Poets Wanted

POETS NEEDED FOR  26^thAnnual  Altamont Fair Poetry Reading


Poet Alan Casline writes:

This year’s POETS AT THE FAIR at the Altamont Fair is being held on Wednesday August 15, 2012 beginning at 1:00 PM. Participating poets will receive a free pass.

This year we will be presenting from the Hotel Altamont stage in the Village and Carriage Museum.


To sign up to read or for more information contact: Alan Casline at acasline@aol.com


Our host will be Pat Canaday.


Having a stage opens up some new possibilities and we are looking for Performance Poets to contribute some mixed media, musical and theatrical pieces to the event.


The schedule would be for a poets to read from their work for 10 min. each with there also being  4 (or more depending on interest) performance slots scheduled for 15 min. each.


Last year at 2:00 PM we had a LEGENDS OF LOCAL POETRY ROUND-ROBIN where poets read the work of other departed poets like W.W. Christman, Art Willis, Magdalene Merritt, Tom Nattel, etc. This will be a feature of this year’s reading as well.


Of course if there are not that many poets in the house everyone will have more time to read.


An unrelated idea is I have discovered the Altamont Fair is a tri-county fair. The counties are Albany, Schenectady and Greene Counties.  I am especially looking for a few Greene County poets to participate. My problem is I don’t know any.


26^th Annual POETS AT THE FAIR
Wednesday August  15, 2012 at 1:00 PM
at the Altamont Fair Grounds, Altamont, New York
presenting from the Hotel Altamont stage in the Village and Carriage Museum.


Local Poets reading from their work
Legends of Local Poetry from the near and historical past
Performance Poetry

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Adirondack 46er Book in Plattsburgh Press Republican

Jerry McGovern reviews Heaven Up-h’isted-ness (2012) cowritten and edited by Writers Institute Assistant Director Suzanne Lance:

"This is an important book because the history of the 46ers is important to the Adirondacks and New York state. By gathering that history in one place, and including archival and modern photos, Lance and the Adirondack 46ers have provided a service to us all."

More in the Plattsburgh Press Republican, July 27, 2012.

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Fracking Panel at Festival of Writers in Rensselaerville

The Festival of Writers in Rensselaerville will open today 7/26 with a panel on fracking that will feature New York Times blogger Andrew Revkin of the "Dot Earth" blog. Revkin is also the author of the 1990 book, The Burning Season: The Murder Of Chico Mendes And The Fight For The Amazon Rain Forest, the basis of a 1994 HBO film directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Raul Julia.
Other panelists are Stu Gruskin, former Deputy Commissioner of NYSDEC and Dr. Erik Kiviat, Executive Director of Hudsonia. Robert Moore, Executive Director of Environmental Advocates of New York, will moderate.  More.

Full schedule of events:  http://www.festivalofwriters.org/schedule/

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Francine Prose at Occupy Wall St.

Francine Prose, who appears tonight in Saratoga, writes:

"As far as I can understand it myself, here’s why I burst into tears at the Occupy Wall Street camp. I was moved, first of all, by what everyone notices first: the variety of people involved, the range of ages, races, classes, colors, cultures. In other words, the 99 per cent. I saw conversations taking place between people and groups of people whom I’ve never seen talking with such openness and sympathy in all the years (which is to say, my entire life) I’ve spent in New York: grannies talking to goths, a biker with piercings and tattoos talking to a woman in a Hermes scarf."   More.

Prose will share the stage with novelist Rick Moody, tonight, 7/26, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga. Free.

Click here for more events in the series. All are free and open to the general public.

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Rick Moody: Novelist Turned Music Critic

Howard Hampton in the NY Times is won over by novelist Rick Moody's new collection of essays on rock and pop bands, On Celestial Music (2012).

"The book’s best essays wrestle with performers and songs as if they were Moody’s better angels and personal hellhounds. He plunges in, thoughtful and reckless, psychoanalyzing the sounds and lyrics and singers and his own reactions, caught in a blissful, bleary tug of war between the heights of intoxication and the depths of hangover. He writes with enormous reserves of empathy and grace about the Magnetic Fields (fickle, arty, doubling back on themselves like serpent-shaped licorice), Wilco (a time-exposure wedding photo, Mathew Brady via Diane Arbus), the Pogues (an Alcoholics Unanimous meeting) and the deeply peculiar Danielson Famile (a Christian cult band or a band of Christian cultists or maybe some kind of crypto-born-again art project). This is doubly appealing for me because these happen to be bands I’ve never had time or affinity for...."

