The Writers Institute mourns the passing of Ruby Dee, pioneering stage and screen actress, and civil rights activist.
Ruby Dee visited the Writers Institute in March 2005 where she delivered the 9th Annual Burian Lecture, funded by the Jarka and Grayce Susan Burian Endowment, and cosponsored by the Department of Theatre.
From the New York Times:
"Ruby Dee, one of the most enduring actresses of theater and film, whose public profile and activist passions made her, along with her husband, Ossie Davis, a leading advocate for civil rights both in show business and in the wider world, died on Wednesday at her home in New Rochelle, N.Y. She was 91."
More about her visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/dee_ruby.html
Some obituaries: http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/12/showbiz/obit-ruby-dee/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/13/arts/ruby-dee-actress-dies-at-91.html?_r=0
http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/people/2014/06/12/daughter-actress-ruby-dee-dead-at-91/10373935/
Friday, June 13, 2014
Ruby Dee (1922-2014)
Tuesday, June 10, 2014
Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award
A call for applications....
Thursday, June 5, 2014
"Roscoe" Opera at Skidmore this Sunday
From today's Times Union:
Opera troupe workshops adaptation of William Kennedy's 'Roscoe'
By Amy BiancolliUpdated 11:29 am, Thursday, June 5, 2014
The souls peopling William Kennedy novels have always had an operatic streak about them: tragically flawed, larger than life, haunted by death (or dead already). And they have issues If, as W.H. Auden observed, opera is "an imitation of human willfulness," then the classic Kennedy protagonist is prime meat for operatic adaptation.Consider Roscoe Conway, the complex and fleshy political insider at the heart of "Roscoe," a new opera scheduled for an Opera Saratoga workshop performance at 2 p.m. Sunday at Skidmore College. Adapted from the Kennedy novel by Albany composer Evan Mack and Tennessee-based librettist Joshua McGuire, the opera is about half-written: Only the 80-minute Act I will be performed in Sunday's unstaged concert rendering, sung by members of the company's Young Artist Program. "It's quite wonderful. It's thrilling to listen to it, and to hear these voices when they start taking off," Kennedy said. Opera struck him as a "very good form for Roscoe himself. As an individual, he has kind of an operatic life, and he is a creature of extreme habits and proclivities. And he reaches great heights as a politician and as a human being, and he has a great rise and fall of his emotions."
More in the Times Union: http://www.timesunion.com/entertainment/article/Singing-his-praises-5528362.php Read More......
Monday, June 2, 2014
Hollis Seamon wins "Ippy" Gold Medal
Hollis Seamon, this year's featured guest author at the New York State Summer Young Writers Institute for high school-aged writers, tied for the 2014 Independent Publisher Book Award ("Ippy") Gold Medal for Short Fiction for her story collection, Corporeality.
More 2014 "Ippy" results here: http://www.independentpublisher.com/article.php?page=1791
Students at the Young Writers Institute will read Seamon's 2013 young adult novel, Somebody Up There Hates You, about a 17-year-old battling cancer.
Booklist said, "Seamon’s first young-adult novel is a tender, insightful, and unsentimental look
at teens in extremis. It brings light to a very dark place, and in so doing,
does its readers a generous service."
More about Hollis Seamon: http://www.skidmore.edu/youngwriters/guest-author.php
More about the New York State Summer Young Writers Institute: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/nyssywi.html