NPR Interview with Joy Harjo

On how to get your artistic voice back, if you've lost it...

"I [had] felt like I had lost my voice, too. And sometimes, to find it ... what I've learned is it needs to be lost for a while. And when it wants to be found, you'll find it.

"But I would say is that you just put yourself in the place of poetry. You just go where poetry is, whether it's in your heart or your mind or in books or in places where there's live poetry or recordings.

"And, you know, it's like looking for love. You can't look for love, or it will run away from you. But, you know, don't look for it. Don't look for it. Just go where it is and appreciate it, and, you know, it will find you."

Read more or listen to the interview: http://www.npr.org/2012/07/09/156501436/joy-harjos-crazy-brave-path-to-finding-her-voice

Harjo visits UAlbany tomorrow, 4:15 and 8pm, Campus Center 375, with a catered reception by SUNY Press to follow the evening event.

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The Big Read in Albany

The Big Read in Albany will feature a number of events inspired by Tim O'Brien's book of stories about the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried.

You may have missed the kick-off event yesterday at The Palace, but there are also two panel discussions, a documentary screening and a musical performance.

You may also be interested in this:

American Place Theatre performance of The Things They Carried
November 7 (Wednesday)
Pre-Performance discussion at 7 p.m.
Performance — 7:30 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus
$15 general public / $12 seniors & faculty-staff / $10 students Box Office: (518) 442-3997

Tim O’Brien’s masterwork of contemporary literature about the Vietnam War is taken from book to stage by American Place Theatre, the award-winning New York City based company. The verbatim adaptation of this compassionate tale of the American soldier includes five of the short stories from the book including “The Rainy River” and “The Man I Killed.” With original cello music as underscoring, the audience plays witness to the complex issues of war and the universal struggle of the soldier.

For more about the Big Read, visit the website of the Albany Public Library:
http://www.albanypubliclibrary.org/documents/thebigread_2012.pdf

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Poet Joy Harjo talks about her tattoo...

Joy Harjo, who visits tomorrow, explains her remarkable hand tattoo on her website:

What do I have on my hand and what does it mean?

The tattoo on my hand is a tattoo. It’s not henna. The style is from the Marquesas Islands. The Marquesas are north of Tahiti.

Roonui, a Tahitian artist, did the tattoo freehand in Moorea, Tahiti. He is now living in Canada. http://www.roonui-tattoo.com/ It took two-and-a-half hours. (And yes, it hurt.)

I’d seen the tattoo there on my hand for sometime. The tattoo represents assistance for my work. I use my hands for music, writing, and everything else I do. The tattoo reminds me of the levels of assistance. I am also carrying a beautiful piece of art with me wherever I go.

Roonui says: "Polynesian tattooing is not a simple exercise in aesthetics. Polynesian carve into their body the symbols of their actions (past present or future), their promises, their games."

The part inside my wrist, close to my heart, resembles ancestral designs of my tribal people.

More about Harjo's events:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/harjo_joy12.html

 

The 8PM reading will be followed by a free catered reception and book signing with Harjo sponsored by SUNY Press (at approximately 9:30 p.m.). The reception is in association with the annual John G. Neihardt lecture celebrating Native American literature.

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Joy Harjo: A Poem to Get Rid of Fear

Watch Joy Harjo, who visits this coming Thursday, Nov 1st., perform her poem "I Give You Back" as part of HBO's Def Poetry Jam....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAYCf2Gdycc

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Joy Harjo coming Thursday

“Joy Harjo is a giant-hearted, gorgeous, and glorious gift to the world. Her belief in art, in spirit, is so powerful, it can’t help but spill over to us — lucky readers. Wildly passionate and honest as a hound, Crazy Brave invites us into a whole new way of seeing—deeper, less cluttered, and vastly more courageous than our own. It’s a book for people who want to re-fall in love with the world.”-- Pam Houston, author of Cowboys Are My Weakness

Joy Harjo, Native American poet and musician
November 1 (Thursday)
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Campus Center Room 375, Uptown Campus
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Campus Center Room 375, Uptown Campus

Joy Harjo is an award-winning poet and musician of the Mvskoke/Creek Nation. The author of seven collections of poetry, she was praised by the late Adrienne Rich for her “breathtaking complex witness and world-remaking language.” Her poetry collections include How We Became Human (2002), The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (1994), and In Mad Love and War (1990), which received the American Book Award and the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. Her new book is the memoir, Crazy Brave (2012), about her journey from a troubled childhood and teenage motherhood to her accomplishments in the arts.

