MacArthur Genius Filmmaker Stanley Nelson 4/7

Meet award-winning filmmaker and MacArthur Genius Stanley Nelson who will answer your questions following a screening of his acclaimed film, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, this Friday night, 7PM start time, Page Hall, UAlbany Downtown campus.

"Sober yet electrifying!" A. O. Scott, New York Times
"Essential history and a primer in making sense of how we live now."-- Washington Post
April 7 (Friday): THE BLACK PANTHERS: VANGUARD OF THE REVOLUTION

 Film screening with commentary by director Stanley Nelson — 7:00 p.m. [note early start time], Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus

 Directed by Stanley Nelson (United States, 2015, 115 minutes, color and b/w)

 This feature length documentary explores the remarkable history of the Black Panther Party, its formation and ultimate downfall, and its cultural and political significance to the broader American culture. Nikki Baughan of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists, called the film “Compelling and incisive,” and said, “The most shocking aspect…is how painfully relevant its message still is.” The film premiered at Sundance, aired on PBS, and received awards for Best Documentary from the Image Awards and the National Board of Review

Stanley Nelson is an Emmy Award-wining documentary filmmaker and recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama in 2014. Nelson’s other films include FREEDOM RIDERS, JONESTOWN: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF PEOPLE’S TEMPLE, and THE MURDER OF EMMETT TILL, among others.
Note: Producer Marcia Smith, also originally scheduled to attend, will not appear at the event because of a scheduling conflict.
Sponsored in conjunction with UAlbany’s School of Criminal Justice’s Justice & Multiculturalism in the 21st Century: Crime, Justice, and Public Memory Film Series.

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A Silent Film Speaks Loudly

Read Amy Biancolli's article about the rediscovered and restored African American silent film classic, Within Our Gates, to be screened tonight at Page Hall at 7:30:

"Within Our Gates" was made almost a century ago, but its message still trembles with urgency. All people are equal. All races are human. All children deserve a good education, and all parents deserve a hope and a chance.

None of that should classify as revolutionary, should it? None of it should need to be said. And yet it's impossible to watch Oscar Micheaux's germinal work — the earliest surviving feature by an African-American filmmaker — without finding immediate and manifest parallels with issues still facing the nation.

Read more:  http://www.timesunion.com/tuplus-features/article/Early-work-of-black-cinema-to-be-screened-at-10938670.php

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Shaka Senghor's visit to UAlbany on Feb. 1st is featured in The Alt.

As much as Senghor’s story is the personal journey of one man seeking redemption and hope, it is also much larger than one single man. “Mr. Senghor’s story provides us with insight into the challenges faced by many young African American men in urban communities and American prisons,” said Frankie Bailey, UAlbany criminal justice professor and chairperson of the event committee. “His emergence as a leader in the criminal justice reform movement illustrates the capacity of those same men for redemption and growth. His message is about becoming a force for positive change.”


More: http://thealt.com/…/07/writing-wrongs-shaka-senghor-ualbany/

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Regina Carter on Saturday, MacArthur Genius & Jazz Violinist

Sat. Afternoon 2/11: WAMC's Joe Donahue live in conversation with MacArthur Genius, Jazz

Violinist Regina Carter, FREE EVENT
February 11 (Saturday):
Regina Carter, jazz violinist
Conversation — 4:30 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, UAlbany Uptown Campus, 1400 Washington Ave., Free Parking.
...

Classically trained, Regina Carter is considered the foremost jazz violinist of her generation. She studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and Oakland University. She lived and played in Germany and Detroit before moving to New York City to play with the New York String Trio for six years. She then launched her career as a band leader, releasing several albums of contemporary jazz, and drew attention for her work on the recording of Wynton Marsalis’s composition “Blood on the Fields” which won a Pulitzer Prize. She toured with Marsalis in 1997 and went on the road with jazz vocalist Cassandra Wilson in 1998. In 2001, Regina became the first jazz musician and the first African-American to play the 250-year-old Guarneri violin once owned by Niccolo Paganini when she performed in a special benefit concert and recorded her CD, Paganini: After a Dream, a mix of classical music and jazz. In 2006, she was selected as a recipient of the MacArthur “Genius Award.” Her current project is “Simply Ella,” celebrating the centennial of Ella Fitzgerald’s birth, which she will perform at The Egg at 8 p.m. on February 11.
For more about the conversation contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620.
(For ticket information contact The Egg Box Office at 518-473-1845.)

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Poetry Prize Named for UAlbany Professor Len Slade

In the Times Union:  Leonard A. Slade Jr., a professor of Africana Studies at the University at Albany, has been honored with a national poetry prize named for him.

The Southern Conference on African American Studies has named its annual poetry prize the Leonard A. Slade Jr. Poetry Prize. It recognizes his literary contributions to The Griot, a journal published by the Houston-based organization since 1979.

