Bob Boyers Wins Sidney Award

NYS Summer Writers Institute Director Robert Boyers receives a Sidney Award for one of the "Best Essays of 2011" from New York Times columnist David Brooks for an essay about the peculiar physical magnetism of his late friend, the writer and "ladies' man" Charles Newman (pictured here), who died in 2006. The essay appeared in the online literary magazine, AGNI.

"The most beautiful man I ever knew was Charles Newman, the founding editor of the journal TriQuarterly, a gifted novelist and man of letters. When I met him in the late 1970s he was almost forty, the possessor of a large, intelligent, perfectly ordered face in which there was no discernible trace of turbulent emotion. His hair lifted softly above an unruffled forehead, and though, as I later learned, he had recently been through a period of stress and agitation, his eyes were radiant with competence, unencumbered. What might have been taken for indifference in another countenance in his was clearly the conviction of a sumptuous sufficiency. His beauty was carried lightly, as if he had never known the need to tend or promote it.... More

For the Times obituary, click here.