Bret Easton Ellis (born March 7, 1964 in Los Angeles, California) is an American author. He is considered to be one of the major Generation X authors and was regarded as one of the so-called literary Brat Pack, which also included Tama Janowitz and Jay McInerney. He has called himself a moralist, although he has often been pegged as a nihilist. His characters are young, generally vacuous people, who are aware of their depravity but choose to enjoy it.

Carol Elaine Channing (born on January 31, 1921 in Seattle, Washington) is an American singer and actress. The winner of three Tony Awards (including a lifetime achievement award), a Golden Globe and an Academy Award nominee, Channing is best remembered for two roles: Lorelei Lee in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" and Dolly Gallagher Levi in "Hello, Dolly!". She is easily recognized by her distinctive voice and wide eyes, …

Helen Frankenthaler (born December 12, 1928) is an American post-painterly abstraction artist. Born in New York City, she was influenced by Jackson Pollock with whom she also was involved in the 1946-1960 Abstract Art Movement. She was the youngest daughter of a justice on the New York State Supreme Court. She studied at the Dalton School under Rufino Tamayo and also at Bennington College in Vermont. She later married fellow artist Robert Motherwell.

John Billingsley (born May 20, 1960 in Media, Pennsylvania) is an American actor, known for a number of memorable TV and film characters, perhaps his most famous being the role of Doctor Phlox on the television series "Star Trek: Enterprise". Billingsley was born in Media, Pennsylvania and raised in Connecticut. He studied theatre at Bennington College in Vermont before moving to Seattle, Washington.

Alan Wolf Arkin (born March 26, 1934) is an Academy Award-winning American actor and director. He is best-known for starring in such films as "Catch-22", "The In-Laws", "The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming", and "Little Miss Sunshine", for which he won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2007. He is the father of actor Adam Arkin.

Mark Barnes (born 1960) is an attorney and advocate. He is a direct descendent of Daniel Boone. Barnes is an expert on public healthcare law. He was Director of Policy for the New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute, and Associate Commissioner for Medical and Legal Policy for the New York City Department of Health under the mayoralty of David Dinkins. He worked on the National Health Care Reform Task Force in the Clinton Administration.

Anne Ramsey (1 September 1929 - 11 August 1988) was an American actress who may be most recognized for two roles: as Mama Fratelli in Richard Donner's "The Goonies"; and as Mrs. Lift, the mother of Danny DeVito's character in her Academy Award nominated performance in "Throw Momma from the Train".

Donna Tartt (born 23 December 1963) is an American writer who received critical acclaim for her two novels, "The Secret History" (1992) and "The Little Friend" (2002). Tartt was the 2003 winner of the WH Smith Literary Award for "The Little Friend". The daughter of Don and Taylor Tartt, she was born in Greenwood, Mississippi but raised 32 miles away in Grenada, Mississippi. At age five, she wrote her first poem, …

Anne Waldman (born April 2, 1945) is an American poet. Waldman was born in Millville, New Jersey and grew up on MacDougal Street in New York City. She received her B.A. from Bennington College in 1966. During the 1960s, along with poets, Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg, Waldman became part of the East Coast poetry scene, giving frequent readings at the St. Mark's Church Poetry Project. She ran the project from 1966-1978. She has published more than forty books.

Marc Spitz is a former Senior writer at Spin magazine. His work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, Nylon and the New York Post. Spitz is the co-author (with Brendan Mullen) of the 2001 LA punk oral history "We Got The Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk". He has authored two novels, "How Soon is Never" (2003) and "Too Much, Too La"te (2006), as well as "Nobody Likes You: Inside the Turbulent Life, Times, and Music of Green Day".

Timothy Daly (born James Timothy Daly on March 1 1956 in New York City, New York) is an American stage, screen and voice actor, director and producer.

Princess Yasmin Aga Khan (b. December 28, 1949 in Lausanne, Switzerland) is an American philanthropist known for raising public awareness in Alzheimer's disease. She is the only surviving child of Rita Hayworth, the American movie actress, and her third husband, Prince Ali Khan, a vice president of the United Nations General Assembly representing Pakistan, for which he served as U.N. ambassador.

Richard Deacon, born in Philadelphia, was an American television and motion picture actor. He was a bald-pated and usually bespectacled character actor who often portrayed imperious authority figures. He made appearances on The Jack Benny Show as a salesperson. His best-known roles are Mel Cooley on "The Dick Van Dyke Show", Fred Rutherford on "Leave It to Beaver" (Mr.

Carolyn Cassady (b. April 28, 1923) is an American writer associated with the Beat Generation by her marriage to Neal Cassady, and friendship with other writers. She was consequently a frequent character in the works of Jack Kerouac, who wrote extensively about Neal. She was born Carolyn Robinson in Lansing, Michigan on April 28, 1923 and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. She received a scholarship to Bennington College, an exclusive women's school in Vermont.

Lynn Collins Emanuel (b. 1949) is an American poet. Born March 14 in Mt. Kisco, New York, she earned her B.A. at Bennington College in 1972, an M.A. at City College of New York in 1975, and her M.F.A. at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, University of Iowa in 1983. She won the 1992 National Poetry Series Open Competition for "The Dig". She is a professor of English and teaches in the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh.

Kathleen Norris (b. 1947) is a best-selling poet and essayist who has become known for her writings about Christian spirituality, especially after she became a Benedictine oblate and spent two extended periods at Saint John's Abbey in Minnesota. Born in Washington D.C., she was raised in South Dakota and Honolulu, attended Bennington College in Vermont and now divides her time between South Dakota and Hawaii.