Cosponsored by SUNY Press in conjunction with the annual John G. Neihardt Lecture

Read more: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/harjo_joy12.html

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Edwin Torres: A Startling Performer, Tonight in the Ballroom

Edwin Torres, one of the most startling performers of the Nuyorican poetry scene, will participate in UAlbany's Diasporican Poetry Cafe, tonight in the Campus Center Ballroom, 5:30-7:45 p.m.

"I have seen Edwin Torres dancing to the sound of a musical saw while wearing a hat of dirt on his head in a store window, and once wearing pure white with the painter/poet Elizabeth Castagna on New Year's day 1999. I've always wanted to be Edwin Torres for a day, to think like him, to wear cool glasses, to be as tall and thin, to have Puerto Rican soul so I could write 'I'm near a tiger's smooch, BURP!'"

Read more of Brenda Coultas' Electronic Poetry Center review of Edwin Torres' poetry collection, Fractured Humorous here: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/torrese/fractured.html

Get a taste of Torres' performance style on YouTube here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8uOPBn5jW4

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Larry La Fountain-Stokes on Sexual Persecution and Migration

Larry La Fountain-Stokes, Puerto Rican poet and performer who will participate in tonight's "Diasporican" Cafe at UAlbany, speaks in San Juan at a TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference about the persecution of people for their sexuality, and the profound effect this has on international migration (emigration and immigration).

View his talk on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoyjL23Bwhc

Books by La Fountain-Stokes include the scholarly work, Queer Ricans: Cultures and Sexualities in the Diaspora (2009), and the bilingual fiction collection, Uñas pintadas de azul/Blue Fingernails (2009).

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A Cascade Of Words: Jesus Papoleto Melendez

On the "Artists on the Cutting Edge" program of UCTV (University of California), Jesus Papoleto Melendez, a founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe who will visit Albany tomorrow, talks about a variety of subjects, including how performance is more satisfying than writing, and about his formative years as a kid in Harlem and as a teacher in San Diego.

http://www.uctv.tv/shows/A-Cascade-Of-Words-Jesus-Papoleto-Melendez-2645

More about the Diasporican Poets Cafe tomorrow at UAlbany:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/puerto_rican_diaspora12.html

Photo: Melendez on the Boricua Poetry website.

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Giannina Braschi this Friday at the Diasporican Cafe

Giannina Braschi, major contemporary bilingual poet and fiction writer, will join a number of other "Diasporican" poets on stage 5:30-7:45 p.m., Friday, October 26th in the Campus Center Ballroom.

Written in inventive mixtures of English, Spanish and Spanglish, Braschi's work explores collisions of language, culture and history with regard to the lives and experiences of 50 million Hispanic-Americans living in the United States.

In the Evergreen Review, Barney Rosset said of Braschi's 2011 novel, The United States of Banana, “Revolutionary in subject and form, United States of Banana is a beautifully written declaration of personal independence. Giannina Braschi’s take on U.S. relations with our southern neighbors in Latin America and the Caribbean, most especially Puerto Rico, is an eye-opener. The ire and irony make for an explosive combination and a very exciting read.”

In advance praise of Braschi's bilingual novel, Yo Yo Boing! (2011), Harvard scholar Doris Sommer said, “A bilingual rollercoaster....A rush of gloriously nuanced sentences that teeter between the grotesque and burlesque…the text transmutes poetry into novel, into screenplay, dialogue, and by extension to more and sometimes unidentified variants.”

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The Literature of Bullying-- Replies, Rebuttals, Confessions, and Catharsis

In addition to her work as poet and playwright, Magdalena Gomez (who visits UAlbany tomorrow) is the coeditor of a new anthology written by survivors of being bullied:  Bullying: Replies, Rebuttals, Confessions, and Catharsis (2012, with Maria Luisa Arroyo). The book features a variety of original essays, poetry, plays, and commentary by parents, teachers, children and assorted adult survivors on how bullying has affected their lives.

Gomez will participate in two events on Friday:

Conversations with Diasporican Writers — 2:15 – 3:45 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown CampusModerator: Tomás Urayoán Noel, University at Albany
Guest Writers: Magdalena Gómez, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Jesús Papoleto Meléndez, and Edwin Torres

Diasporican Café: Performing Voices of the Puerto Rican Diaspora — 5:30 – 7:45 p.m., Campus Center Ballroom
Guest Writers: Giannina Braschi, Magdalena Gómez, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Jesús Papoleto Meléndez, and Edwin Torres

Five internationally known U.S. Puerto Rican writer-performers will discuss their work in an afternoon panel discussion and present readings/performances in the evening. Both events are part of the 20th Anniversary Conference of the Puerto Rican Studies Association, which is being held at UAlbany October 24 – 27. For more information on the Conference go to: http://www.puertoricanstudies.org. 

