Bios of presenters

Wayne Arnold is an Associate Professor of American Studies at The University of Kitakyushu, in Japan. He holds a Ph.D. in English from The University of Louisiana at Lafayette and an M.A. in TESOL from the same university. Additionally, he has earned an M.A. in English from Western Kentucky University and an MBA from Wright State University. His research focus is Henry Miller and Japan. This topic has brought him to more than 30 archive libraries around the world in an effort to uncover Miller’s relationship with Japan. https://www.kitakyu-u.ac.jp/examinee/jukensei/prof/arnold/index.html

Caroline Blinder is Associate Professor in American Literature and Culture with a specialization in the intersections between literature and visual culture, in particular 20th century American writing and Documentary photography. Her first book was A Self-made Surrealist — Ideology and Aesthetics in the work of Henry Miller (Camden House 2000). She has published extensively on photo-textual intersections and is the editor of New Critical Essays on James Agee and Walker Evans: Perspectives on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 2010, and United States Topographics: Imaging National Landscapes, The Journal of American Studies, 2018. In addition, she has published widely on transatlantic modernism in the work of European photographers, such as Brassaï, Kertész and Doisneau, and on U.S. street photography in the work of Walker Evans, and Weegee, amongst others. At the moment, she  is working on a forthcoming edition of critical essays on the American photographer Robert Frank following a Senior Fellowship at The National Gallery, Washington D.C. In 2019–20, she was the first Terra Foundation visiting professor in American Art History at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan.

Caroline’s last book The American Photo-Text: 1930–1960 (EUP, 2019) — a critical survey of Documentary studies of the United States — examines various collaborations between writers and photographers in the 1930s, 40s and 50s. Her interest in the intersections between photography and writing all goes back to Miller’s friendship with Brassaï and their nocturnal Parisian perambulations.  https://carolineblinder.com/

Adrienne Cacitti is an independent scholar. She earned her B.S. from New York University in English education. She has a M.F.A. from Mills College in creative writing. She lives in Capitola, California where she is working on a biography of Henry Miller’s second wife, June Mansfield.

Mary Dearborn is the author of eight books, including The Happiest Man Alive: A Biography of Henry Miller. She received a B.A. in English and Classics from Brown University and a Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where she was a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities. She was most recently a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She lives in Buckland, Massachusetts.  Dearborn has a new book out —  Carson McCullers A Life, published by Knopf and it's getting RAVE reviews. Her other books are about Peggy Guggenheim, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer and Louise Bryant.

https://www.maryvdearborn.com

James M. Decker is the co-editor of Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal, and is Professor of Humanities at Illinois Central College. Decker has written extensively on Henry Miller and authored Henry Miller and Narrative Form: Constructing the Self, Rejecting Modernity. He also co-edited Henry Miller: New Perspectives with Indrek Männiste. His other books include Ideology and Victorian Literary Cultures: Studies in Textual Subversion.

Lisa Elliot is a Producer, Inventor and Entrepreneur.

Lisa has written the 3 Volume of Book: How to Build a Brand—With Authentically for Success, created an app: Mast Flow and blogged for the Huffington Post.

She consults with brands in every category through her consulting company: Lit Up Brand.  She has  built several top known brands in the fashion and lifestyle industries through her 20 + year Showroom eM Productions and in her consulting.  She has spoken at USC's Business School, where she graduated from.

Lisa's passion is creating purposeful events and stories to bring to the public.She is in development now on a docuseries: Womenkind, inspired by Origin, about top women’s struggles and dreams to create brands and inventions.

She is also the Creator and a Producer on the feature film in development on Henry Miller's transformation in Big Sur.  There is a synchronized way of film making to tell a humanistic story in a deeper sense with transformation being the key to Lisa's story telling.  This film touches on events in one's life that many can relate to: ego, passion, muse, mother wound and more than anything transforming oneself by deeply looking within to a wiser path of acceptance and authenticity.

Joan Gannij is a writer who makes photographs of the people she writes about. She was born in New York City, raised in Hollywood, and has been based in Amsterdam since 1987. Her mother Adele was a glamour photographer who put a camera in her hand when she was five, sneaked her into the Mocambo and Crescendo jazz clubs on the Sunset Strip when she was 14, and passed on her well-worn copies of Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn to her when she was 16. Joan started her career as a journalist in the mid-1970s, freelancing for the LA Times, Los Angeles magazine, Penthouse, Viva, making interviews with Henry Miller, Joan Baez, Charles Bukowski and Mohammad Ali, among many others. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks: Twelve Poems, Domestic Landscapes & Other Terrain (which she completed during a brief stay at the Henry Miller Memorial Library in 1986), and Wounds of Change, as well as an award-winning children’s book author (Elusive Moose, Hidden Hippo (Barefoot Books), and a respected jazz and pop lyricist. She taught creative writing at a private Dutch college for the past 17 years, and recently completed a memoir, One-Way Ticket: on my way to Here. She is currently working on a new project: Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski: Chastely Consorting with the Dirty Old Men of Literature.