Andrea Rita Dworkin (September 26, 1946 - April 9, 2005) was an American radical feminist and writer best known for her criticism of pornography, which she linked with rape and other forms of violence against women. An anti-war activist and anarchist in the late 1960s, Dworkin became a radical feminist after escaping an abusive marriage in the Netherlands, and went on to publish ten books on radical feminist theory and practice.

Jill Eisenstadt (born June 15, 1963) is an American novelist and freelance journalist. Eisenstadt was born in Queens, New York and attended Bennington College, graduating in 1985. She was considered part of the 'Literary Brat Pack' whose members included Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, and Tama Janowitz, though she publicly distanced herself from that group.

Jared Paul Stern is a freelance reporter and former columnist for the New York Post who gained national notoriety when he was accused by California billionaire Ron Burkle of extortion. Prior to the scandal, Stern had written for the popular Page Six column from time to time for eleven years. He edited the first issue of "Page Six" magazine, and also wrote the New York Post column "Nightcrawler" for several years. He worked briefly at Star Magazine.

Jonathan Marc Sherman (born 10 October 1968) is a contemporary American playwright. He was born in Morristown, New Jersey, and grew up in Livingston. He began writing plays on a typewriter his father gave him as a birthday gift when he was twelve or thirteen years old. His first performed original play was the one-act Confrontation (1986).

Elizabeth Swados (born 1951) is an American writer, composer, musician, and director. Her work generally eschews conventional formats in favor of her own unique approaches. While some of her subject matter is humorous, such as her political satire of Ronald Reagan, "Rap Master Ronnie" (a collaboration with Garry Trudeau), much of her work deals with dark issues such as racism, murder, and mental illness. The child of a financially well-to-do family and neighborhood, …

Nathalie Handal (born July 29, 1969) is a Palestinian poet, writer and playwright and a literary researcher.

Marian Zazeela (b. 1940) is a light-artist, designer, painter and musician based in New York City. Born to Russian-Jewish parents and raised in the Bronx, she was educated first at the High School of Music and Arts and then Bennington College, where she studied with Paul Feeley, Eugene C. Goossen and Tony Smith and earned a Bachelor or Arts degree with a major in Painting in 1960.

Alec Wilkinson (b. 1952 -) is a writer, interviewer, essayist and master of the written word who has been a staff writer for "The New Yorker" since 1980. According to "The Philadelphia Inquirer" he among the "first rank of" contemporary American (20th Century and early 21st Century) "literary journalists...(reminiscent) of Naipaul, Norman Mailer and Agee." Aside from writing dozens of articles for "The New Yorker", he is the author of over six books, …

Louis Calabro, (1926-1991 Brooklyn New York) was an American orchestral composer. Calabro studied piano and composition at Julliard School of Music. Vincent Persichetti was his principal teacher there. Louis Calabro was a music professor at Bennington College of Vermont from 1955 until his death in 1991. He was a composer, teacher, conductor and a percussionist. Calabro's original music is published by Elkan-Vogel, Theodore Presser, Tuba Press and Morningstar Music.

Mohammed Naseehu Ali is an author, originally from Ghana. He is a graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy and Bennington College. He has published short stories and non fiction essays in several publications, including "The New Yorker", the "New York Times", "Mississippi Review", "Bomb", "Gathering of the Tribes", and "Essence". Ali now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Julia Randall (1924-2005) was an American poet. She was one of a number of female poets writing in English whose work retained rhyme and meter long past the time when they were considered fashionable by the U.S. poetry scene of the twentieth century. Even her work in free verse uses techniques like alliteration, assonance, and internal rhyme.

Bruce Berman is the executive producer and chairman CEO of Village Roadshow Pictures. He ranked #71 on Premiers 2003 annual Power 100 list. He studied film in the early seventies at the California Institute of the Arts.

Mary Ruefle is an American poet and essayist.

Amy Gerstler (born in 1956) is an American poet. Her books of poetry include "Ghost Girl" (2004); "Medicine" (2000) - finalist for the Phi Beta Kappa Poetry Award; "Crown of Weeds" (1997); "Nerve Storm" (1995); "Bitter Angel" (1990) - winner of the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award and "The True Bride" (1986). She is graduate of Pitzer College and holds an M.F.A. from Bennington College, …

Mary Early (born 1975, Washington, DC) is a sculptor living and working in Washington DC. Her three-dimensional works in beeswax, wood, and concrete are abstract references to symmetrical and structured forms. She studied visual art, film and video at Bennington College.

Katharine Holabird (born January 23 1948, Cambridge, Massachusetts) is an American-born, British-based children's writer, best known for creating the popular adventures of Angelina Ballerina, the ballet-dancing mouse. Holabird grew up in Chicago, Illinois and studied literature at Bennington College in Vermont which inspired her to take up a writing career. Upon graduation from Bennington, she worked as a literary editor for a year, before staying on in Rome, …

Merce Cunningham (born April 16, 1919 in Centralia, Washington, United States) is an American dancer and choreographer. A long-term collaborator with composer John Cage, Cunningham is commonly recognized as one of the most innovative and influential figures in modern dance. Cunningham's dances emphasise strength and agility, and his choreography notoriously demands of his dancers difficult, nearly impossible physical feats of athleticism.