Bumpspark* and the ongoing selection of each episode's counterparts will be consistently informed and guided by great minds, in that great minds are our subject. The following hand picked polymaths, whose bodies of work inspired the ideas behind the show, will participate in the initial season of conversations and establish our widening circle of advisors.

Board Member & Counterpart, Author Alan Lightman

Alan Lightman was born in Memphis, Tennessee, and educated at Princeton and at the California Institute of Technology, where he received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics. An active research scientist in astronomy and physics for two decades, he has also taught both subjects on the faculties of Harvard and MIT.

Lightman's novels include Einstein's Dreams, which was an
international best seller; Good Benito; The Diagnosis, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and Reunion. His essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, Nature, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New Yorker, among other publications. He is adjunct professor of humanities at MIT.

Board Member & Counterpart, Poet Robert Pinsky

Robert Pinsky is the author of six books of poetry including The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996, which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and was a Pulitzer Prize nominee. He has also published four books of criticism, two books of translation, and a computerized novel, Mindwheel. His honors include awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America.

He is currently poetry editor of the online journal Slate and teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University. Pinsky served as the thirty-ninth Poet Laureate of the United States, completing an unprecedented three terms in that post in April, 2000. He was guest star in the Simpsons episode "Little Girl in the Big Ten".

Board Member & Counterpart, Doctor Rodolfo Llinás

Dr. Rodolfo Llinás is the Thomas and Suzanne Murphy Professor of Neuroscience and Chairman of the department of Physiology & Neuroscience at the NYU School of Medicine. He received his Ph.D. in 1965 from the Australian National University working under Nobel laureate Sir John Eccles.

Professor Llinás has published over 300 scientific articles. His focus is the physiology of human consciousness. Llinás is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the French Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He was also a founder and chairman of the NASA/Neurolab Science Working Group.

Board Member, Author & Professor John Briggs

JP Briggs, PhD, is the author and co-author of several books, including Fire in the Crucible, on creativity (St. Martin's Press); three books on chaos: Turbulent Mirror (HarperCollins); Fractals, the Patterns of Chaos (Simon and Schuster); and Seven Life Lessons of Chaos (HarperCollins). His collection of short stories, Trickster Tales, was published by Fine Tooth Press in 2005.

He joined the faculty at Western Connecticut State University in 1987. He is one of three distinguished CSU professors from Western. He served as senior editor of Connecticut Review from 2004-2007 and is currently the journal's associate editor.

Board Member, Author & Professor Brian Clements

Brian Clements, PhD, coordinates the MFA in Professional Writing Program at Western Connecticut State University. He edits the small press, Firewheel Editions, and the award-winning journal, Sentence, a Journal of Prose Poetics. He is the author and editor of several books, including the forthcoming titles And How to End It (prose poems), Disappointed Psalms (poems), and the anthology An Introduction to the Prose Poem. Disappointed Psalms was awarded the Colombian Poetry Prize and will be published in 2008.

Board Member, Author Stephen Miller

Stephen Miller is a freelance writer whose latest book is Conversation: A History of a Declining Art. His essays and reviews have appeared in many magazines, including Partisan Review, Sewanee Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and The American Scholar. He has worked for the National Endowment for the Humanities and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. He has also been a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He has an M.A. from Yale in English and a Ph.D. from Rutgers in comparative literature.

Next: donate tax-free

back to the top

mission | blog | donate | join | contact

©2007 hEADLESS FILM