Education / Lecture Platform


Week One — June 24–30, 2012

Roger Rosenblatt and Friends on the Literary Arts

In what has become one of Chautauqua’s favorite recurring weeks, the literary arts take center stage at the Amphitheater for a week of conversations between distinguished author Roger Rosenblatt and five of his friends. Interviews will showcase accomplished writers discussing the process of writing, with all the gravitas, banter and storytelling we’ve come to expect.


Confirmed Lecturers

Roger Rosenblatt

Monday 6/25
Tuesday 6/26
Wednesday 6/27
Thursday 6/28
Friday 6/29

Norman Lear

Jules Feiffer

Meg Wolitzer

Derek Bok

Sissela Bok

Emma Walton Hamilton

Dame Julie Andrews

Monday–Friday, June 25–July 29 @ 10:45 a.m.

Roger Rosenblatt

author, Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats

Author, essayist, playwright and professor Roger Rosenblatt returns to Chautauqua in 2012 to lead a third week of onstage conversations with his literary friends. Rosenblatt served as a columnist and essayist for The Washington Post, Time and “PBS NewsHour,” and as literary editor of The New Republic. He has been an editor at U.S. News and World Report and Life, editor-at-large at Time Inc., the youngest House Master in the history of Harvard, and director of education at the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Rosenblatt has written five Off-Broadway plays and 13 books, four of which have been Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circleselections: Making Toast, Beet, Lapham Rising and Life Itself. His latest books are Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats and Unless It Moves the Human Heart: The Craft and Art of Writing, published in January 2012 and January 2011, respectively.

Rosenblatt’s list of awards and honors includes a Fulbright Scholarship, Washingtonian Magazine’s award for the best columnist in Washington, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Prize, two George Polk Awards, a Peabody Award and an Emmy. He is a distinguished professor of English at Stony Brook University and has taught at Columbia School of Journalism, Georgetown and Harvard, his alma mater.

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Monday, June 25

Norman Lear

television writer and producer

Norman Lear has enjoyed a long career in television and film, and as a political and social activist and philanthropist. He is perhaps best-known as the creator of the 1970s CBS sitcom “All in the Family,” which won the Peabody Award in 1978 and four “Outstanding Comedy Series” Emmys. He later created or produced many hit shows, including “Maude,” “Sanford and Son,” “The Jeffersons,” “One Day at a Time,” “Good Times” and “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.”

One of the first seven television pioneers inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame, Lear began his career writing for“The Ford Star Revue” and “Colgate Comedy Hour.” In 1967, his script for “Divorce American Style” was nominated for an Academy Award. President Bill Clinton award him the National Medal of Arts in 1999, saying, “Norman Lear has held up a mirror to American society and changed the way we look at it.”

Lear is a founder or co-founder of People for the American Way, the Norman Lear Center at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, the Environmental Media Association and Declare Yourself, a nonpartisan youth voter registration initiative. He is currently chairman of Act III Communications, a multimedia holding company. Lear attended Emerson College and is a World War II veteran.

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Tuesday, June 26

Jules Feiffer

Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist; author, playwright, screenwriter

Jules Feiffer is an award-winning cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter and children’s book author and illustrator, best known for his long-running comic strip in The Village Voice, for which he won a George Polk Award and Pulitzer Prize. The first cartoonist commissioned by The New York Times to create comic strips for its Op-Ed page, Feiffer has since shifted his focus towards writing and illustrating books for children and young adults, including The Man in the Ceiling, A Room with a Zoo and Bark, George!

Feiffer won an Academy Award for his animated short “Munro.” His plays “Little Murders” and “The White House Murder Case” each garnered Obie and Outer Circle Critics awards. He has written two novels, Harry the Rat with Women and Ackroyd, a graphic novel, Tantrum, and scripts for “Carnal Knowledge,” “Popeye” and “I Want to Go Home.” His 2010 memoir is titled Backing into Forward.

Feiffer’s other honors include Lifetime Achievement Awards from the Writers Guild of America and the National Cartoonist Society, and major retrospectives at the New York Historical Society, the Library of Congress and the School of Visual Arts. He has taught at the Yale School of Drama, Northwestern University, Dartmouth and presently at Stony Brook Southampton College.

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Wednesday, June 27

Meg Wolitzer

author, The Uncoupling

Meg Wolitzer is New York Times best-selling, critically claimed author of seven novels, including The Ten Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife. Her latest, The Uncoupling, was released in April 2011.

