photo: Jerry Bauer
Laura Shaine Cunningham is a novelist, playwright and journalist whose fiction and nonfiction work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and other publications.
She is particularly well-known for her memoirs. Her 1989 memoir, Sleeping Arrangements, a tribute to her eccentric childhood in the "Babylonian Bronx" of the 1950s, was met with an avalanche of praise and has since become an American classic. The New York Times praised it as "a model memoir...funny and sad, irreverent and generous." After multiple reprintings, it has just been reissued in a new edition to coincide with the July 2000 release of her new memoir, A Place in the Country. This new book takes the reader from the cramped spaces of the author's youth to the rolling greenery of an upstate farm, and it too has been greeted with delight and critical acclaim.
Ms. Cunningham has also had five plays produced, the first of which - Beautiful Bodies - has been anthologized in Plays For Actresses and is being widely produced in regional theatres. As a screenwriter she has been commissioned by Bette Midler and Alan Pakula, among others.
The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships for her writing and theatrical work, Cunningham divides her time between New York City and the Ulster County home that has provided the affectionate and wryly humorous material for her most recent work.
Geri Rosenzweig is a poet from neighboring Ossining, NY. She has had two books of poetry in print: Under The Jasmine Moon, published by HMS Press, London, Ontario, and Half the Story, a chapbook, published by March St. Press, North Carolina. Her latest poetry manuscript is titled Domestic Star.
Her work has appeared in Verse, The Nebraska Review, Greensboro Review, Confrontation, Christian Science Monitor, Poet Lore, Sulphur River Literary Review, Annals of Internal Medicine, West Hills Review, and many other journals. It has also appeared on two e-zines, poetry.com and ThreeCandles.org.
She won the Maclachan Award of the Walt Whitman Society of Long Island, and her poem, "Osprey," won the BBC Wildlife Magazine Poet of the Year Award, August issue, 2000.
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This series made possible in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Westchester Arts Council with funds from Westchester County Government, corporations and individuals and with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency. Additional funding has been provided by The Bydale Foundation.