Issue 22—2023

R. Barton Palmer

Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature Emeritus
Clemson University

R. Barton Palmer is Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature Emeritus at Clemson University, where he founded the World Cinema program and served as its first director. He has worked with the Tennessee Williams Annual Review as a contributor for more than two decades and assumed the role of editor in 2017. With Robert Bray he published Hollywood’s Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America and edited the multiauthor volume Modern American Drama on Screen. Recently, with Homer B. Pettey, he published ReFocus: The Literary Films of Richard Brooks. Palmer has published widely on US and world cinema history, on topics including film noir, film theory, and directors such as the Coen Brothers, Michael Mann, Steven Soderbergh, and Michael Curtiz, among others. An award-winning editor and translator of medieval French poetry, he published the edited volume Allegory and the Poetic Self: First-Person Narration in Late Medieval Literature in 2022. Palmer also serves as the editor of the South Atlantic Review and is a book series editor at a number of academic presses.

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 His essay “Tennessee Williams Wrestles with Race in Three Unpublished Works: ‘Goat Song,’ ‘Heavenly Grass,’ and ‘Why Did Desdemona Love the Moor?’”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in the 2019 issue of the Tennessee Williams Annual Review, and he is the editor of a forthcoming edition of previously unpublished stories by Williams, “The Caterpillar Dogs” and Other Early Stories.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.

Tennessee Williams

Stephen Cedars

Stephen Cedars writer, director, teacher, and scholar whose plays have been published, produced, or developed throughout the US and Canada. He has created new theatrical work as a director in New York City for more than twenty years. His scholarship has been published in journals throughout the US and UK. He is currently a PhD candidate in theater and performance with the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Takashi Sakai

Fukuoka University in Japan

Takashi Sakai is associate professor of English at Fukuoka University in Japan, where he specializes in American queer theater and performance arts from the twentieth century to the present day. His essays on Tennessee Williams have appeared in the Journal of Modern Literature and Modern Drama.

John Haman

The author of several published plays and short stories, John Haman is completing an MFA degree in creative writing at Sewanee School of Letters. He has worked as a journalist, communications professional, writing instructor, and playwriting mentor. In recent years, he has been named a finalist in three national playwriting competitions and one national fiction competition.

David Kaplan

David Kaplan is the author of Tennessee Williams in Provincetown (2006) and Tenn Years: Tennessee Williams on Stage, a collection of essays (2015). He also served as editor of Tenn at One Hundred (2011), a comprehensive look at Williams’s evolving reputation from varied perspectives, including those of Amiri Baraka, Allean Hale, and John Lahr. Kaplan has staged plays by Williams since 1973. These include Suddenly Last Summer in Russia, in Russian (1993); The Eccentricities of a Nightingale in Hong Kong, in Cantonese (2003); The Day on Which a Man Dies in Chicago (2007) and in South Africa (2015); Ten Blocks on the Camino Real in Uruguay, in Rioplatanese Spanish (2012), and in Ghana (2016). In 2022 he staged a Felliniesque Rose Tattoo in a big top circus tent in St. Louis. He is the curator and cofounder of the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, now in its eighteenth year.

Bess Rowen

Villanova University

Bess Rowen is assistant professor in the theater department at Villanova University. She is the author of The Lines between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment (2021), and her work focuses on what she terms “affective stage directions,” a topic she explored in her 2016 Tennessee Williams Annual Review essay “Completing the Sentence with a Gesture.” She serves as the performance review editor for the Eugene O’Neill Review and serves on the board of the Eugene O’Neill Society.

Bess Rowen

Villanova University

Bess Rowen is assistant professor in the theater department at Villanova University. She is the author of The Lines between the Lines: How Stage Directions Affect Embodiment (2021), and her work focuses on what she terms “affective stage directions,” a topic she explored in her 2016 Tennessee Williams Annual Review essay “Completing the Sentence with a Gesture.” She serves as the performance review editor for the Eugene O’Neill Review and serves on the board of the Eugene O’Neill Society.

2023 Tennessee Williams Annual Review Cover