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Upstate Nuyorican Poets Cafe

Some key figures of New York City's historic Nuyorican Poets Cafe (pictured here), perhaps the most vibrant institution of U.S. Hispanic literary culture, will visit Albany to participate in a "Diasporican Cafe," free and open to the public, as part of the 20th Anniversary Conference of the Puerto Rican Studies Association.

Featured performers will include Jesus Papoleto Melendez, one of the founders of the Cafe in the 1970s, Edwin Torres, a transformational figure at the Cafe in recent decades, and Giannina Braschi and Magdalena Gomez, both leaders of the Nuyorican poetry movement.

More on the event in Albany: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/puerto_rican_diaspora12.html

More on the Nuyorican Cafe: http://www.nuyorican.org/

And here's a recent article about a newly announced $7 million renovation of the cafe: http://www.thelodownny.com/leslog/2012/10/nuyorican-cafe-looks-to-undertake-a-7-million-dollar-renovation.html

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Poet Joy Harjo profile in High Country News

"The poet Joy Harjo claims to remember her struggle through the birth canal –– leaving a past world as a warrior with weapons in hand and entering this one "puny and female and Indian in lands that were stolen. Most people don't wonder about the lives they might have lived before they were born into this one; most of us don't go beyond abstractions such as "heaven" or "spirit" when we wonder about what follows our departure from this earth. But Harjo has spent decades exploring the connections between worlds in story and song."

Native American poet and musician Joy Harjo, who visits Albany on Thursday, Nov. 1, is profiled in High Country News, a Colorado based magazine about public policy and culture in the American West:

http://www.hcn.org/hcn/issues/44.17/already-gone-a-profile-of-native-american-poet-joy-harjo

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The Hungry Ear: Kevin Young

Poet Kevin Young, who visited us in 2005, is making news with his new book on poetry and food:

"It delivers such a groaning board of things to love, from Seamus Heaney on oysters and Lucille Clifton on collard greens to Theodore Roethke on root cellars and Jane Kenyon on shopping at an IGA."

More:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/22/books/the-hungry-ear-poems-of-food-drink-kevin-young-editor.html

More on Young's 2005 visit to Albany:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/young_kevin.html

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Performing Voices of the Puerto Rican Diaspora

Dear Readers, Writers, Teachers, Students and All Members of the General Public:

We invite you to attend the following free events:

Performing Voices of the Puerto Rican Diaspora
October 26 (Friday)
Conversations with Diasporican Writers — 2:15 – 3:45 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus
Moderator: Tomás Urayoán Noel, University at Albany
Guest Writers: Magdalena Gómez, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Jesús Papoleto Meléndez, and Edwin Torres

Diasporican Café: Performing Voices of the Puerto Rican Diaspora — 5:30 – 7:45 p.m., Campus Center Ballroom
Guest Writers: Giannina Braschi, Magdalena Gómez, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Jesús Papoleto Meléndez, and Edwin Torres

Five internationally known U.S. Puerto Rican writer-performers will discuss their work in an afternoon panel discussion and present readings/performances in the evening. Both events are part of the 20th Anniversary Conference of the Puerto Rican Studies Association, which is being held at UAlbany October 24 – 27. For more information on the Conference go to: http://www.puertoricanstudies.org.

Giannina Braschi is the author of the collection of poetry and fiction El imperio de los sueños (1988; Empire of Dreams, 1994) and the novels Yo-Yo Boing (1998) and United States of Banana (2011).

Magdalena Gómez, poet, playwright, and actor, is the co-founder and artistic director of Teatro V!da, a performing arts collective that explores multicultural and multigenerational issues.

Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is a poet, fiction writer, playwright, and performer. His publications include the story collection Uñas pintadas de azul (2009, Blue Fingernails), and the play Escándalo! (2003).

Jesús Papoleto Meléndez is one of the founders of New York’s Nuyorican Poets Café. An award-winning poet, his forthcoming book Hey Yo/Yo Soy! 40 Years of Nuyorican Street Poetry, is the first volume of his collected work.

Edwin Torres is known internationally for his experimentalist performance poetry that incorporates sound, visual theatre, and audience participation. He is the author of the poetry collection In the Function of External Circumstances (2010).

Sponsored by the Center for Latino, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies; the Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latino Studies; and the College of Arts and Sciences at UAlbany

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The Execution of Wanda Jean in the news....