More.

Moody reads tonight 7/26 at Skidmore with Francine Prose.

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Twitter Literature.... Twitterature?

Rick Moody (author of The Ice Storm), who appears tomorrow, Thursday, July 26 in Saratoga caused something of a stir in 2009 when he wrote the world's first short story in the form of Twitter tweets.

The story, "Some Contemporary Characters," is available only by subscription to the journal Electric Literature, but here is a line drawing video inspired by one sentence in that story:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anaHMP7PUM4

Moody will share the stage with novelist Francin Prose, tomorrow, 7/26, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga. Free.

Click here for more events in the series. All are free and open to the general public.

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"Global Warming's Terrifying New Math"

The most talked-about piece on global warming this year was written by Bill McKibben, Glens Falls native and Vermont resident who participated in the Writers Institute's "Telling the Truth" symposium back in 1991.

From this week's Rolling Stone:

"If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe."

More.

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On Men and Violence

Read Mary Gaitskill's short story, "The Other Place," about men and obsessions with violence in last year's Valentine's Day issue of the New Yorker:

"My son, Douglas, loves to play with toy guns. He is thirteen. He loves video games in which people get killed. He loves violence on TV, especially if it’s funny. How did this happen? The way everything does, of course. One thing follows another, naturally."

More.

Gaitskill will share the stage with poet Tom Healy, tonight, Wednesday, July 25th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga. Free.

Click here for more events in the series. All are free and open to the general public.

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An Army of Storytellers

"...[Storytelling] is important for the very idea of understanding -- for people to understand each other, other countries, other languages, maybe even themselves a little better. Fulbright wasn't founded in 1946 to send people on vacation; it was founded to bridge communities, to build ties, to share knowledge, to solve some of our pressing global challenges, and to work for peace."

Poet Tom Healy, who shares the stage with Mary Gaitskill tonight in Saratoga, was appointed Chairman of the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board by President Obama in 2011. He wrote earlier this month in the Huffington Post of his mission to encourage Fulbright scholars to take storytelling seriously.

Read more in the Huffington Post.

Healy grew up on a dairy farm in Mount Vision, NY. His 2009 poetry collection, What the Right Hand Knows was a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry He will share the stage with fiction writer Mary Gaitskill, tonight, Wednesday, July 25th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga. Free.

Click here for more events in the series. All are free and open to the general public.

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Troy Street Kid

Bill Kennedy's talk in Saratoga next week:  “I’ll talk about John Morrissey, a Troy street kid and river rat, who rose in the world through his fists and his politics to become an exalted gambler courted by the New York elite and who brought the casino and the track to Saratoga. I’ll talk about latter day gamblers and mob figures who moved into Saratoga — Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano — how it was all linked to politics, and how a politician — Governor Thomas E. Dewey — closed it down,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy will talk about crime and gambling in early 20th century Saratoga in a one-hour moderated conversation with political talk show host Susan Arbetter at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 1 in the Canfield Casino. The program is free and open to the public.

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Writer Mary Gaitskill tomorrow

"Mary Gaitskill used to be the downtown princess of darkness. Now she’s happily married and lives on a country lane. But she still writes with an icy insight into life’s little cruelties...."

So begins a 2005 New York Magazine profile here.

Gaitskill will share the stage with poet Tom Healy, tomorrow, Wednesday, July 25th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga. Free.

Click here for more events in the series. All are free and open to the general public.

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The Work of a Single Sentence: Jamaica Kincaid

Jamaica Kincaid, who reads tonight in Saratoga, discusses the work of thought behind the single 11-word sentence that begins her novel about her biological father, Mr. Potter, a taxi driver on the island of Antigua, whom she first met as an adult.

From the New York Times, June 7, 1999:

"How do I write? Why do I write? What do I write? This is what I am writing: I am writing "Mr. Potter." It begins in this way; this is its first sentence: "Mr. Potter was my father, my father's name was Mr. Potter." So much went into that one sentence; much happened before I settled on those 11 words."  More.

Picture: Jamaica Kincaid with William Kennedy.

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Poet Henri Cole Tonight

Here is Henri Cole's elegy for his father, "Oil and Steel."