http://joangannij.com/

Arthur Hoyle is a former educator and documentary filmmaker, now writing non-fiction. His biography of Henry Miller, The Unknown Henry Miller: A Seeker in Big Sur, was published in March 2014 by Skyhorse/Arcade. In March 2020 Sunbury Press published his second non-fiction book, Mavericks, Mystics, and Misfits: Americans Against the Grain, a collective biography of exemplary American men and women whose lives span the history of America since the Puritan settlements in New England. The book was a Finalist in the Biography/Historical category of the 2020 National Indie Excellence Awards and the Winner in the Historical Biography category of the 2021 Independent Press Awards. He has also published essays and reviews in Huffington Post, Empty Mirror, Across the Margin, Counterpunch, AIOTB: As It Ought To Be, and Terror House Magazine. He now regularly reviews biography for the New York Journal of Books. Visit www.arthurhoyle.com for links to his work and his podcast interviews. He was born in New York City, and worked professionally in Los Angeles after receiving his M.A. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles. He now lives in Santa Barbara, California.

Roger Jackson became interested in the works of Henry Miller in 1978, and over the next few years transitioned from simply being a reader of Miller’s work to a collector and publisher. He compiled, and in 1993 published, Henry Miller: A Bibliography of Primary Sources, with the aid and support of countless individuals. Since the publication of this first book, he has published an additional 120 titles, most by or about Henry Miller, including From Tropic of Cancer (1999), and Henry Miller: His Life in Ephemera 1914-1980 (2012). In 2002 he co-founded Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal with Dr. James M. Decker—fifteen individual issues have been published. He currently lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

Paul Jahshan started reading Henry Miller as a teenager and, when given the chance to pursue his PhD in American Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK, he naturally wrote his dissertation on his favourite 20th-century author. Paul is Professor of American Studies at Notre Dame University, Lebanon, where he has been teaching American and British literature, critical theory, drama, and urban studies since 2000. He wrote Henry Miller and the Surrealist Discourse of Excess: A Post-Structuralist Reading (2001) andCybermapping and the Writing of Myth (2007), and has contributed articles and book chapters on Henry Miller, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Pynchon, Paul Auster, cybertheory, and Lebanese-American writers.

Finn Jensen

M.A. & Ph. D. from University of Copenhagen

I have studied Henry Miller and his companions in Paris for many years and have written many articles and 3 books in Danish about him. In 2017 I published Henry Miller and Modernism. The years in Paris, 1930 – 1939 by Palgrave Macmillan.

Gary M. Koeppel, BS, BA, MFA has authored two novels, 

a candle-making book, a history book, several art books and a television series screenplay.  He is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and is a former English professor who developed a new way to teach writing.  In 1968 Fritz Perles invited him to Esalen in Big Sur to teach “Pop Comp”, to seminarians.  He moved to Malibu, invented sculptured sandcast candles and became a successful American artisan, then returned to Big Sur  to purchase the Coast Gallery where he discovered a cache of Henry Miller paintings and letters, which he returned. He developed a friendship and became Miller’s art dealer, art publisher and art licensing agent.  He produced many major exhibitions, including at the Daimaru Museum, the Henry Miller Museum in Japan, and the cities of Tel Aviv, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Big Sur and Pebble Beach.  In 1990 he published the Centennial Collection of 25 Henry Miller paintings in editions of 200 prints bearing Miller’s original signature.  He also published eight monographic signed prints from Miller’s Berlin etchings in small editions under 100.  The HM 21 celebration will be the perfect venue to introduce this very rare and last limited edition prints bearing Henry’s original signature. 

Eric D. Lehman is an Associate Professor of English at University of Bridgeport and the author or editor of twenty-two books, including New England Nature, New England at 400, and Becoming Tom Thumb, which won the Henry Russell Hitchcock Award from the Victorian Society of America, and was chosen as one of the American Library Association's outstanding university press books of the year. His novel 9 Lupine Road: A Supernatural Tale on the Tracks of Kerouac was chosen as a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award, and his novella, Shadows of Paris, was the Novella of the Year from the Next Gen Indie Book Awards, a Silver Medal for Romance from the Foreword Review Indie Book Awards, and a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award. He is a regular contributor to Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal, The Wayfarer, and Estuary Magazine, for which he has won several awards from the Connecticut chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. He has been consulted on diverse subjects and quoted by The Atlantic Monthly, USA Today, the BBC, the History Channel, Deutsche Presse-Agentur, and The Wall Street Journal.

