DAN WAKEFIELD was a friend of Kurt Vonnegut’s from the time they met in 1963 until the author’s death in 2007. Wakefield is a novelist, journalist, and screenwriter, whose books include the bestselling novel Going All the Way; the novel was made as a film for which he wrote the screenplay. His other novels include Starting Over, which was also made as a movie, and Under the Apple Tree. His memoirs include New York in the 50s, which was the basis of a documentary film of the same name that was aired on the Sundance Channel, and Returning: A Spiritual Journey.
Wakefield is the recipient of a Nieman Fellowship in Journalism at Harvard University, a grant in writing from the Rockefeller Foundation, an award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellowship. He has taught at Emerson College in Boston, the University of Massachusetts in Boston, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and won the Faculty Mentorship Award at Florida International University, where he was writer in residence from 1994 through 2010. He is presently on the faculty of the low-residency M.F.A. in writing program at Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C.