LIT FEST PANELISTS
Melanie Benjamin
author of Alice I Have Been, an historical novel based on the life of Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The novel has been featured in People, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, the New York Times, Washington Post, and on Fresh Air, and the novel’s translation rights have sold in nine countries; she has appeared at the Dallas Fine Art Museum as part of their “Arts and Letters Live” series, and as a featured author at the 2010 Southern Festival of Books.
Kate Bernheimer
founder/editor of Fairy Tale Review (a literary journal), including the Red Issue (new work inspired by Little Red Riding Hood)
author of three novels, The Complete Tales of the Gold Sisters and the short story collection, Horse, Flower, Bird.
author of the children’s book The Girl in the Castle Inside the Museum (named a Best Book of 2008 by Publisher’s Weekly)
editor of the anthologies: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: 40 New Fairy Tales; Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales; and Brothers and Beasts: An Anthology of Men on Fairy Tales.
Janet Davidson-Hues
an interdisciplinary artist who focuses on language, image, object, movement and sound to create books, paintings, installations, performances, and video, explores language and how it affects the cultural representation of women.
has given over 35 lectures at universities, art centers, and conferences, on her work and criticism, some on feminism, some on performance art, issue-oriented work, and gender politics.
Gary Frost
hosts www.futureofthebook.com, which visualizes the future of the codex book, considering hybrid topics between reading behaviors, traditional book use in the context of digital delivery systems, library preservation and book art.
an instructor in book art and book conservation. Previously on faculty of library schools at Columbia University and the University of Texas, he is currently Conservator of Libraries at the University of Iowa.
Peter Kuper
his illustrated commentary and comics appear regularly in Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, for which he contributed the newspaper’s first regular comic strip.
author/illustrator of Comics Trips, a journal of an eight-month trip through Africa and Southeast Asia, and Diario de Oaxaca: A Sketchbook Journal of Two Years in Mexico. The bilingual book features text and images describing Kuper’s involvement in a Oaxaca teacher’s strike that was violently suppressed by the regional government.
other works include adaptations of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Alice in Wonderland and Sticks and Stones, a wordless graphic novel about the rise and fall of empires, which was awarded the gold medal in the sequential arts category in the 2004 Society of Illustrators competition.
in 1979, co-founded the political comix magazine World War 3 and remains on its editorial board.
Tanya Hartman
teaches painting and drawing at the University of Kansas.
her work focuses on memory, and its translation into words, contrasting robust and lush surfaces, with texts and images that describe sensual and spiritual recollection and regret.
awards include two Hall Center Creative Work Fellowships, a grant from the Puffin Foundation, a Virginia Center For Creative Arts Fellowship, a Ragdale Foundation Fellowship, a Fulbright Research Fellowship to pursue post-graduate studies in painting and printmaking at the Konsthogskollan, in Stockholm, Sweden, a Ucross Foundation Fellowship, three Graduate Faculty Research Awards, and a teaching fellowship from the Yale University School of Art.
Katherine L. Walter
Chair of Digital Initiatives & Special Collections in the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Libraries.
co-directs the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at UNL with Kenneth Price. A joint initiative of the UNL Libraries and the UNL College of Arts & Sciences, the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities is advancing collaborative, interdisciplinary research by creating unique digital content, developing text analysis and visualization tools, and encouraging the use and refinement of international standards.
has directed many federally-funded grant projects in the areas of history, folklore, and literature. During her tenure, the UNL Libraries have acquired significant manuscript collections in the humanities, including 19th & 20th Century literature, history, and folklore/folk arts.