My father lived in a dirty dish mausoleum,
watching a portable black-and-white television,
reading the Encyclopedia Britannica,
which he preferred to Modern Fiction.
One by one, his schnauzers died of liver disease,
except the one that guarded his corpse
found holding a tumbler of Bushmills.
"Dead is dead," he would say, an anti-preacher.
I took a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet
and some motor oil—my inheritance.
Once, I saw him weep in a courtroom—
neglected, needing nursing—this man who never showed
me much affection but gave me a knack
for solitude, which has been mostly useful.

Henri Cole will share the stage with author Jamaica Kincaid, tonight, Tuesday, July 24th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga. Free.

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Upcoming Events

The final week of the New York State Writers Institute at Skidmore College in Saratoga will feature Jamaica Kincaid and Henri Cole tonight 7/24, Mary Gaitskill and Tom Healy tomorrow 7/25, Rick Moody and Francine Prose Thursday 7/26, and "Writers on the Presidential Election" Friday 7/27, featuring James Miller and The Nation's Katha Pollitt (pictured here).

All Readings are at 8:00 p.m. in Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall.
Free and open to the public.

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The Obamians Reviewed in NY Times

James Mann, child of Albany, has a new book on President Obama's foreign policy team.

Leslie Gelb reviews it in the New York Times:  "Like the best reporters, Mann lets his subjects speak for themselves, then checks their fancies against the facts. He has given us a very good first cut at history."

Read more.

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Jamaica Kincaid, Writing as "Self Rescuing"

Jamaica Kincaid, major Caribbean-American author, who speaks tomorrow, Tuesday, 7/24, in Saratoga, recalls the childhood neglect that propelled her to become a writer.

Growing up as an only child until the age of 9, her mother and stepfather gave birth to three sons in quick succession....

"I don't know if having other children was the cause for our relationship changing - it might have changed as I entered adolescence, but her attention went elsewhere. And also our family money remained the same but there were more people to feed and to clothe and so everything got sort of shortened not only material things but emotional things, the good emotional things I got a short end of that. But then I got more of things I didn't have, like a certain kind of cruelty and neglect. In the end it didn't matter. When I was first a young person it did matter a lot because I didn't know what had happened to me.. If I hadn't become a writer I don't know what would have happened to me; that was a kind of self rescuing."
Jamaica Kincaid will share the stage with novelist Henri Cole, tomorrow, Tuesday, July 24th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga. Free.

Click here for more events in the series. All are free and open to the general public.

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Breaking Down Timbuktu

Nigerian author and art critic Teju Cole, who visited the Institute in February 2012, writes about the motivations of iconoclasts in history, and the destruction by Sunni extremists of Timbuktu's medieval Sufi Muslim shrines that have been decleared UNESCO World Heritage sites.

From the webzine, The New Inquiry:

"Iconoclasm is nominally about theology. Images which represent the wrong ideas must be expunged. But why be so furious about ideas? And, so, how are we to understand the ongoing destruction of Sufi shrines in the north of Mali? Ansar Dine, the rebel group that now controls Timbuktu, believes itself to be doing the will of God. The United Nations doesn’t matter, Ansar Dine has said, UNESCO is irrelevant, only God’s law matters. The locals are helpless, and horrified. Short of witnessing grievous bodily harm, few things are as astonishing as seeing the casual, physical destruction of what one holds sacred."

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Darin Strauss, Who Writes of Accidentally Killing a Classmate

"Half my life ago, I killed a girl."

So writes memoirist Darin Strauss (who reads tonight, Monday, 7/23, in Saratoga).

In his 2010 memoir, Half a Life, writer Darin Strauss recounts a tragedy and its aftermath. In his last month of high school, just after turning eighteen, Strauss is behind the wheel of his father's Oldsmobile, driving with friends—having "thoughts of mini-golf, another thought of maybe just going to the beach." Then out of the blue: a collision that results in the death of a bicycling classmate that shadows the rest of his life. In spare and piercing prose, Darin Strauss explores loss and guilt, maturity and accountability, hope and acceptance....

"staggering and unforgettable." --Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

Strauss, who received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, will share the stage with award-winning novelist Binnie Kirshenbaum, tonight, Monday, July 23rd, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga. Free.

