Author Dinah Lenney Speaks in Southampton April 30
Author and actress Dinah Lenney will read from her works and speak about writing at the next session of Stony Brook Southampton’s Writers Speak Wednesdays on April 30.
Lenney’s latest work is The Object Parade, a collection of related essays.
“How better to track the stages, shape, and meaning of a life than by way of the significant objects in it?” Stony Brook Southampton Distinguished Professor of English and Writing Roger Rosenblatt wrote of the collection. “But Dinah Lenney is a good deal more than clever. Every object she embraces in this beautifully wrought book—the piano, the Christmas tree, the mole, the green earrings—discloses the compressed and hidden power of things, the nouns with which we write our lives. Piece by piece, the author reveals herself as a first rate observer in possession of a kind and generous mind—the most treasurable object in her rich parade.”
Her credits also include Acting for Young Actors, which she co-authored, and a memoir on the murder of her father, Nelson G. Gross, a Republican politician turned businessman who was kidnapped and killed in 1997. Lenney’s 2007 book is titled Bigger Than Life: A Murder, A Memoir.
In addition to being a writer who holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars, Lenney trained as an actor with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in Manhattan.
Her television appearances include, among others, Married… with Children, Murphy Brown, Judging Amy, A Fine Romance and South of Nowhere, plus a recurring role as a nurse on ER.
Watch Lenney’s 2012 TED Talk, “Faith and the Writer: When Life Meets Art.”
Writers Speak Wednesdays are always free and open to the public. Dinah Lenney speaks April 30 at 7 p.m. in the Radio Lounge on the second floor of Chancellors Hall at the Stony Brook Southampton campus at 239 Montauk Highway, Shinnecock Hills. For more information, call 631-632-5030 or visit stonybrook.edu/mfa.