50 Writers You Need to See Read Live

The hip and influential webzine Flavorwire posted a list yesterday of "50 Writers You Need to See Read Live." Not to sound smug or anything, but 20 of them have appeared at the New York State Writers Institute (although we have a very unfair advantage in that 2 of them are part of our "family").

One them of course is our own Bill Kennedy, NYSWI Founder and Executive Director. Another is Elisa Albert, who lives in Albany, and is married to NYSWI Writing Fellow Ed Schwarzschild.

The rest are regular NYS Summer Writers Institute visitor Paul Harding, as well as Gay Talese, Claire Messud, Colson Whitehead, Gary Shteyngart, Mary Gaitskill, Denis Johnson, Shalom Auslander, J. M. Coetzee, Marilynne Robinson, Sigrid Nunez, Sherman Alexie, Isabel Wilkerson, Charles Simic, Karen Russell, Chang-Rae Lee, James Salter, and Jonathan Ames.

Picture:  Mary Gaitskill.

Full list here:  http://flavorwire.com/487668/50-writers-you-need-to-see-read-live/view-all

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Richard Norton Smith, C-SPAN's "in-house historian"

Richard Norton Smith, who visits us on Thursday, 11/20, talks to the TU's Paul Grondahl about what it was like to wrestle with writing a monumental biography of Nelson Rockefeller for 14 years:

"His long slog on Rockefeller was less a case of writer's block and more of information overload, as he kept uncovering fresh material and boxes of Rocky's previously sealed archives were made available to Smith. Stressed to the max about the ballooning biography, Smith suffered two heart attacks on Nov. 30, 2010. 'I can't remember four or five days. Luckily, a neighbor got concerned and came to my apartment,' he recalled. 'He got me to the hospital right away, and they discovered I'd had a heart attack and there was a blood clot in my heart. I had another heart attack the next day.'"

More in the Times Union:  http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/A-Rocky-story-5891118.php

More about the upcoming events with Smith:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/smith_richard_norton14.html

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