The prize will be awarded to the person whom judges decide has published the best poem or poems in the journal that year.

"I'm very humbled," said Slade, who has contributed poetry to The Griot for more than 25 years. He came to UAlbany in 1988 after 22 years on the faculty of Kentucky State University.

More in Paul Grondahl's interview in the Times Union:
http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/National-honor-for-UAlbany-professor-and-poet-6512661.php

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"Black Boy" next week-- One Actor, 15 Characters!

The “Literature to Life” program of American Place Theatre presents a verbatim one-man adaptation of the first half of Richard Wright’s classic autobiographical work, Black Boy. The performance, in which the actor plays more than a dozen characters, dramatizes Wright’s journey from childhood innocence to adulthood in the Jim Crow South, exploring issues that still resonate in today’s cultural dialogue.

American Place Theatre performance of Black Boy
February 12 (Wednesday)
Performance — 7:30 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown CampusPre-performance discussion at 7 p.m.
Tickets: general public $15 in advance, $20 day of; students/seniors/UA faculty & staff $10 in advance, $15 day of
Box Office: (518) 442-3997; tickets@albany.edu

Presented by the Performing Arts Center in conjunction with the Writers Institute; with support provided by the Diversity Transformation Fund, administered through the Office of Diversity and Inclusion; and the Holiday Inn Express

More about it here:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/black_boy14.html

Picture:  Tarantino Smith in the one-man show.

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Ayana Mathis Tonight

Here's an interview in the Times Union:

Q: Your first book was chosen for Oprah's Book Club. What has that done in terms of sales and also any pressure you may feel about your next book?
A: Certainly, the book has reached more folks than it would have otherwise. We make distinctions, which are both useful and harmful, about fiction, and sometimes readers are intimidated by classifications like literary fiction. I think we also have a tendency to label books — as an African-American story or Latino story or gay story, etc. — which results in readers thinking that perhaps a book won't resonate with them, because of whatever differences they perceive between their lives and the characters' lives. This isn't true, of course. Literature reaches across all of those kinds of false barriers.
The Oprah book club's greatest strength is that it makes a great variety of books accessible to people who may not otherwise have found them or been attracted to them. It's as though she's walking the books she chooses into living rooms and book clubs across the country, and people are a bit more willing to take a chance on them. Of course, that translates into sales, but I think the real boon has more to do with readers finding their way to books that are meaningful to them.

More:  http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/Tribal-initiation-5022008.php

More about Mathis's visit today to UAlbany:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#ayana

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Toni Morrison Talking to Google

Our former office mate Toni Morrison teaches Google Inc. about creativity.....

NEW YORK (AP) — Novelist Toni Morrison, speaking Wednesday to dozens of Google employees holding laptops and smartphones, shared her vision for how she would turn the search engine leader into a literary character.

"It's like a big, metal, claw-y machine in 'Transformers,'" she said, to much laughter, during a lunchtime gathering at Google's Manhattan offices. "When they're threatened, they turn into a little radio, they turn into a little car. And then after you pass them by they come up again.

"They can be anything and everything."

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/toni-morrison-talks-google-about-creativity

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Broadway Star Colman Domingo's Visit

Colman Domingo received more than one standing ovation at UAlbany on Monday for his inspirational message to students and clips of his riveting performances, not to mention his pledges to revive the soon-to-be-cut UAlbany Theater Department.

Domingo talked about his inner city boyhood in West Philadelphia, his improbable success on stage and screen, his indefatigable pursuit of his personal goals as an actor and playwright, his role in the opening scene of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, and his friendship and close working relationship with beloved former UAlbany Theater faculty member Lisa Thompson, whom he called his "soul sister."

Domingo last visited the Institute in February 2007 to direct excerpts from Thompson's plays, prior to many of his recent triumphs.

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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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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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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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At home with Toni Morrison this week

The AP features an intimate chat with Toni Morrison that ran earlier this week:

"It's Saturday and the 81-year-old Morrison is in a relaxed, informal mood, wearing a gray blouse and slacks and dark slippers, a purple bandanna tied over her gray corn rows, her laugh easy and husky with a pinch of "Can-you-believe-this?" You might mistake her for an ordinary neighbor ready for gardening until you see the pictures of her with James Baldwin, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Elie Wiesel among others, or learn that the low, wooden table by her chair was a prop from the film version of Beloved, her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel."  More.

The Nobel laureate was a UAlbany writer in residence at the Institute's inception and shared space in our offices in the mid-1980s.

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Two Minute Standing Ovation at Sundance

Sam Pollard, director of Slavery by Another Name, received a two-minute standing ovation earlier this week at the Sundance Film Festival competition according to Cherie Saunders of the Eurweb Electronic Urban Report:

"Sundance audiences are embracing the work (with one woman so overcome with emotion during a post-screening Q&A with Pollard that she was unable to speak)." More.