Katy Masuga is the author of two Henry Miller monographs: Henry Miller and How He Got That Way (Edinburgh University Press, 2011) and The Secret Violence of Henry Miller (Camden House, 2011). She is also the author of the novels The Blue of Night (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2020) and The Origin of Vermilion (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016) and the translator of Freud's Thinking: An Introduction by Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen (Cambridge, 2023). A list of her complete works can be found on her website, including essays, anthology chapters, and stories across subjects such as the vegetarianism of Dr. Frankenstein's creature, the book art of Doug Beube and Brian Dettmer, and Wittgensteinian language games in Samual Beckett. Katy holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and a joint Ph.D. in Theory and Criticism from the University of Washington, Seattle. She teaches in Paris for the Comparative History of Ideas Department of the University of Washington and the Graduate School of Collective Intelligence of the University of Mohammad 6 Polytechnique. She is the founder of The Library, a writing and art residency in the forest of Fontainebleau just outside Paris, France.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katy_Masuga

Michael Paduano is a Canadian scholar and archivist. He has contributed prefaces to new French-language editions of Henry Miller’s The Rosy Crucifixion Trilogy (Éditions Bartillat, 2022) and Quiet Days in Clichy (Éditions Bartillat, 2023), and is editor of Miller’s The Book of Conversations with David Edgar (Sublunary Editions, 2023) and The Heaven Beyond Heaven (William Ashley, 2022), as well as the volume Imperfect Itineraries: Literature and Literary Research in the Archives (Éditions de l’Université de Lorraine, forthcoming). He is currently working on an extensive archival-based study of Miller’s creative process. He lives in Paris.

Mark SaFranko’s many novels and story collections have garnered rave reviews and a cult following, mainly in Europe. Putain D’Olivia (Hating Olivia/Harper Perennial) was recently nominated for the Prix Littéraire Rive Gauche à Paris and published in Italy in 2020. In 2018 he was named the first Author in International Residence at the University of Lorraine in Nancy, France. His latest novel, Amerigone, published in 2023 by Pulpmaster.de, has been both a critical and commercial success in Germany, and Tout Sauf Hollywood (Nowhere Near Hollywood) was published in 2022 by Mediapop Editions in France. His stories have appeared in many magazines and journals, including Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and were cited in Best American Mystery Stories. His paintings have been exhibited in Europe, and he is also a playwright and musician. 

https://marksafranko.com/

Tom Schiller met Henry Miller in the Pacific Palisades when he was 18 years old, working as a sound man on Robert Snyder's documentary "The Henry Miller Odyssey.” 

The two became pals, Tom an eager audience for Henry's unique philosophy of life.

Tom went on to make his own portrait of the artist, "Henry Miller Asleep & Awake,” and later became an original writer, filmmaker and three time Emmy winner on "Saturday Night Live."

He currently lives in New England with his wife, author Jacque and their cat, Sugar Toonis.

Gabriela Tollman is an award-winning writer-director whose films have played in festivals worldwide, including Palm Springs, Seattle, Cinequest, Cleveland, Mill Valley, Nashville, Sedona, and the Sundance Film Festival. Several of her films have aired on television networks, including HBO. Tollman recently directed the short film LOVELY, is co-writing a feature about writer Henry Miller, and is attached to direct the award-winning screenplay titled APART. She shadowed Hanelle Culpepper on the show NOS4A2 for AMC. Tollman's dark-comedy pilot script is currently in development with Bad Robot and Warner Brothers and her work has been a finalist for Stowe Story Labs, highlighted by the Blacklist, a finalist for Screencraft, and a second-rounder for The Sundance Labs. Tollman wrote, directed, and co-produced, “The Last Gunshot” that played in over 30 festivals and won The International Cinematographer’s Guild Award. Tollman wrote and directed “Birth Of Industry,” which won the Los Angeles Short Film Grant from Kodak, Panavision, and Filmmakers Alliance. BIRTH OF INDUSTRY played in over 20 festivals and was awarded the John Williams award for Visual Excellence at the Cleveland Film Festival. Her film “You Turned Back And Held My Hand” screened at numerous festivals, including the Sundance Film Festival to much acclaim. Her first feature film, “Somebody’s Mother,” was released theatrically and is now available for streaming on Amazon, Itunes, and Google Play. Check out her work at:

www.gabrielatollman.com

Magnus Torén as the Henry Miller Memorial Library Director since 1993, is responsible for creating a vital cultural and educational resource at Library. Magnus holds a skipper’s license and spent the years between 1977 and 1984 (and 1994-95), delivering yachts across 5 of the seven oceans of the world. He made landfall in Big Sur and is married to Mary Lu, living on Partington Ridge.

Specialties: Sailing. Writing songs. Giving talks about sailing, maritime history, island ecology, travel, Big Sur and Henry Miller.