YAWP Administration and Faculty
WILL CHANDLER (Program Director, Playwriting/Screenwriting), an American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) Nicholl Fellowship screenwriter, is the YAWP Program Director and a teaching artist. He was formerly the Education Director for Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor where he taught, administered and expanded the theatre's education programs. He has sold scripts and worked on assignment for a number of studios and independent producers, including Sony Pictures and actor Russell Crowe. He has also been a story analyst/script doctor for CBS, Viacom, Harpo Productions, New World Pictures and private clients. As Director of Development for Green-Epstein Productions, Chandler worked on dozens of projects for ABC, CBS, NBC and HBO.
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.