 

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Andy Rooney Named a "Giant of Broadcasting"

Son of Albany and summer resident of Rensselaerville Andy Rooney (1919-2011) has been named a "Giant of Broadcasting" by the Library of American Broadcasting.

From the official announcement:  "No one should be asked to sum up ANDY ROONEY in a paragraph. He was foremost a writer, and at least a marginal iconoclast, and became most famous for his generally irreverent closings on 60 Minutes on CBS (“A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney”) featuring his observations on daily life and the passing parade...."   More.

For Paul Grondahl's 2001 Times Union interview of Rooney at his summer house in Rensselaerville, click here.

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Binnie Kirshenbaum Reads Monday 7/23

"A tremendous talent. Her novels are sexy, intelligent, complex, and provocative; they press against your heart the way old lovers do." — Junot Diaz

"Not many young female novelists can deal with sex, the appetite for it, and the loss of such appetite, with such candor, lack of self-protection, and humor as Binnie Kirshenbaum." — Norman Mailer

"...Kirshenbaum, the prolific writer of novels and stories written with wit and serious moral concern...is a presence to be reckoned with. One of her charms is that vestigial ladylike manner of a young woman who deports herself properly, aims for grace....(A) novelist of enormous cultural reach....the voice of a writer, known, or on the endless journey to knowing herself." — Maureen Howard

Kirshenbaum, who is also Chairperson of the Writing Program at Columbia University School of the Arts, will share the stage with award-winning memoirist and novelist Darrin Strauss, Monday,  July 203rd, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga. Free.

Click here for more events in the series. All are free and open to the general public.

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Woody Guthrie's Unpublished Novel

Movie star Johnny Depp and historian Doug Brinkley (who, in 1994, drove a busload of teenaged students across the country to Albany in order to meet William Kennedy) are coediting folksinger Woody Guthrie's as-yet-unpublished novel, House of Earth, for publication in 2013.

The unlikely pair published an essay about the forthcoming book earlier this month in the New York Times:

"Endemic poverty is a theme that Guthrie would turn to full-bore in House of Earth. The narrative follows the lives of two hardscrabble farmers, Tike and Ella May Hamlin, living in the cap rock country of West Texas, 'that big high, crooked cliff of limestone, sandrock, marble and flint, that runs between and is the line that divides the lower west Texas plains from the upper north Panhandle plains.' The impoverished couple, it seems, live in biological harmony with the land. A scorching lovemaking scene on a hay bale viscerally represents the fertility ritual. Yet they can’t keep the bizarre weather out of their shabby home, and Tike — Guthrie’s alter ego — starts espousing the gospel of adobe."   More.

Brinkley visited the Institute in 1998 to introduce Hunter S. Thompson, and again in 1999 to discuss William Kennedy's career as a journalist as part of a presentation for the Associated Writing Programs (AWP), and to discuss his bestselling 1998 book on Jimmy Carter, The Unfinished Presidency: Jimmy Carter's Journey Beyond the White House.

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"Almost Every Other Book You Ever Read Will Suck"

Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, writes about his experience studying short fiction by Amy Hempel (who reads tonight 7/20 at the Summer Writers Institute in Saratoga) in a writing workshop early on in his career:

"WHEN YOU STUDY MINIMALISM IN THE NOVELIST Tom Spanbauer's workshop, the first story you read is Amy Hempel's The Harvest. After that, you're ruined. I'm not kidding. You go there, and almost every other book you ever read will suck. All those thick, third-person, plot-driven books torn from the pages of today's news -- after Amy Hempel, you'll save yourself a lot of time and money."

Read more in L.A. Weekly.

Amy Hempel shares the stage with Pulitzer-winning poet Richard Howard on Friday, July 20th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga. Free.

Click here for more events in the series. All are free and open to the general public.

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The Carnegie Medal and Us

Perhaps this is a boast, but two thirds of the finalists for the newly established Andrew Carnegie Medal of the American Library Association recently visited the New York State Writers Institute.

Anne Enright, who visited on April 18 has received the first-ever Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction.

Both of the remaining two finalists for the medal were also recent Institute guests:  Karen Russell, who came in February 2011, and Russell Banks, who visits often.

Robert K. Massie (who, oddly, has never been here though he lives in Irvington, NY) received the Carnegie Medal for Nonfiction.

Among the remaining two nonfiction contenders was James Gleick, who came in March 2011. The reamining finalist was the late Manning Marable.