One of the stars of tonight's film, The Execution of Wanda Jean (7:30pm at Page Hall with discussion) is death penalty opponent Jesse Jackson, who has recently taken his fight to the African nation of The Gambia.

There's an article on Jackson's fight that mentions Wanda Jean Allen in an October 2012 issue of The Nation:

http://www.thenation.com/article/170284/jesse-jackson-fights-capital-punishment-gambia#

Photo: Jackson with Gambian president Yahyah Jammeh.

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Coetzee Event: UAlbany Photo of the Day

Nobel Visit

NYS Writers Institute Director, Donald Faulkner moderates a panel discussion with Nobel Prize-winning novelist J.M. Coetzee from South Africa, along with novelist Paul Auster, and a select group of UAlbany students participating in a seminar discussing the work of American author Herman Melville in the Performing Arts Center.

 

Photo credit: Mark Schmidt

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Vivien Ng and James Acker at the Movies

Vivien Ng (pictured here) will join James Acker at Page Hall on Friday 10/19 at 7:30 PM to lead audience discussion following a screening of The Execution of Wanda Jean, a documentary about the first African American woman to be executed in modern times, and a finalist for the Grand Jury Prize of the Sundance Film Festival.

Vivien Ng is chair of the UAlbany Women's Studies Department and the first president of the National Women's Studies Association (1993-4). More on Vivien:  http://www.albany.edu/womensstudies/fac-ngv.shtml

James Acker is Distinguished Teaching Professor of the School of Criminal Justice and author of the standard textbook, Criminal Procedure: A Contemporary Perspective (1999, now in its 3rd edition, 2012). More on Acker: http://www.albany.edu/scj/james_acker.php

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The Next Big One, Tonight with David Quammen

"By the Next Big One, I mean a murderous pandemic that sweeps around the planet, killing millions of people, as the so-called 'Spanish' influenza did in 1918-19, as AIDS has been doing in slower motion, and as SARS might have done in 2003 if it hadn’t been stopped by fast science, rigorous measures of public health, and luck. Experts I’ve interviewed over the past six years generally agree that such a Next Big One is not only possible but probable.... From where will the Next Big One emerge? Answer, as I’ve noted: Most likely from wildlife. It will be a zoonosis — an animal infection that spills over into humans."

Read more in Yale Environment 360:  http://e360.yale.edu/mobile/feature.msp?id=2579
Quammen visits today at 4:15 and 8PM in the UAlbany Campus Center:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#david

Photo from the 1918 flu pandemic.

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Quammen on Fact vs. Fiction

Science writer David Quammen, who visits today, talks to Terrain.org about the responsibility of nonfiction writers not to take creative liberty with the facts:

"Fact or truth, yeah, that question. I utterly distrust the word truth. I detest it when writers claim they are hedging on factuality in service to higher truth. Or sometimes it's the essential truth of a situation. Bullshit. Nonfiction should be composed, artfully but conscientiously, like a mosaic, from bits of accurate fact. Is it an art form? well, it can be, it should be. Artful, imaginative, accurate: this combination of adjectives is not contradictory. Readers should demand this of their nonfiction, and not settle for self-indulgent, falsified jive. The form in which this boundary has been most egregiously violated recently is the memoir. Ugh."

Read more:  http://www.terrain.org/interview/21/

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Of Bats, Pythons and the Marburg Virus

Read an excerpt from Spillover, David Quammen's new book about emergent pandemics.

Quammen visits the Writers Institute tomorrow, Thursday.

"Astrid Joosten was a 41-year-old Dutch woman who, in June 2008, went to Uganda with her husband. At home in Noord-Brabant, she worked as a business analyst. Both she and her husband, Jaap Taal, a financial manager, enjoyed annual adventures, especially to Africa. The journey in 2008, booked through an adventure-travel outfitter, took them to the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, home to mountain gorillas. While there, the operators offered an optional trip, to a place called the Maramagambo Forest, where the chief attraction was a peculiar site known as Python Cave. African rock pythons lived there, languid and content, grown large and fat on a diet of bats."

More in The Guardian:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2012/sep/28/deadly-viruses-ebola-marburg-sars

More on Quammen's visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/quammen_david12.html

Picture:  Egyptian fruit bats, Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda

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They're Coming!... The Zoonotic Diseases

Here's a 2007 National Geographic article by David Quammen, who visits Albany tomorrow, about the rise of zoonotic diseases, which "jump" from animals to people-- the subject of his new critically acclaimed book, Spillover (2012).

