Somerville, Mass.
(Somerville, Mass.)
Timothy Gager co-founder of the Somerville News Writers Festival announced that John Buffalo Mailer, son of the late Norman Mailer, will be a reader at the Somerville News Writers Festival this November. Earlier this month Gager announced that Rick Moody will be the featured reader. Doug Holder, co-founder, has selected Frank Bidart, Sam Cornish, Tino Villanueva, Richard Hoffman and Tam Lin Neville as the featured poets. Bidart will be the recipient of the Ibbetson Street Press Lifetime Achievement award.
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John Buffalo Mailer (born April 16, 1978) is an author, playwright and journalist. He is the youngest child of American novelist Norman Mailer. Mailer is a graduate of Wesleyan University. He has written several screenplays and is a freelance journalist. In 2005 he co-wrote The Big Empty with his father.
Mailer was a founding member of Back House Productions, a theater production company in New York. He was also previously the editor of High Times, a magazine which advocates the legalization of cannabis.
Before graduating from Wesleyan University with a BA in Theater, John Buffalo Mailer published his first novella, Hello Herman, in The Reading Room, vol. 1, Great Marsh Press. The story centered around a sixteen year old mass murderer from a small suburban town in Iowa, and the cocky young journalist, trying to run from his own dark past, who is hired to interview him.
After graduating, John founded Back House Productions in New York City with three other Wesleyan grads. Within one year Back House became the resident theater company of The Drama Bookshop's Arthur Seelan Theater. In 2001, John's first play, an adaptation of Hello Herman, had its New York Premiere at the Grove Street Playhouse.
2003, he took a hiatus from Back House and theater in general to accept the position of Executive Editor for the infamous High Times magazine. Hired by Richard Stratton to help re-launch the magazine as an independent, outlaw version of Vanity Faire, Stratton, Mailer, and Annie Nocenti, the Editor, made national headlines with the stories they published. While there, John became active in the protest movement centering around the Republican National Convention. In addition to the "High Times Activist's Guide to the RNC", he also interviewed his father for New York Magazine, on the possible dangers and benefits of the protest.
His second play, Crazy Eyes, recently had its World Premiere in Athens, Greece, in March 2005. Crazy Eyes, which takes place in October 2001, in Park Slope, Brooklyn, centers on an actor, a day trader, an AIDS researcher, a bag of white powder,and a Palestinian American who owns the 99 cent store.
John is a member of The Dramatists' Guild Actor's Equity Association, and The Playwright/Director's Group of The Actors Studio. He has lectured at the University of Notre Dame, Wesleyan, and the University of Athens. He is also the American Cultural Dramaturge for Israeli actress Meital Dohan's one woman show, Bath Party. In addition to HeIlo Herman and Crazy Eyes, he has written several screenplays, one short play, and freelanced for Playboy, New York, Stop Smiling, and Lid Magazines.
John is the youngest child of Norman Mailer, with wife Norris Church Mailer, and was selected as one of People Magazine's sexiest men alive in 2002.
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