YAWP Administration and Faculty
WILL CHANDLER (Program Director, Playwriting/Screenwriting/Creative Writing), an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) NICHOLL FELLOWSHIP IN SCREENWRITING winner, has sold scripts and worked on assignments for major studios and independent producers. His Nicholl-wining script CYRANO OF LINDEN VIEW was optioned by writer/producer Michael Schiffer, his spec script THUMB was sold to Sony Pictures on a preemptive bid, and actor Russell Crowe hired him for BUSHRANGER, a sweeping historical drama based on Australian outlaw Ben Hall. Will has also written for The Jim Henson Company, L-Squared Entertainment and others. Before that, Will was a script development executive in movies and miniseries for Green-Epstein Productions, where he guided dozens of projects for ABC, CBS, NBC and HBO. Will got his start in the entertainment business as a story analyst/script doctor for Harpo Productions, New World Pictures, Lifetime, and more. Will is also a Professor in Stony Brook University’s undergraduate Film department where he teaches screenwriting, story analysis, and understanding the language of film. In addition to this, Will is a judge for an internationally recognized screenwriting competition.
EMMA WALTON HAMILTON (Executive Director, Playwriting) is a best-selling children's author, editor, arts educator and arts and literacy advocate. She has co-authored over thirty children's books with her mother, Julie Andrews, seven of which have been on the New York Times best-seller list, including the #1 bestselling series The Very Fairy Princess. Emma’s own book for parents and caregivers, Raising Bookworms: Getting Kids Reading for Pleasure and Empowerment, premiered as a #1 best-seller on Amazon.com in the literacy category and won a Parent’s Choice Gold Medal, silver medals from the Living Now and IPPY Book Awards, and Honorable Mention from ForeWord Magazine's Best Book of the Year. Emma is a faculty member and directs both the Southampton Children’s Literature Fellows program and YAWP (the Young Artists and Writers Project). She is married to actor/producer/director Stephen Hamilton, with whom she co-founded the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, NY in 1991. For more information, visit http://www.emmawaltonhamilton.com
ANNETTE HANDLEY CHANDLER (screenwriting) is the Director of the Southampton Screenwriting Conference and teaches Screenwriting through the MFA Writing & Literature program. She has produced films for Paramount Pictures, Disney, PBS, ABC and CBS. Among them, the 2001 Emmy Award winning Ansel Adams: A Documentary directed by Ric Burns. A former literary agent and ABC programming executive in Los Angeles, Handley Chandler taught screenwriting at UCLA and Pepperdine University. Locally, she has written, directed and produced Plum TV's documentary on vintner/sculptor Walter Channing. She writes fiction and has been published in numerous publications including the East Hampton Star, The Southampton Press and HamptonStyle Magazine.
JULIE SHEEHAN (poetry) is a 2008 recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and author of two poetry collections: Orient Point, which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Thaw, winner of the Poets Out Loud prize from Fordham University. Other honors include the Elizabeth Matchett Stover Award from Southwest Review, the Robert H. Winner prize from Poetry Society of America, and, from Paris Review, the Bernard F. Conners prize. Her poems have appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Parnassus, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Yale Review, The Best American Poetry and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, and the forthcoming anthologies Seriously Funny: Poems About Love, God, War, Art, Sex, Madness, and Everything Else, ed. Barbara Hamby and David Kirby, University of Georgia Press, and Poem in Your Pocket, ed. Elaine Bleakney, introd. by Kay Ryan, Harry N. Abrams. Her third collection, Bar Book: Poems & Otherwise, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.
LOU ANN WALKER (essay, memoir, creative non-fiction) creator and former editor of The Southampton Review, is a writer-in-residence and director of the MFA Program in Writing and Literature at Stony Brook Southampton. She is also a screenwriter and journalist and has written for many publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, Parade, People, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Esquire. She's the author of a number of books, including the memoir, A Loss for Words, winner of the Christopher Award and a Book of the Month Club Editor's Choice, as well as a book on artist Roy Lichtenstein. Other awards include a Marguerite Higgins Distinguished Reporting Award, a New York Public Library Books of the Year, a National Social Studies Book Council Books of the Year Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Grant. She previously taught at Columbia and Marymount Manhattan College.