"In September 1994, a violent disease erupted among racehorses in a suburb of Brisbane, Australia. The place, called Hendra, was a quiet old neighborhood filled with racecourses, stables, newsstands that sell tip sheets, corner cafés with names like The Feed Bin, and racing people. The first victim was a pregnant mare named Drama Series, who started showing symptoms in an outlying pasture and was brought back to her trainer's stable for doctoring, where she only got worse. Three people worked to save her—the trainer himself, his stable foreman, and a veterinarian. Within two days Drama Series died, leaving the cause of her trouble uncertain. Had she been bitten by a snake? Had she eaten some poisonous weeds out in that scrubby, derelict meadow? Those hypotheses were eliminated two weeks later, when most of her stablemates fell ill. This wasn't snakebite or toxic fodder. It was something contagious."

Read more:  http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/10/infectious-animals/quammen-text

More about his visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/quammen_david12.html

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Capital Punishment Documentary and Discussion Friday

Dear Readers, Writers, Teachers, Students and All Members of the General Public,

 

We invite you to attend the following free film event, which will be followed by an audience discussion led by UAlbany professors Vivien Ng, Chair of the Women’s Studies Department, and James Acker, Distinguished Teaching Professor of the School of Criminal Justice:

THE EXECUTION OF WANDA JEAN
October 19 (Friday)
Film Screening — 7:30 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus
Directed by Liz Garbus
(United States, 2007, 94 minutes, color)

A spare and unsentimental documentary about the first African American woman to be put to death in modern times, EXECUTION follows the clemency appeal of mentally-impaired death row inmate Wanda Jean Allen. NY Times reviewer Julie Salamon said the film “offers an unusual opportunity to observe the inequities in the death penalty, not just the inherent immorality but also the haphazard administration of it.... In the end, Execution achieves a torturous, race-against-time desperation. Against a well-captured background of extended-family grief, the film inflates with optimism and then helplessly watches the state squeeze the air out. As Allen’s execution date closes in, the documentary gives an especially poignant portrait of her friendship with the never flagging legal investigator David Presson. For all his chin-up attitude, he slowly comes apart, sweating, sighing, laughing uncontrollably at Allen’s good-natured faith that all will end well….” The film was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival.

 

For more information contact 518-442-5620 or writers@albany.edu, or visit us online athttp://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/ . You may also wish to visit our blog at http://nyswiblog.blogspot.com/, or to friend us on Facebook. 

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An Embarrassment for the Pulitzer Jury

"Mr. Quammen... is not just among our best science writers but among our best writers, period.... That he hasn’t won a nonfiction National Book Award or Pulitzer Prize is an embarrassment."

So writes Dwight Garner this month in the New York Times.

Read the article here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/03/books/spillover-by-david-quammen-on-how-animals-infect-humans.html?_r=0

Quammen visits us tomorrow:

David Quammen, nature writer and author
October 18 (Thursday)
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus

David Quammenis one of America’s leading nature writers. His new book is Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (2012), about his travels in the remote corners of the globe with field researchers investigating disease outbreaks in rats, monkeys, bats, pigs, and other species, with the potential to “spillover” to humans. Walter Isaacson described the book as “a frightening and fascinating masterpiece of science reporting that reads like a detective story.” A widely-travelled contributing writer for National Geographic, and the author of the column, “Natural Acts,” for Outside magazine for 15 years, Quammen has written several nonfiction bestsellers, including The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (2006), Monster of God (2003), The Boilerplate Rhino (2001), and The Song of the Dodo (1996).

Cosponsored by UAlbany’s School of Public Health

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Poet Without Borders

Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah, a practicing physician in the ER unit of a VA Hospital in Houston, Texas, published his first poem while working abroad for Doctors Without Borders in Zambia (he has also worked for that organization in Sudan).

Winner of Yale University's Younger Poets Series prize, Joudah will visit with major Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan tomorrow October 16th (rescheduled from April 10th).

Joudah served as translator for Zaqtan's first collection in English, Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me (2012) from Yale University Press.

Joudah was profiled and interviewed by David Thies in the Texas Observer in 2008:

"Poetry comes from a pre-evolutionary space," he says when asked about the origins of his work. He looked back to the Arabic poetry he had shared with his father and began working at translating the cadence-the feel-of that language into English. "I told myself that if I could reproduce that childhood cadence in English, I could be a poet."

Why didn't he write poetry in his native Arabic? Joudah describes the decision to write in English as an embrace and a rebuke. Writing in English is "a way to embrace the world," he says, and a riposte to the "Orientalist" view of Arabic culture that it is exotic and underdeveloped. More.

