include Tennessee Williams and Europe (2014), Tennessee Williams: A Literary Life (2013), New Selected Essays: Where I Live (2009), and Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and Queer Masculinities (2009).

Bernadette Clemens

Bernadette Clemens holds a B.A. cum laude from Barnard College of Columbia University and a certificate from the British American Drama Academy. She is an M.A. candidate and director of national development at Case Western Reserve University, and a professional actress with unions AEA and AFTRA.

José I. Badenes

Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature
Loyola Marymount University

José I. Badenes teaches Spanish and comparative literature in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California. He specializes in the life and works of Spaniard Federico García Lorca. Dr. Badenes is currently working on a comparative study of the plays of Tennessee Williams and Federico García Lorca.

Tom Mitchell

Head of the Theatre Department
University of Illinois

Tom Mitchell is professor emeritus of theater at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and scholar-in-residence for the Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis. Mitchell edited Tennessee Williams’s story “Why Did Desdemona Love the Moor?” for first-time publication (Tennessee Williams Annual Review, 2020) and adapted it for performance at the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival. His essay “Tennessee Williams Wrestles with Race in Three Unpublished Works: ‘Goat Song,’ ‘Heavenly Grass,’ and ‘Why Did Desdemona Love the Moor?’” appeared in the 2019 issue of the Tennessee Williams Annual Review, and he is the editor of a forthcoming edition of previously unpublished stories by Williams, “The Caterpillar Dogs” and Other Early Stories. Mitchell has adapted “The Men from the Polar Star” for the 2023 Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival.

Michael Paller

Dramaturg and Director of Humanities
American Conservatory Theater, San Francisco

Michael Paller is dramaturg and director of humanities for the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, and also teaches in their M.F.A. acting conservatory. Since joining A.C.T. in August 2005, he has dramaturged more than thirty mainstage productions and several readings in A.C.T.’s First Look series of new work, including plays by Ping Chong, José Rivera, Lillian Groag, and Philip Kan Gotanda. He has been a dramaturg and literary manager at several theatres, including the George Street Playhouse, the Berkshire Theatre Festival, the Long Wharf Theatre, the Roundabout Theatre, and others. He is the author of Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality and Mid-20th Century Drama (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2005) and Tennessee Williams: The Playwright in Context (Smith & Kraus, 2010), as well as several essays on Williams’s work.

2009 Tennessee Williams Annual Review Cover