Wolitzer’s short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize, and her novel This Is Your Life was made into the Nora Ephron film “This Is My Life.” She has taught in the graduate writing programs at Columbia University, Skidmore College and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

A voracious Scrabble player, Wolitzer’s September 2011 children’s book, The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman, is about kids who meet at a Scrabble tournament. She attended Smith College and is a graduate of Brown University.

On social media:

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Thursday, June 28

Derek Bok

author, The Politics of Happiness
former president, Harvard University

Derek Bok has been a lawyer and professor of law, dean of Harvard Law School and 25th president of Harvard University. Currently, he is the 300th Anniversary University Research Professor in the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where his research focuses on the state of higher education and the adequacy of the U.S. government in coping with the nation’s domestic problems. His three books on this subject are The State of the Nation, The Trouble with Government, and, most recently, The Politics of Happiness.

Bok has written six books on higher education: Beyond the Ivory Tower, Higher Learning, Universities and the Future of America, The Shape of the River, Universities in the Marketplace, and Our Underachieving Colleges. He serves as chair of the board of the Spencer Foundation and was formerly chair of Common Cause.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University, Bok earned his law degree from Harvard Law School and a master’s degree in economics from George Washington University. Following law school, he was named a Fulbright Scholar and studied at the University of Paris’s Institute of Political Science.

Sissela Bok

author, Exploring Happiness
philosopher, ethicist

Sissela Bok is senior visiting fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and a moral philosopher of international renown. Her many books include the seminal Lying, Secrets, A Strategy for Peace, Mayhem, Common Values and, most recently, Exploring Happiness.

A former member of the Pulitzer Prize Board, Bok is a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and sits on the editorial boards of the Bulletin of the World Health Organization, Common Knowledge and Ethical Theory and Moral Practice. She has also taught at Brandeis University.

Bok is the daughter of two Nobel laureates: Gunnar Myrdal, awarded the economics prize in 1974, and Alva Myrdal, awarded the peace prize in 1982. She was born in Sweden and educated in Switzerland and France before coming to the United States. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology at the George Washington University, and her Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard University.

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Friday, June 29

Emma Walton Hamilton

author of children’s books

Emma Walton Hamilton is a best-selling children’s author, editor, arts educator and arts and literacy advocate. She has co-authored 20 children’s books with her mother, Julie Andrews, six of which have been on the New York Times best-seller list, including the The Very Fairy Princess and The Very Fairy Princess Takes the Stage, the Dumpy The Dump Truck series, Simeon’s Gift and Thanks to You: Wisdom From Mother and Child.

Hamilton’s own book for parents and caregivers, Raising Bookworms: Getting Kids Reading for Pleasure and Empowerment, won a Parent’s Choice Gold Medal, and silver medals from the Living Now and IPPY Book Awards. She is the creator and host of the Children’s Book Hub online writer’s salon and Just Write for Kids!, a home-study course for aspiring children’s book authors. She is also a former actress and Grammy Award-winning voiceover artist.

The editorial director for The Julie Andrews Collection publishing program, Hamilton is a faculty member in Stony Brook Southampton’s MFA in Writing and Literature Program, where she serves as director of the annual Southampton Children’s Literature Conference, co-director of the Southampton Playwriting Conference and executive director of the Young American Writers Project. She attended Brown University.

On social media:

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Dame Julie Andrews

award-winning actress and singer, author of children’s books

Julie Andrews is one of the most recognized and beloved figures in the entertainment industry. A child star of the British vaudeville circuit, Andrews came to the U.S. at 19 to star in “The Boyfriend” on Broadway. Her many memorable film performances include “Mary Poppins,” for which she won an Academy Award, and “The Sound of Music.” “The Julie Andrews Hour,” her 1970s weekly television variety series, won multiple Emmy Awards.

Andrews has co-authored 20 children’s books with her daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton, six of which have been on the New York Times best-seller list. Her first two novels — Mandy and The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles — remain in print and in high demand. The Julie Andrews Collection imprint at Little Brown is dedicated to publishing quality children’s books that “nurture the imagination and cultivate a sense of wonder.”

In 2000, Queen Elizabeth II made Andrews a Dame Commander of the British Empire. Her many other honors include being named “One of the 100 Greatest Britons” by the BBC, serving as Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Development Fund for Women, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, and a prestigious Kennedy Center honor.

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