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Zaqtan in the Times Union

Paul Grondahl of the Times Union profiles major Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan, and interviews Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah. Both will visit Albany tomorrow:

Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan, whose application for a visa was held up in a case described as "ethnic profiling," has rescheduled a hastily canceled April U.S. tour and will visit the University at Albany on Tuesday on a triumphant note.

"We are so happy to have him here finally, but it was a disappointing and frustrating case of an entrenched and bizarre U.S. bureaucracy," said Dr. Fady Joudah, a Houston physician who also is a Palestinian-American poet, winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize and a translator of the poetry of Zaqtan (pronounced ZOCK-tawn), who writes in Arabic.

Read more: http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/Poetic-license-3943081.php#ixzz29NwMLZTw

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Ghassan Zaqtan on PBS NewsHour

Tomorrow's visitor to UAlbany, Palestinian poet and Director General of the Literature Department of the Palestinian Ministry of Culture, is featured on the Poetry Series web page of The News Hour with Jim Lehrer with audio of readings in both English and Arabic.




NewsHour link: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/entertainment/poetry/profiles/poet_zaqtan.html

Here are the event details:

Ghassan Zaqtan, Palestinian poet, with Fady Joudah, Palestinian-American poet and translator
October 16 (Tuesday)
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Campus Center Room 375, Uptown Campus
Reading — 7:00 p.m. [Note early start time], Campus Center Room 375, Uptown Campus
Ghassan Zaqtan, poet, novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and playwright, is a major Palestinian poet and a leading representative of the avant-garde in Arabic literature. His most recent collection—the first to appear in English—is Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me (2012), which was translated by Fady Joudah, a Palestinian-American poet and winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition for his own collection, The Earth in the Attic (2008). A past participant in numerous panels and colloquia with leading Israeli writers on peaceful coexistence and mutual concerns, Zaqtan is also the co-founder and director of the House of Poetry in Ramallah and is currently the Director General of the Literature and Publishing Department of the Palestinian Ministry of Culture.

Note: This event has been rescheduled from April 10, 2012.

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Animal Rights Activist and Nobel Laureate to Speak

J. M. Coetzee is an animal rights activist and ethical vegetarian, in addition to being a Nobel Prize winning novelist.

He is a leading figure of the Australian organization, Voiceless-- The Animal Protection Institute, and co-selected the stories and essays that appear in the 2013 Voiceless Anthology, which will be published in December 2012.

Coetzee calls animal protection, "one of the more urgent social and philosophical issues of our times." His bestselling novel, Elizabeth Costello (2003), explores many of these issues.

More on the anthology:  http://www.voiceless.org.au/grants-and-prizes/writing-prize/2013anthology

Coetzee will share the share with his friend Paul Auster twice today at UAlbany.

More about the events:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/coetzee_auster12.html

Photo of pigs in an industrial farming facility from an op-ed piece by Coetzee in the Sydney Morning Herald decrying Biblical justifications for the eating of meat:

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/animals/nothing-biblical-in-factory-farming-20111205-1oe2o.html

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John Malkovich in Coetzee's "Disgrace"

J. M. Coetzee's 1999 novel about racial strife and a father-daughter relationship in South Africa was adapted as a 2008 movie starring John Malkovich as a troubled college professor who resigns his position after an affair with a student and moves to his daughter's remote farm house in the South African hinterlands to make sense of his life.

See the trailer here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqvIssZT6cg

Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, visits UAlbany tomorrow, Friday, 10/12:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#jm

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Cycling with Coetzee

Paul Grondahl writes in the Times Union about how our event came to be with publicity-shy Nobel Prize winning author J. M. Coetzee tomorrow (a spectacularly rare event, by the way).

ALBANY — The literary coup that the University at Albany scored by bringing Nobel Prize-winning South African novelist J.M. Coetzee to campus on Friday began with a bike ride in Oklahoma a decade ago

More:  http://www.timesunion.com/default/article/UAlbany-s-literary-coup-a-long-winding-road-3937098.php

More about Coetzee's visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/coetzee_auster12.html

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A Nobel Prize for One of Ours?

British oddsmaker Ladbrokes gives their odds for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Needless to say, many of our previous guests are feature.

The most noteworthy at the moment is Paul Auster (100:1 odds), who shares the stage on Friday with actual Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee. Link here.

Ladbrokes gives the following authors among our visitors a 16:1 chance:  Philip Roth, Amos Oz and Margaret Atwood.

At 20:1, we have Les Murray and Chinua Achebe.

At 33:1, Adam Zagajewski, Don DeLillo, Nurrudin Farah, Joyce Carol Oates and New York State Author E. L. Doctorow.

