Bonnie Culver
Playwright and co-founder and longtime director of the graduate creative writing program at Wilkes University; a Norman Mailer Society Board member, organizer of its Wilkes conferences and staged readings, and author of the one-woman play on Norris Church Mailer starring Anne Archer.
Bonnie Culver is a playwright and screenwriter who co-founded the graduate creative writing program at Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and directed it for many years. The program later became the Maslow Family Graduate Program in Creative Writing. She has written more than twenty plays. Sniper won the New Jersey Arts Council’s Perry Award in 2004 and had an equity showcase at Center Stage, New York, in 2005. She holds an M.A. and Ph.D. from Binghamton University, has served on the board of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and has been an associate professor of English at Wilkes (contributor notes, The Mailer Review 5, 2011, and 12, 2018; Society conference biographies, 2007–2012).
Her contributor note in J. Michael Lennon‘s 2025 review says she and Lennon co-founded the Wilkes program in 2004 (Review of Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer). In December 2015 the Society’s news digest marked the program’s tenth anniversary, which points to 2005 (Mailer in the News, 2015).
In the Society
Culver was at the Society’s second business meeting, in 2004. At the 2005 conference she presented “Dramatic Dialogues” with Wilkes creative-writing faculty and students (2005 conference). In 2007 Lennon thanked her and the Wilkes students “for presenting again the ‘Reader’s Theater’” (2007 minutes), and these staged readings became a regular part of the conferences. They included Tough Guys Don’t Dance, which she directed with Ken Vose at three Provincetown venues in 2015 and also read in (as Madeline). Later came Mailer’s unpublished first novel “No Percentage” (2016) and The Time of Our Time (2019) (conference programs). With Deborah Martinson she coordinated the 2011 joint conference with the James Jones Society in Austin. With Lennon she co-chaired the 2014 conference at Wilkes (2014 membership drive). She also hosted the 2019 conference at Wilkes (2019 minutes).
She was on the Board by 2009 (2009 Board roster) and was re-elected in 2012, 2015, and 2018 (2012, 2015, 2018 minutes). The Society’s website still lists her as a Board member. In 2015 she and Robert Begiebing agreed to choose the recipients of the new Barry Leeds Travel Fund (The Barry Leeds Travel Fund). In 2017 and 2018 she reported to the members on moving the Norman Mailer Writers Colony to Wilkes and recreating Mailer’s Provincetown study there (2017 and 2018 minutes; see Norman Mailer Center). Her conference papers include “Mailer and Feminism” (2020) and “Revisiting ‘The Prisoner of Sex’” (2022), on The Prisoner of Sex.
The Norris play
Culver adapted Norris Church Mailer‘s memoir A Ticket to the Circus as a one-woman play. It was first performed at the 2016 Long Branch conference by K. C. Leiber under the memoir’s title (2016 conference). In 2018 The Mailer Review announced it as Norris, starring Anne Archer, at the Edgemar Center for the Arts in California (The Mailer Review 12, 2018). The Society listed Norris with Archer, directed by Michelle Danner and streaming in June 2022, among its centenary projects (Mailer Centenary Projects). The 2023 streaming of the same production went out as A Ticket to the Circus (Special Performance). The play has therefore carried both titles.
In The Mailer Review she wrote “Norris: A Memory” (2011), a review of Susan Mailer‘s memoir In Another Place titled “Patrolling No-Man’s Land, Living on the Border” (2018), and “NORRIS” (2019) (Bibliography 2011; Bibliography 2018; Bibliography 2019).
Related pages
- Norman Mailer Society | Norris Church Mailer | A Ticket to the Circus | J. Michael Lennon | Deborah Martinson | Susan Mailer