The Leopardi Writing Conference

Lou Berney

Fiction

Lou Berney is the bestselling author of four novels, most recently November Road, one of the Washington Post's Best Books of 2018, and The Long and Faraway Gone, winner of an Edgar Award. His short fiction has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. He teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Oklahoma City University.

Christine O'Brien

Non Fiction

Christine O'Brien is the daughter of Academy Award, Emmy Award and Golden Globe winning movie and television producer Edgar J. Scherick. As Head of Programming at ABC-TV Scherick green-lighted such iconic television shows such as Batman, Peyton Place, Betwitched, and That Girl. He also produced movies, including They Shoot Horses Don't They, Sleuth, The Heartbreak Kid, and The Stepford Wives. Christine grew up in New York City and Beverly Hills. She earned a BA in English at UC Berkeley and holds a Double MFA in Nonfiction and Fiction. Her essay "Cul de Sac" received Honorable Mention in Glimmer Train's 2014 Short Story Award for New Writers and her essays and short stories have appeared in The Seneca Review and The Slush Pile Magazine. Christine has worked for ABC-TV, Alex Ponti and NBC Productions. Her screenplay The Maccabees was optioned by Dan Blatt Productions. Her memoir, CRAVE, will be released through St. Martin's Press, Fall 2018. She lives in Walnut Creek, California, with her husband and two children.

Frederick Turner

Distinguished Guest Speaker - Poetry

Frederick Turner's science fiction epic poems led to his being a consultant for NASA's long-range futures group, through which he met Carl Sagan and other space scientists. He received Hungary's highest literary honor for his translations of Hungarian poetry with the distinguished scholar and Holocaust survivor Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, won Poetry's Levinson Prize, and has often been nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature. Born in England, raised in Africa by his anthropologist parents Victor and Edie Turner, and educated at Oxford University, he is also known as a Shakespearean scholar, a leading theorist of environmentalism, an authority on the philosophy of Time, and the poet laureate of traditional Karate. He is the author of about 40 books, ranging from literary monographs through cultural criticism and science commentary to poetry and translations. He has taught at UC Santa Barbara and Kenyon College, edited the Kenyon Review, and is presently Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas-Dallas.

TBC

Thomas Cooney

Founder and Co-Director

Thomas Cooney is a graduate of UCLA with a degree in Art History, and NYU with an MA in Modernism. From 1997 – 2012 he anchored the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Saint Mary's College of California where he served as Acting Director, Director, and Coordinator.  His short prose has been anthologized in The Answer, My Friend and Howl: A Collection of the Best Contemporary Dog Wit, and his travel essays have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday Magazine (Liberation, Paradise Lost, Bollywood Dreams). A Graham Greene scholar, he has also served on several advisory boards, and from 2006 – 2008 was appointed for three consecutive years to serve on the recommendation committee for the awarding of International Fulbright Awards in the field of Creative Writing. 

Lain Hart

Founder and Co-Director

Lain Hart graduated from King's College, University of London, and completed an MA in Museum Anthropology at Columbia University in the City of New York. As a freelance writer and editor, and as an assistant to the curator of the Asian Ethnographic Collection of the American Museum of Natural History and the Education Department of the British Museum, he traveled throughout Europe and Southeast Asia, wrote and edited museum publications, and published non-fiction essays and articles in academic journals and books, including one award-winning collection. Currently, he is teaching composition, studying Italian, taking up birdwatching, and working for a writing education program serving high school students in Oakland, California.

A view of the Adriatic Coast from Recanati

Ascoli Piceno, Le Marche

Statue of Giacomo Leopardi in Recanati

Map showing the location of the Region of Le Marche (in gold)