At 50:1, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chang-Rae Lee, Peter Carey, Bei Dao, Ernesto Cardenal and

A. B. Yehoshua. At 66:1, Kazuo Ishiguro, Colm Toibin, William Gass, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Julian Barnes and New York State Poet John Ashbery. At 100:1, in addition to Auster, Michael Ondaatje, New York State Author Mary Gordon, Marge Piercy and Louise Gluck. If you have any nominations of your own, feel free to post!

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Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity! on Friday afternoon 10/12

Two master writers will discuss "Bartleby the Scrivener," with your participation, this coming Friday afternoon in the Recital Hall of the Performing Arts Center, free and open to the public.

You can prepare for the event by reading the story here: http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1479870

J. M. Coetzee, Nobel Prize winner from South Africa, and Paul Auster, bestselling author, will present a rare opportunity to discuss one of the classic and most influential short stories of modern times:

Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street by Herman Melville

"I AM a rather elderly man. The nature of my avocations for the last thirty years has brought me into more than ordinary contact with what would seem an interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written:—I mean the law-copyists or scriveners."  More.

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Insight into How We Pick Our Visiting Writers

A couple of years ago we were approached at an event by James Mann's mother (an Albany resident who is now 92 years old). She told us in no uncertain terms that we needed to feature her son in our series.

Since that time, we have been trying to work out a suitable date with Mann, who was born and raised in Albany, and who attended the Albany Academy.

Mann visits this coming Tuesday. His mother plans to attend both events.

James Mann, journalist and nonfiction writer
October 9 (Tuesday)
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus
Born and raised in Albany, NY, journalist James Mann is a sought-after authority on the behind-the-scenes deliberations over foreign policy within recent American presidential administrations. His newest book is The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White House to Redefine American Power (2012), an insider’s guide to the events, ideas, personalities, and conflicts that have defined Barack Obama’s foreign policy. In a New York Times review Michiko Kakutani said, “Drawing upon some 125 interviews…Mr. Mann writes with shrewdness and insight about the evolution of the president’s thinking, tensions among his staff…and contrasts and continuities between his conduct of foreign policy and that of the previous two presidents.” Mann achieved international renown with Rise of the Vulcans (2004), a revelatory and much-cited study of George W. Bush’s war cabinet. A former Beijing Bureau Chief for the L. A. Times, Mann is also the author of three award-winning books on America’s evolving relationship with China.

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On the "Paradox" of Teaching Writing at MIT

Q: You teach creative writing at MIT. Isn't that like teaching astrophysics at Juilliard?

 

Junot Diaz:  It's more like teaching cooking in a state penitentiary.

 

More in USA Today:  http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/books/news/story/2012-09-05/junot-diaz-how-you-lose-her/57611976/1

 

Junot Diaz visits today.

 

Picture:  Cooking at the Arizona State Prison-Perryville Desert Rose Cafe, from the Arizona Republic.

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Avalon: Sci-fi Film on Friday

Speaking of apocalypse, Junot Diaz, who is fond of apocalyptic sci-fi, might be interested in Friday's movie, Avalon, which was selected for our "The Future of Film" series by major film critic J. Hoberman. The series highlights what is happening to film in the 21st century. This computer-generated film in particular illustrates the rise of films that "no longer have need of an actual world, let alone a camera."

AVALON
October 5 (Friday)Film screening — 7:30 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus
Directed by Mamoru Oshii
(Japan and Poland, 2001, 107 minutes, color and b/w)
In Polish with English subtitles

Japan’s Mamoru Oshii pioneered the concept of a computer-generated world on film with his 1995 anime feature, GHOST IN THE SHELL, a major inspiration for 1999’s THE MATRIX. With AVALON, Oshii creates what Hoberman calls, “a new sort of cyborg entity, namely a digital-photographic fusion.” Made with a Polish cast and a Japanese crew, the film employs digital versions of vintage, sepia-tone photographs to create a battle simulation game set in Eastern Europe in the mid-20th century.

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Junot Diaz on the Apocalypse

Junot Diaz, who visits tomorrow, talks to Bohemian.com about his interest in apocalyptic sci-fi.

"If you could be any other writer, who would you be?" In a fantastic subversion of expectations, Diaz said that he would be Octavia Butler, the African-American science fiction author of such classics as Parable of the Sower and Kindred. It was a beautiful moment in the history of literature.

