Bestselling Author Dinah Lenney and Award-Winning Author Phillip Lopate Read

While many colleges experience a “summer lull,” Bennington College’s campus swells with America’s most acclaimed and celebrated writers during its ten-day June low-residency MFA writing seminar. Hundreds of budding writers travel cross-country to join Bennington’s longtime writer-in-residence, U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall, and award-winning faculty regularly praised by The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, Slate, The Washington Post, among others. Opening its doors in the evening, faculty and associates offer a series of readings, free and open to the public. Continuing the series on Friday, June 15, 2007, at 7:00 pm in the Student Center, associate faculty member Dinah Lenney and faculty member Phillip Lopate read from their latest work.

Dinah Lenney is author of the LA Times bestselling memoir Bigger Than Life: A Murder, A Memoir. Los Angeles Magazine, Shelf Life synopsizes: “A On September 17, 1997, Nelson Gross, a one-time Senate hopeful, was kidnapped by three teenage boys and brutally murdered; with the money they stole from him, they purchased jewelry, clothes, and hubcaps…Although the abduction made national news, the book is less about the tragedy than about what such events do to the survivors.” Continuing they write “The subject matter is grim but the writing is anything but, as Lenney, with an artful layering of details and remembered conversations, brings her complex, confounding father back to literary life.” Lenney's work has appeared in The New York Times, Agni, L.A. Parent Magazine, and elsewhere. Also an actor, she has appeared in theater, film, and television shows such as E.R., The West Wing, Murphy Brown, and Judging Amy.

A prolific author, Phillip Lopate has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He is the author of several books of nonfiction, including Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan, Getting Personal: Selected Writings, and Totally, Tenderly, Tragically. Lopate is also the editor of The Art of the Personal Essay and Writing New York. His essays, fiction, poetry, film, and architectural criticism have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Essays, several Pushcart Prize annuals, The Paris Review, Harper's, Vogue, Esquire, The New York Times, as well as many other periodicals and anthologies.