John Kenneth Galbraith
Literary Award

Ken Cameron

Born in St. Thomas and raised on the family farm outside of Dutton, Ken Cameron is a playwright and Artistic Director currently living in Calgary. He is the author of more than fifteen plays, including Harvest which recently closed a near sold-out run at Ontario’s Blyth Festival and will be performed at the Port Stanley Festival Theatre in the summer of 2009. In 2007 Ken won the Enbridge playrites Award for the one-act version of Harvest, which The Calgary Herald described as “comic gold”. Ken is the Artistic Director of the Magnetic North Theatre Festival produced in partnership with the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. With a mandate to showcase Canada’s outstanding touring productions, Magnetic North is produced in Ottawa in odd numbered years, and in a different Canadian city every other year. In 2010 the festival will be hosted by the Cities of Kitchener and Waterloo. Ken is the author of My Morocco, based on the death of his sister, Dutton native Beth Evans. The play premiered in London Ontario, subsequently toured Western Canada and was nominated for Outstanding New Play at Calgary’s Betty Mitchell Awards in Calgary. Ken’s play My One And Only premiered at The Alberta Theatre Projects’ Enbridge playRites Festival ‘04 and received a second production by Edmonton’s Workshop West Theatre in April 2005. The play was featured at The National Arts Centre’s On The Verge reading series, received an Honourable Mention in the Herman Voaden National Playwriting Competition and was nominated for the Gwen Pharis Ringwood Award for playwriting and a Betty Mitchell Award for Outstanding New Play. It was produced in New York City by the Bridge Theatre Company in November 2005. All three plays will be published by Newest Press in 2010. Ken was the Executive Director of the Alberta Playwrights' Network, a provincial organization that develops plays and playwrights around Alberta from 2001-07 and is a member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. He was named one of Calgary’s Top 40 Under 40 by Calgary Inc Magazine in 2006 and writes irregular travel articles for FFWD Weekly in Calgary. He and his wife Rita still enjoy traveling abroad together.

James K. Galbraith

James K. Galbraith holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen, jr. Chair of Government/Business Relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, the University of Texas at Austin, and a professorship in Government.

Galbraith’s most recent book, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too was published in August, 2008 by Free Press, with the paperback appearing in May, 2009. It was the number 1 Amazon hard cover best seller on O Unbearable Cost: Bush, Greenspan and the Economics of Empire was published by Palgrave-MacMillan in late 2006. He is the author in all of seven books and several hundred scholarly and policy articles, including columns in Mother Jones and articles in The American Prospect, the Nation, and the Texas Observer.

Galbraith holds degrees from Harvard and Yale (Ph.D. in Economics, 1981). He studied economics as a Marshall Scholar at King's College, Cambridge, and later served on the staff of the U.S. Congress, including as Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee, before joining the faculty of the University of Texas in 1985. In public life he organized congressional oversight of the Federal Reserve (the Humphrey-Hawkins hearings) and worked on financial crises including New York City, the Chrysler Corporation and the Third World debt crisis of the 1980s. In the 1990s he served for four years as Chief Technical Adviser for macroeconomic reform to the State Planning Commission of China. He was widely identified as an adviser to the Obama campaign in the summer and fall of 2008, and was called to advise the House of Representatives on the TARP legislation in September, 2008, and on recovery strategy in December.

Galbraith’s research has focused on the measurement and understanding of inequality in the world economy, under the rubric of the University of Texas Inequality Project. His policy writing ranges from monetary policy to the economics of warfare, with forays into politics and history, especially the history of the Vietnam war. He is a Senior Scholar with the Levy Economics Institute, and Chair of the Board of Economists for Peace and Security, an international association of professional economists. He held a Fulbright Distinguished Visiting Lectureship in China in the summer of 2001, and was named a Carnegie Scholar in 2003

Visit the web-site of the University of Texas Inequality Project at http://utip.gov.utexas.edu for current research and an archive of published writings. Papers on macroeconomic topics can be found on the Levy web-site at www.levy.org . The work of EPS is at www.epsusa.org. Information on The Predator State is at http://predatorstate.com