How does the idea of apocalypse play into your current project and your work in general?
As far as the apocalypse, I grew up in the most apocalyptic area in the world. We can’t think of a place that has endured more apocalypses than the Dominican Republic and the island of Hispaniola, or the island of Haiti has endured everything expect for a nuclear catastrophe. I think these shadows, these historical echoes reached me and they both intrigued and troubled me. And I came up in New Jersey, within slight distance of New York City during the time of the possibility of total nuclear annihilation. I was one of those kids that grew up in a time where you would see, on the news, they’d suddenly flash a map of New York City and they would show a big black ring, of every area, every town, every person within that range would be utterly obliterated, and of course, we were deep in the heart of that ring. The apocalyptic history of both the Dominican Republic and the United States has resonated with me and continues to shape a lot of the interests in my work.

More:  http://www.bohemian.com/BohoBlog/archives/2012/10/02/extended-play-an-interview-with-2012-macarthur-fellow-junot-diaz

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A poem about the labor of poetry by Salgado Maranhao

Songwriter-Poet Salgado Maranhao visits us this afternoon. Here is a poem about the labor of poetry.

"Of Will," translated from the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin

Of the scratches sculpted
by a hand
only those that glow
survive.
A nomad, morning
strips bare the sun
on the surface
of the flesh,
multiple,
in the giddiness of language.
There are no floodgates
No paths prepared
No Saharas
or Viennas
In everything a battle
bedecked
with flowers
and coffins.
In everything a carving
on the other side
of things that show themselves
but don’t surrender,
that only in a verse are seen,
in the peeling of the underside.
(Offenses that in exile
drown the lyre
crimson red,
record through jubilation,
erase through rage.)
The breath of rhythm’s second chance,
the intimacy of unvoiced ways,
the breath of will, the breath of days.

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Junot Diaz Wins MacArthur "Genius" Award

Junot Diaz, who visits Albany Thursday, has just been awarded a $100,000 no-strings-attached MacArthur Foundation grant.

From the L. A. Times:

On Monday, news of who would be named the 2012 MacArthur Fellows leaked out early in reports by the Associated Press and elsewhere. Two writers are among the 23 artists, scientists and thinkers on the list: Junot Diaz and Dinaw Mengestu.

Diaz is the author of, most recently, the short story collection "This Is How You Lose Her," published in September. Mengestu's most recent work is the 2010 novel "How to Read the Air." Both are published by Riverhead.

Each author will receive a no-strings-attached "genius grant" of $500,000. All MacArthur Fellows are awarded $100,000 a year for five years.

More:  http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/la-jc-macarthur-genius-junot-diaz-dinaw-mengestu-20121001,0,2594121.story

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Junot Diaz Likes Character Flaws

Jack Rightmyer of the Schenectady Daily Gazette interviewed Junot Diaz on Sunday. The Pulitzer-winning fiction writer visits the Institute this coming Thursday.

“Characters who have all the answers and know exactly how to live and how to always do the right thing give off very little heat in a story,” he said in a recent phone interview.

“Most of us love ambivalence,” he said, “and my character Yunior is one of those dicey cats that will at times turn off and offend readers. He often makes the wrong choice, especially in relationships, but I still thought writing about him would be worth the risk because he’s an honest cat and there’s something refreshing about that.”  More.

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Junot Diaz Hates Writing Short Stories

"Every writer is cursed or blessed with a unique creative metabolism: the distinctive speed and efficiency with which he or she converts the raw fuel of life into the mystical, dancing blue smoke of art. Junot Diaz's metabolism is notoriously slow. His fuel just sits there, and sits there, and maybe every once in a while gives off a tiny ribbon of damp smoke, until you start to worry that it all got rained on and ruined — and then, 5 or 10 years later, it suddenly explodes into one of the most mesmerizing fires anyone can remember."

Read Sam Anderson's interview with Junot Diaz in the New York Times magazine.

Diaz visits us for two events this coming Thursday, 10/4, 4:15 and 8PM in the Campus Center.

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A Slave on His Father's Land

Salgado Maranhao's childhood as an illiterate field-hand on his white father's plantation is the subject of Elizabeth Floyd Mair's interview with translator Alexis Levitin in the Times Union.

Maranhao and Levitin will visit the Writers Institute tomorrow, Oct. 2 at 4:15 p.m. in the Standish Room of the Science Library.

Q: How did he learn to read [at the age of 16]?

A: Before he entered a regular school, his mom moved the whole family to the city of Teresina, the capital of the state of Piaui, so that he could get an education. His whole family was extremely intelligent, he says, although all of them were illiterate. They were all kind of lost, he says, since there was no schooling and no way to develop your intelligence or make use of it. His mother wanted to prove that he was as good as his father's side of the family.
     He spent three months with a family that kind of gave him a special intensive tutorial to prepare him for school. And then he also discovered a library. The discovery of the library was key, because from then on he read all the time.

More.

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