The film will be screened on 2/3 with a talkback by the screenwriter, Sheila Curran Bernard, and the Pulitzer-winning author of the book, Doug Blackmon.

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Exclusive Behind-the-Scenes Clip

The Hollywood Reporter posts an exclusive behind-the-scenes clip about the making of Slavery By Another Name, which premieres at Sundance on 1/23, before coming to a theater near you (the UAlbany Performing Arts Center) on 2/3.

"The documentary Slavery by Another Name will have its premiere Monday, Jan. 23, at noon at the Temple Theatre as part of the official 2012 Sundance Film Festival competition program. Sam Pollard, who was a longtime editor on Spike Lee’s films, directed the project, which takes a hard look at the many ways involuntary servitude continued for African Americans long after the abolition of slavery."

"THR here hosts an exclusive behind-the-scenes clip that features Pollard, executive producer Douglas Blackmon and several of the descendants whose stories are told in the film."

See the clip.

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A Present for Martin Luther King's Birthday, 1986

From the New York Times, Dec. 29, 1985:

When Toni Morrison, author of the best seller ''Tar Baby'' and winner of a National Book Critics award for ''Song of Solomon,'' accepted the Albert Schweitzer Professorship of the Humanities at the State University of New York at Albany, she expected to lead the proverbially quiet life of an academic - teaching writing and writing fiction. Instead she found herself deeply involved in the theater, as a playwright.

Her drama, ''Dreaming Emmett,'' commissioned by the New York State Writers Institute at SUNY-Albany and directed by Gilbert Moses, will have its world premiere Saturday at the Market Theater there. It will be produced, in conjunction with the Writers Institute and SUNY's Capital District Humanities Program, by the Capital Repertory Company, a resident theater founded by Peter Clough and Bruce Bouchard. More.

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New Film About AIDS in Africa

Sheila Curran Bernard, Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, and UAlbany Assistant Professor of History and Documentary Studies, is the cowriter of a new film about AIDS in Africa, Inside Story: The Science of HIV/AIDS.

The film premiered in South Africa on World AIDS Day, December 1, 2011 and premieres in the U.S. and Nigeria in 2012. It will be broadcast to nearly 300 million viewers throughout sub-Saharan Africa, and will reach millions more through a public/private distribution network.

Curran Bernard is also the script writer for SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME, based on Douglas A. Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the abuse of black laborers in the United States from the end of the Civil War through the middle of the 20th century. As part of the New York State Writers Institute Classic Film Series, Blackmon and Curran Bernard will answer questions immediately following the screening of SLAVERY on Friday, Feb. 3rd.

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Isabel Wilkerson Tonight at Page Hall 11/15 8PM

Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, a sharecropper's wife, fled Mississippi in fear for her life after a relative was falsely accused of turkey stealing, and landed in Chicago in 1937.

George Swanson Starling, a Florida citrus picker who was threatened with a lynching after trying to organize fellow pickers, ended up in Harlem in 1945.

Dr. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster headed west to Los Angeles from Monroe, La., in 1953, frustrated that he was not permitted in most operating rooms in the South, despite his success as an Army surgeon.

This trio of protagonists formed the foundation of Isabel Wilkerson's extraordinary accomplishment, "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration," winner of the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for nonfiction. The book's power resides not only in its intimate portraits, but also in its epic sweep, redolent of a great novel.

Read more in the Chicago Tribune.

Learn more about tonight's event.

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Isabel Wilkerson to Speak Evening Tuesday at Page, Afternoon Seminar Cancelled

Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer-winning Journalist

November 15 (Tuesday) {NOTE: Due to a scheduling conflict, Isabel Wilkerson’s afternoon seminar has been cancelled. She will be appearing at 8 p.m. in Page Hall, only.]
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus

Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (2010), a sweeping history of the movement of Blacks from the former slave states to the cities of the industrial North during the first half of the twentieth century. Writing in the New Yorker, Jill Lepore called it, “[A] deeply affecting, finely crafted and heroic book.” It received the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction. In 1994, Wilkerson became the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for journalism for her 1993 coverage of floods in the Midwest. Cosponsored by the Times Union.

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Albany, the Promised Land

"The Albany that migrants discovered upon arrival from the Deep South was a city on the move. The 1930 census placed the state capital's population at 127,412, with 98 percent white and 86 percent native born.... New arrivals found housing in Albany's oldest neighborhoods along the river. These neighborhoods were composed of row houses broken into apartments and shops. Once fashionable, these areas became worn after generations of newcomers to Albany getting their start and then with success moving on to better quarters and neighborhoods."

In connection with Isabel Wilkerson's visit to the Writers Institute on Nov. 15, it's interesting to read about the impact of the experiences of African Americans who came to Albany during the Great Migration. Jennifer Lemak, UAlbany graduate and Curator of History at the New York State Museum, has published some fascinating information on this period in the city's history

Read about the historic African American community on Rapp Road in the Pine Bush here.

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