UAlbany launched Pulitzer drama winner Stephen Adly Guirgis

Paul Grondahl interviews Stephen Adly Guirgis in the Times Union:

Guirgis, 50, and his unlikely career trajectory could be viewed as a kind of patron saint for late bloomers, slackers and second chances.

"I wasn't a great student, but it took me more than six years because I kept changing my major," Guirgis said Tuesday by phone from his apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. "In my last two years, I became a theater major and things really started to click. At the time, Albany was known as a business school and we were kind of like a weird group, but we were always doing something, creating shows, and we stuck together."

More in the Times Union:  http://www.timesunion.com/tuplus-local/article/UAlbany-launched-Pulitzer-drama-winner-Stephen-6215221.php

More about Guirgis's 2010 visit to the Writers Institute: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/guirgis_stephen10.html

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UAlbany Grad Stephen Guirgis Wins Pulitzer

Stephen Adly Guirgis, who graduated from the University at Albany in 1990 with a major in Theatre, is the 2015 winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for his new play "Between Riverside and Crazy."

The Pulitzer jury called the work, "a nuanced, beautifully written play about a retired police officer faced with eviction that uses dark comedy to confront questions of life and death."

Guirgis visited the New York State Writers Institute on April 12, 2010.

More about his visit here:
http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/guirgis_stephen10.html

An interview with Guirgis posted on the Institute's YouTube page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFR2iMDmcFE

Guirgis studied theatre with NYS Writers Institute Fellow and UAlbany Professor W. Langdon Brown and with the late Jarka Burian of the Theatre Department who-- together with his wife Grayce Burian-- established and endowed the Institute's annual Burian Lecture on the art of the theatre.

More on the Burian Lecture here:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/burian_lectures.html

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Joan Murray in the Times Union

Poet Joan Murray discusses her friendship with poet Alicia Ostriker in the Times Union. The two poets will visit together on Thursday, April 23rd:

"I've known Alicia since we were both young poets in the second wave feminist movement in the '70s. We were attracted to each other's work, because we were both young moms writing about motherhood and war. We've kept up a literary friendship since then, staying in touch and seeing each other now and then. Alicia is fun, but she's also famous and brilliant in a down-to-earth way."

"While our poems are different, we're both dramatic, and we can riff like the old masters when we want to. We both deal with serious social and political issues. We also write about God, though we're not believers. (Alicia has a whole book talking with him.) And we're both risk-takers: I have that book in the voice of the Niagara woman, and Alicia's new book is in the voices of an old woman, a tulip and a dog."

More in the Times Union interview with Elizabeth Floyd Mair:  http://www.timesunion.com/tuplus-features/article/Writing-from-experiences-6204800.php

More about the upcoming visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/ostriker_murray15.html

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Mary Norris, Queen of Proofreaders, in the New York Times

Mary Norris, who visits us on Thursday, April 9, is reviewed in the New York Times:  

Ms. Norris looks not only for errors that have slipped through the many layers of security, but also for subtle dissonances in sense and style — words that are slightly off, imprecise or muddy phrases, anachronistic colloquialisms, technically correct commas that might make a sentence sound better if omitted, or vice versa.

 

“It’s like those mechanics that only work on cars that go 200 miles an hour,” said David Remnick, The New Yorker’s editor. “They can see every little precise thing that can go wrong that might get you killed.”

More:  http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/books/mary-norris-muses-on-a-lifetime-of-literary-vigilance-in-between-you-me.html?referrer&_r=0

More about her upcoming visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/norris_mary15.html

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