For more on the award, visit American Libraries, the magazine of the American Library Association.

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Poets in the Park, Saturday 7/21

Sylvia Barnard (pictured here) and Carolee Sherwood, the "Women Poets of Willett St." will present a free outdoor reading this Saturday 7/21 at the Robert Burns statue at Henry Johnson Blvd. & Hudson Ave. in Washington Park, Albany, as part of the Hudson Valley Writers Guild's "Poets in the Park" series.

Bring a chair or blanket to sit on
Rain site: the Social Justice Center, 33 Central Ave.
Sponsored by the Poetry Motel Foundation & the Hudson Valley Writers Guild
For information call 482-0262

Sylvia Barnard is Professor of Latin and Greek at UAlbany. She is is currently conducting research on the cult of the Dioscuri. She was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to Cyprus in 2003 for her work. She is interested in and teaches classes on women in antiquity, Latin and Greek literature, Greek and Roman history, and ancient law. She regularly teaches Latin and Greek texts, both in translation and in their original language.

Carolee Sherwood is a painter, mixed media artist and poet.Her poetry is published locally and nationally and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

For more information visit the Hudson Valley Writers Guild website at hvwg.org.

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A Poem About Poetry

Richard Howard, who reads Friday 7/20 in Saratoga, explores form in poetry in the form of a poem in the much-cited title poem of his 1994 collection, Like Most Revelations.

Like Most Revelations
by Richard Howard
(after Morris Louis) It is the movement that incites the form, discovered as a downward rapture--yes, it is the movement that delights the form, sustained by its own velocity. And yet it is the movement that delays the form while darkness slows and encumbers; in fact it is the movement that betrays the form, baffled in such toils of ease, until it is the movement that deceives the form, beguiling our attention--we supposed it is the movement that achieves the form. Were we mistaken? What does it matter if it is the movement that negates the form? Even though we give (give up) ourselves to this mortal process of continuing, it is the movement that creates the form. Howard, who formerly served as New York State Poet under the aegis of the Writers Institute, shares the stage with major contemporary short story writer Amy Hempel, on Friday, July 20th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga. Free. All events in the series are free and open to the general public.

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Poet Peg Boyers on "Outing on the Hudson"

Peg Boyers, who reads tomorrow in Saratoga, offers poetic commentary on the 1850 painting
"Outing on the Hudson" (pictured here) by an unknown artist.

"Hardly native and far from naked, these dignified
loungers by the Hudson stroll in their Sunday best,
white as the lilies in the foreground, white
as the sails on the little boats below
navigating the river, white as the scentless smoke
pluming up from the passing steamboat. In this Sunday idyll...."

Read more in Slate.

Hear Boyers read the poem at the Tang Museum in Saratoga here.

Boyers will share the stage with major American fiction writer Ann Beattie, tomorrow, Thursday, July 19th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga. Free.

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Ann Beattie in Saratoga tomorrow

“Beattie has created a resplendent paean to the pleasures of the literary imagination , and a riveting and mischievous, revealing and revitalizing portrait of an overlooked woman.”— Donna Seaman in a starred review in Booklist of Ann Beattie's new work of metafiction, Mrs. Nixon (November 2011), a literary deconstruction and reconstruction of First Lady Pat Nixon (pictured here).

Ann Beattie will share the stage with poet Peg Boyers, tomorrow, Thursday, July 19th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga.

All events in the series are free and open to the general public.

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Kennedy Reads Tonight in Saratoga

William Kennedy will read from his work tonight, Wednesday, July 18th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga.

Executive Director of the New York Writers Institute, Kennedy is the author most recently of Chango's Beads and Two-Tone Shoes, set in revolutionary Cuba and 1960s Albany.

Here's an excerpt from Elizabeth Donnelly's interview with Kennedy in last November's Paris Review:

Donnelly: Like your character Daniel Quinn, you’ve met Castro. What’s it like, talking with Fidel?

Kennedy: Well, it’s absolutely like nothing else. He showed up the first day I was in Cuba, in 1987. I was in the house of [Gabriel] García Márquez. It was after lunch, I was sitting in the rocking chair, and Gabriel—Gabo—said to me, “Would you mind moving to another chair? The Comandante is coming and he likes the rocker.” Fidel came in, in his field jacket and his cap. He was very bulky in the chest and was probably wearing a bulletproof vest.

