Issue 12—2011

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

Jess Gregg

Jess Gregg enjoyed a ten-year fellowship with the New Dramatists Committee, during which he served as an assistant to top Broadway directors Elia Kazan (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof ), Josh Logan (Fanny ), and Gower Champion (Bye Bye Birdie, Carnival, Hello, Dolly!, and I Do! I Do! ). His play “A Swim in the Sea” was optioned by the Theatre Guild and produced by Hal Prince at the Annie Russell Theatre in 1960 prior to its opening in Philadelphia. The following year it was successfully revived in England as “The Seashell,” starring Dame Sybil Thorndike and the up-and-coming Sean Connery. Gregg published two novels, had other plays produced, and also wrote the libretto for the musical “Cowboy,” which toured the West for two years. A collection of autobiographical pieces was published as The Tall Boy in 2005 by the Permanent Press.

Shelley Akers

Shelley Akers holds a B.A. from the University of the South and an M.A. from Middle Tennessee State University, where she wrote her thesis, “Culture, Self, and Fragmentation: Three Critical Approaches to Tennessee Williams’s Moise and the World of Reason,” under the direction of Dr. Robert Bray. She presented a portion of her research at the 2009 Tennessee Williams Scholars Conference and plans to continue her study of Moise and Memoirs as an independent scholar.

Claire Nicolay

Adjunct Professor of English
Loyola University Chicago

Claire Nicolay is an adjunct professor of English at Loyola University Chicago, where she teaches fiction and drama. Her research has focused on constructions of masculinity and male self-fashioning in nineteenth-century British culture, with articles on Benjamin Disraeli, Catherine Gore, W. M. Thackeray, and Charles Baudelaire.

Michele Meek

Michele Meek has published articles in MovieMaker Magazine, The Independent Film & Video Monthly, WHERE Magazine, Bonjour Paris, and indieWIRE. She has guest lectured at Boston College and Emerson College and taught film and writing courses at Emerson College, Boston Film Video Foundation, and Massachusetts College of Art. She earned her M.F.A. from Emerson College and is a Ph.D. student in English at the University of Rhode Island. She will be presenting her paper “Art and Hoax: The Street Art Movement and Viral Marketing of Exit through the Gift Shop” at the 2011 Society For Cinema and Media Studies Conference.

Juanita Cabello

Independent Scholar

Juanita Cabello received her Ph.D. in English and Women’s Studies from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her dissertation focused on American travel literature and tourism in Mexico and included a chapter on Tennessee Williams’s The Night of the Iguana and the construction of Puerto Vallarta as a tourist site. Her article on Latina “chick-lit” and popular women’s travel narratives was recently published in Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of MALCS. She is an independent scholar, currently working as an interpreter in Fort Worth, Texas.

David Leopold

David Leopold is an author and curator who has organized exhibitions for institutions around the world, including the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London. He has been the archivist of Al Hirschfeld’s work for more than two decades.

2011 Tennessee Williams Annual Review Cover