About the Conference Conference Schedule Speakers Exhibit Accommodations/Dining Directions Home Bob Donlon, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Robert LaVigne, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (left to right) in front of City Lights Books in San Francisco. Photo by Peter Orlovsky, courtesy of the Ginsberg Trust.	Speakers Bill Morgan, artist, freelance archivist and bibliographer of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, living in New York City. Morgan is the author of a half dozen books dealing with the Beats, including the popular City Lights publications The Beat Generation in New York: A Walking Tour of Jack Kerouac's City and The Beat Generation in San Francisco: A Literary Tour. His collections of the works of Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg form the basis for the Rare Book Collections holdings in Beat literature. Ann Charters, Professor of American Literature at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. She is the first biographer of Jack Kerouac and author of innumerable books and articles on the Beats, including Beat Down to Your Soul: What Was the Beat Generation and The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America. Charters is also the editor of The Portable Beat Reader. Hilary Holladay, Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. She is the Director of the biennial Kerouac Conference on Beat Literature sponsored by the University. Jennie Skerl, Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, West Chester University. She is the author of the 1985 critical study William S. Burroughs; with Robin Lydenberg, William S. Burroughs at the Front: Critical Reception, 1959-1989; and Reconstructing the Beats, published in 2004. Tim Hunt, Chair of the Department of English at Illinois State University. He is the author of Kerouac's Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction and editor of the five volume Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Gordon Ball, Professor of English at Virginia Military Institute, former film maker, photographer, friend and associate of Allen Ginsberg. Ball is the editor of Allen Ginsberg's early journals and other writings as well as author of his own remembrances including '66 Frames: A Memoir. Matt Theado, Professor of English at Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. Theado is the author of The Beats, a Documentary Volume and Understanding Jack Kerouac. Nancy Peters, Co-Director of City Lights Books in San Francisco. Peters is the author (with Lawrence Ferlinghetti) of Literary San Francisco: A Pictorial History from Its Beginnings to the Present Day. Barney Rosset, founder of the famous Grove Press of New York. Rosset has been the publisher of many of the Beat authors, including Kerouac, Burroughs, and Ginsberg, as well as other American and European avant-garde writers. He was also publisher of the influential Evergreen Review. A leader in some of the most important legal struggles against literary censorship in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, he was involved in the successful defenses of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and William Burroughs's The Naked Lunch. Robert Wilson, owner of the well-known and respected Phoenix Book Shop in New York during the 1960s. Wilson has been an important friend, supporter of the Beats and, through his poetry chapbook series, publisher of many of the Beat poets. John Cohen, still photographer for the classic Beat film Pull My Daisy. Cohen presently holds the Lehman Brady Chair, Professor of Documentary and American Studies at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies. He has had a productive career as a photographer and filmmaker. Cohen is a musician with the popular New Lost City Ramblers. David Amram, jazz musician at the famous Five Spot Café in New York in the 1950s and musical accompanist of Jack Kerouac in the late 1950s and 1960s. Amram composed the musical score and acted (along with Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso) in the famous underground film Pull My Daisy, narrated by Kerouac and produced by Robert Frank in 1959. He was also the composer of the musical scores for a number of Hollywood films (e.g. The Manchurian Candidate) and Broadway plays (e.g. On the Waterfront). Amram was honored as the first composer-in-residence at the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1970s under Leonard Bernstein. Amram has been a tireless performer of material related to the Beats, appearing most recently at the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of City Lights Books in San Francisco, the Kerouac Festival in Lowell, and last month at the opening of the exhibition of the original manuscript scroll of Kerouac's On the Road in Orlando, Florida. Michael McClure, poet. Associated with the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance of the late 1950s, McClure was one of the young poets who performed at the legendary reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1956, the occasion of the first public reading of Allen Ginsberg's Howl. A prolific writer, McClure has published poetry, fiction, plays, and essays. Steven Clay, the publisher of Granary Books in New York, is an editor, curator, and archivist specializing in the art and literature of the 1960s and 1970s. Clay co-authored, with Rodney Phillips, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980.
	This Conference is cosponsored by the UNC Library and the North Carolina Writers' Network