He stuck around for about three and a half hours. We talked about literature, movies. I was about to go into production for Ironweed. He was very genial and he arranged all of my itinerary. He arranged for me to go to Santiago and then up to Holguin, to fly over to the Isle of Pines, where he had been in prison.

We also talked about making Scotch, because he had some Czechoslovakian hops and he had sent some people to Scotland to find out how to make Scotch. He made some and I promptly got a bottle and drank some. More

All events in the series are free and open to the general public.

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Rensselaerville Festival of Writers, July 26-29

The 2012 Rensselaerville Festival of Writers will feature Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Galway Kinnell, Writers Institute friend and retiring New York State Legislator Jack McEneny, UAlbany English professor Tomas Urayoan Noel, Lizz Winstead who co-created the Daily Show with John Stewart, and many others.

No doubt there will also be spontaneous tributes to Rensselaerville's best-loved resident, the late Andy Rooney, who passed away last November.

Other attractions include hiking in the Huyck preserve and the village itself.

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Danzy Senna, Author Who Explores Multiracial Experience

Multiracial author Danzy Senna is the daughter of African-American scholar Carl Senna and white author Fanny Howe. Her fiction frequently explores the experience of being biracial, the ambiguity of race, and the absurdity of defining race.

Click here to read an interview last year with the Times Union's Elizabeth Floyd Mair:

"In the liberal white world, what's sometimes hardest for me is the earnestness around race. It doesn't have that quality of irony and humor that I feel when I'm in a group of people who are of color--that ease of humor."

Senna will read today with former U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic, Tuesday, July 17th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga.

 

All events in the series are free and open to the general public.

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Bill Kennedy Explores Saratoga's Hidden Past

Pulitzer Prize winning author William J. Kennedy will explore Saratoga Springs’ gambling past in a one-hour moderated conversation with award winning, syndicated political radio talk show host Susan Arbetter, Wednesday, August 1 at 7 p.m. in the Canfield Casino in Saratoga Springs’ Congress Park. The program is free and open to the public.

In this discussion, Kennedy will draw from a lifetime of research in regional history and personal observation. While much of the talk will focus on the importance of the Spa City as a resort, according to the author, attention will also be directed on the parts of the city seldom discussed. “I’ll talk about John Hennessey, a Troy street kid and river rat, who rose in the world through his fists and his politics to become an exalted gambler courted by the New York elite and who brought the casino and the track to Saratoga. I’ll talk about latter day gamblers and mob figures who moved into Saratoga -- Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano—how it was all linked to politics, and how a politician -- Governor Thomas E. Dewey—closed it down,” Kennedy said.

Born in Albany and educated at nearby Siena College, Kennedy, a former journalist and one of the nation’s most important living authors, has distinguished himself with books about Albany and its people. His works include The Ink Truck (1969), Legs (1975), Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (1978), Ironweed (1983, winner of the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; film 1987), and Roscoe (2002).

 

The event is jointly sponsored by the New York State Archives Partnership Trust, the Saratoga Springs History Program, and the New York State Writers Institute. Funding for the program comes from the Alfred Z. Solomon Charitable Trust and the New York Council for the Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.

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Former US Poet Laureate Charles Simic tomorrow

Charles Simic reads tomorrow at Skidmore with writer Danzy Senna.

His 1999 poem, "Fork," was featured last week in a Slate article on the peculiar history of that utensil.

This strange thing must have crept  

Right out of hell.

It resembles a bird’s foot

Worn around the cannibal’s neck.

As you hold it in your hand,

As you stab with it into a piece of meat,

It is possible to imagine the rest of the bird:  

Its head which like your fist

Is large, bald, beakless, and blind.

Tuesday, July 17th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga.

All events in the series are free and open to the general public.

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Bill Kennedy Receives SUNY Honor

William Kennedy was named the first honorary inductee of the newly established SUNY Distinguished Academy, which honors the achievements of SUNY faculty throughout the state, in a a ceremony last May.

Bill is pictured here with SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher and UAlbany President George Philip.

Created this year, the Academy is intended to encourage a renewed commitment to quality instruction, service on campuses, and strong leadership development for new faculty throughout the state university system.

Zimpher said, "“It is only fitting that SUNY bring together its distinguished faculty to help raise the bar for academic excellence throughout the system. By establishing the academy, the Board paves the way for increased contribution to the SUNY mission on behalf of this group, and expands its honor of their extensive accomplishments.”

More.

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Eugene Mirabelli in the TU

81-year-old novelist and UAlbany English professor emeritus Gene Mirabelli, the recent loss of his beloved wife and muse Margaret Black, his struggle with grief, and his new novel Renato the Painter are the subjects of a large profile on the front page of the Times Union's "Unwind" section.

Paul Grondahl writes:

"[Mirabelli] understands firsthand that life can change in an instant, whether in his own real-world experiences or the plot of his novels."  More.

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Former US Poet Laureate Mark Strand in Saratoga

Poet Mark Strand, whose poetry was praised for its "transparent verbal perfection" by Octavio Paz, the late Mexican writer and Nobel Laureate, will share the stage with poet and memoirist Honor Moore this coming Monday, July 16th,  8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs.

Honor Moore, author of poetry, fiction and nonfiction is perhaps best known for her bestselling memoir, The Bishop's Daughter, about her relationship with her secretly gay father, leading Episcopal bishop Paul Moore, Jr.
All events in the series are free and open to the general public.

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The Dark Lady of American Letters, This Friday

Joyce Carol Oates, a towering figure of contemporary fiction, and a favorite to win the Nobel Prize for a quarter century, and a regular visitor to the New York State Summer Writers Institute, will speak on Friday the 13th of July in Saratoga. 8PM, free and open to the public, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs.

All events in the series are free and open to the general public

Her most recent book is The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares: Novellas and Stories of Unspeakable Dread (2011).

Publishers Weekly said, "The seven stories in this stellar collection from the prolific Oates (Give Me Your Heart) may prompt the reader to turn on all the lights or jump at imagined noises.... This volume burnishes Oates’s reputation as a master of psychological dread."

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Russell Banks and Chase Twichell Tonight

Russell Banks and Chase Twichell share the stage tonight in Saratoga.
8PM, free and open to the public, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs.

All events in the series are free and open to the general public

Banks received the 2012 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for his newest novel, Lost Memory of Skin, a novel about a loosely-organized community of homeless sex offenders who live beneath a Florida highway overpass.  Writing in the New York Times, Janet Maslin said, “Destined to be a canonical novel of its time... it delivers another of Banks’s wrenching, panoramic visions of American moral life, and this one very particular to the early 21st century... Banks, whose great works resonate with such heart and soul, brings his full narrative powers to bear.”

Chase Twichell, poet, is the author most recently of the 2010 collection, Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been, winner of the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Writing in the Washington Post, Robert Hass said, "[The poems] are full of sharp observation, both of the world and herself, unsentimental poems with a sinewy intellectual toughness -- they open out into a stark, sometimes bewildered clarity"

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Tonight: Joanna Scott and James Longenbach

Another literary couple shares the stage tonight in Saratoga, Joanna Scott (pictured here) and James Longenbach:
8PM, free and open to the public, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs.

All events in the series are free and open to the general public.
Carol Burns of the Washington Post writes about her discovery of Joanna Scott in the preface to a 2004 interview:

"I discovered Joanna Scott when I read one of her stories in The Paris Review. It was as intricate and complex as a novel, yet as clear as a stone in water. Immediately I went to find more of her work: first her story collection, Various Antidotes, then her novels. She takes on science and the natural world, both expansively and in miniature. In the opening of The Manikin, a single owl comes to realizes it must fly south early this year. In this moment, Scott traces the mystery of instinct."  More.

James Longenbach's most recent poetry collection, The Iron Key (2010), received this review in Publishers Weekly:

"James Longenbach (The Art of the Poetic Line) is an incontestably brilliant critic. This fourth book of poetry shares some of the virtues of Longenbach's criticism—the poems are unfalteringly wise and knowledgeable about the poetic tradition. At their best moments, these often narrative poems borrow the haunting logic of distant memories...."  More

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Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt tonight in Saratoga

Noted literary couple Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt [pictured here] will share the stage tonight at a reading for the New York State Summer Writers Institute, Skidmore College, 8PM, free and open to the public, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs.

All events in the series are free and open to the general public.

Auster's new memoir, Winter Journal, was just named by Huffington Post Books as one of the 11 Best Summer Books of 2012:

"Paul Auster's second memoir is surprisingly uncomplicated, except for the fact that it jumps around chronologically, and is written in the second person - which gives the book a sense of being spoken out loud, while staring into the mirror. Moments in Auster's life are arranged in interesting ways, such as an annotated list of all the houses he's ever lived in, and it's never less than readable." More.

Hustvedt's new essay collection Living Thinking Looking receives a rave in today's London Independent:

"Seeing is creating, for Hustvedt, and the meditations collected here amount to a lucid, absorbing and vigorous exploration of how we engage with the physical world, with art and with memory."  More.

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Suzanne Lance Wins Adirondack Literary Award

NYS Writers Institute Assistant Director Suzanne Lance received the Adirondack Literary Award for Best Edited Collection for Heaven Up-h'isted-ness! The History of the Adirondack Forty-Sixers and the High Peaks of the Adirondacks.

Other awardees included Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Millhauser for the short story collection We Others, and Bloated Toe Press for its singular service to regional authors.

For the official press release about the awards click here and scroll down. For Paul Grondahl's article on the book in the Times Union click here.

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Louise Glück and Caryl Phillips Tonight, July 3rd

Louise Glück, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for Poetry, and Caryl Phillips [pictured here], novelist, A Distant Shore; Dancing in the Dark; In the Falling Snow, will read tonight at Skidmore, 8PM, free and open to the public, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs.

All events in the series are free and open to the general public.

In a review in The New Republic, the critic Helen Vendler wrote: "Louise Glück is a poet of strong and haunting presence. Her poems, published in a series of memorable books over the last twenty years, have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither 'confessional' nor 'intellectual' in the usual senses of those words."

"Caryl Phillips was born in St.Kitts and came to Britain at the age of four months. He grew up in Leeds, and studied English Literature at Oxford University.... He was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1992 and was on the 1993 Granta list of Best of Young British Writers. His literary awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and Britain's oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for Crossing the River which was also shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. A Distant Shore won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize; Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN/Beyond the Margins Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.... A regular contributor to The Guardian and The New Republic, his latest book, Colour Me English - Selected Essays, was published in July 2011."

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Anthony D'Aries to Address Young Writers Institute

Anthony D'Aries will talk about his new memoir of growing up in a blue collar town, The Language of Men, with the students participating in the New York State Summer Young Writers Institute on Tuesday, July 3rd, 3:30-5pm in Bolton 280, Palamountain Hall, Skidmore College in Saratoga.

Recent Institute guest Tom Perrotta said of the new book, "The Language of Men isn't just a beautifully written memoir about a Vietnam vet father and the complicated legacy he leaves to his son; it's also a disturbing, brutally honest, darkly funny meditation on masculinity, violence, and sexuality. Anthony D'Aries is a writer to watch."

Institute guest Andre Dubus III said, "Hold the phone, kick down the door, and yell from the rooftops of all those American blue-collar towns that give birth to so many of our artists: a new one is among us, and his name is Anthony D'Aries. This man writes like Charlie Parker played the alto sax, with grit and verve and a willing free-fall into hard-won, illuminated truths. The Language of Men is a profoundly important book by a major new talent!"

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Tonight in Saratoga: Liz Benedict and Phillip Lopate

The Summer Writers Institute reading series at Skidmore begins tonight with a dual reading by Elizabeth Benedict (pictured here) and Phillip Lopate at 8PM in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs. All events in the series are free and open to the general public.

"Phillip Lopate is considered by many to be one of the most important essayists of our time, a writer and editor at the fulcrum of memoir's resurgence who has contributed significantly to discourse on creative nonfiction. The anthology Lopate edited in 1994, The Art of the Personal Essay (Doubleday), helped contextualize the genre as part of a global tradition dating back to the classical period." (Poets & Writers, May 2008).

Benedict's novels have established her reputation as a writer who "specializes in the subterranean currents of modern relationships, the secret motivations and betrayals that underlie everyday interactions." Hallie Ephron in the Boston Globe called her most recent novel, The Practice of Deceit, "a wickedly funny literary suspense novel" that is "wry, at times heartbreaking, always smart and entertaining."Newsday's reviewer said that Benedict's "wit is as sharp as her eye, and twice as fast. She writes the hard, horrifying truth about human nature, and it is addictively entertaining." Fresh Air's Maureen Corrigan chose her previous novel, the bestseller Almost, as one of her top five novels of 2001.

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