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
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
UAlbany launched Pulitzer drama winner Stephen Adly Guirgis
Thursday, September 4, 2014
Mourning Joe Persico, One of the Finest Writers in the Region
Joseph E. Persico, acclaimed historian and biographer, dies at 84
Ex-Rockefeller aide's work noted for its humanity
By Paul Grondahl
Joseph E. Persico of Guilderland, an acclaimed historian and biographer and former chief speechwriter for Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller, who published 12 books, including the autobiography of Gen. Colin Powell for which he was the ghost writer, died Saturday at St. Peter's Hospital after a long illness. He was 84.
Persico, son of glove makers, rose from a blue-collar upbringing in Gloversville. He graduated with a bachelor's degree and a double major in English and political science from the New York State College for Teachers in 1952 (now the University at Albany).
More in the Times Union: http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Joseph-Persico-acclaimed-historian-biographer-5724215.php
Read More......
Monday, October 7, 2013
T. C. Boyle Visits Tomorrow
Q: A lot of your stories in this volume present characters, usually men, who are so self-absorbed that they necessarily veer toward disaster. Is your view of human nature more dark than light?
A: I have lived one of the most fortunate of human lives, surrounded by light and love. I have known my closest friend since I was 3 1/2 years old, my children are slim and tall and beautiful and smarter than all the computers in the world combined, and I remain the only writer in history only to have one wife, the legendary Karen Kvashay, my college sweetheart at SUNY Potsdam.
Still, I do suspect that the universe doesn't care much about any of this or any of us and that accident rules the world. Fiction is a place for examining the darker scenarios, the ones we hope to avoid.
Read more of Elizabeth Floyd Mair's interview in Sunday's Times Union:
http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/Tales-to-tell-4866512.php
October 8 (Tuesday)
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Standish Room, Science Library, Uptown Campus
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
Booker Prize Long List Announced
Three of the thirteen people on the 2013 Booker Prize Long List, which was announced today, are past visitors of the New York State Writers Institute.
Ruth Ozeki (pictured here) who visited in 2004: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/ozeki_ruth.html
Colm Toibin, who visited in 2001: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/toibincolm.html
And Collum McCann, who visited in 2003: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/mccann_colum.html
Full list here: http://www.themanbookerprize.com/news/longlist-2013-announced
Wednesday, August 29, 2012
State Author and Poet to Open Fall Writers Series
NEW YORK STATE AUTHOR AND POET AWARDS AND READING
Alison Lurie, New York State Author 2012-2014 and Marie Howe, New York State Poet 2012-2014
September 20 (Thursday)
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus
Alison Lurie is celebrated for witty novels that examine middle class American life, particularly in small college towns inspired by Ithaca, New York. For her nuanced understanding and lifelike portrayal of social customs and relationships between the sexes, Lurie is widely regarded as the Jane Austen of contemporary American letters. Over the course of ten novels and half a century she has held a mirror up to people of her own generation as they navigate romance, marriage, parenthood, divorce, reconciliation, and advancing age. Her major novels include Truth and Consequences (2005), Foreign Affairs (1984), which received the Pulitzer Prize, The War Between the Tates (1974), and Love and Friendship (1962).
Marie Howe’s prize-winning poetry seeks answers to perplexing questions about life and death in ordinary moments and day-to-day experiences. As a teacher and poet, she searches for meaning and redemption in suffering and loss. She helped many come to terms with grief during the AIDS epidemic by writing compassionately about the loss of her brother to that disease, and by encouraging those impacted by AIDS to find their voices and be published. Her poetry collections include The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008), What the Living Do (1997), and The Good Thief (1988), which was selected by Margaret Atwood for the National Poetry Series. She also has received the Lavan Younger Poets Prize of the American Academy of Poets.
Monday, July 16, 2012
Bill Kennedy Receives SUNY Honor
Bill is pictured here with SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher and UAlbany President George Philip.
Created this year, the Academy is intended to encourage a renewed commitment to quality instruction, service on campuses, and strong leadership development for new faculty throughout the state university system.
Zimpher said, "“It is only fitting that SUNY bring together its distinguished faculty to help raise the bar for academic excellence throughout the system. By establishing the academy, the Board paves the way for increased contribution to the SUNY mission on behalf of this group, and expands its honor of their extensive accomplishments.”
More. Read More......
Friday, May 4, 2012
In case you missed Harry Staley on Wednesday....
In advance praise, literature scholar Todd F. Davis said, “The portrait of the speaker in the majority of these poems is one of a man conflicted in his religious faith, in his faith in his fellow human community, in the wars that religion has persuaded his fellow humans to take part in…. Staley demonstrates an understanding that is deeply spiritual, yet does not yield to easy, forgiving answers.” Read More......
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Build Your Own Lightsaber!
Michio Kaku, who comes to Albany on 2/21, offers some practical advice on how to build a light saber in a video that appeared in 2010 on the Science Channel.
The video is based on Kaku's 2008 book, Physics of the Impossible.
Kaku will speak about the sequel to that book, Physics of the Future (2011), in the Campus Center Ballroom.
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
The Allure of the Gothic
The seductive appeal of eerie Gothic Lit is the topic of Cynthia Crossen's "Dear Book Lover" column in the WSJ.
Institute visitors mentioned in the column include Margot Livesey (who visits 3/20), Institute Writing Fellow James Lasdun (who teaches a community workshop this spring), the late Angela Carter (a former workshop instructor), the late Kurt Vonnegut (New York State Author), Joyce Carol Oates (who will visit our upcoming Summer Writers Institute) and Jennifer Egan.
Vonnegut formulates his own unpublished gothic novel as: "A young woman takes a job in an old house and gets the pants scared off her."
More.
Monday, January 30, 2012
Reconsidering Gertrude Stein
Institute Writing Fellow and UAlbany Professor Lynne Tillman reconsiders Gertrude Stein in the New York Times Book Review this past Sunday:
"Approaching Gertrude Stein’s writing critically is tricky. Because she strove to reshape literary conventions — syntax, language usage, narrative order and the sense of making sense — any comment on her choices may already be rebuffed in her poetics and practice. Stein is a trickster. This may be why, as I read 'Ida' and 'Stanzas in Meditation,' both reissued in corrected, authoritative editions from Yale University Press, I remembered a Jonathan Richman lyric I’ll paraphrase as 'Pablo Picasso never got called a jackass.'"
More.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
TU's Top Moments in the Arts
The Times Union's "Top Moments in the Arts" cover story feature (in its Preview entertainment guide) highlights a number of Writers Institute events of the past year.
Among his top five picks, Joseph Dalton selects Bill Kennedy's reading of Chango's Beads on October 3rd. See the YouTube clip.
Amy Griffin's top five include Gary Shteyngart's reading on February 17th. YouTube clip here.
And Michael Janairo's top five include Ken Johnson's November 7th lecture, a cosponsorship with the University Art Museum. UAlbany News Center Page here.
See the Preview section here.
Friday, December 2, 2011
A Letter from Martha Rozett
UAlbany English Professor Martha Rozett sent us an e-letter about her new book, When People Wrote Letters: A Family Chronicle:
I am writing to tell you about my new book, WHEN PEOPLE WROTE LETTERS: A FAMILY CHRONICLE. If you can, please come to my book signing on December 8th at Book House in Stuyvesant Plaza from 7:00 to 9:00 PM.
Many of you have heard me talk about this project during the past few years. It is a tale told through wonderfully witty and moving letters, photographs, clippings and pamphlets, excerpts from an unpublished autobiography and from family history narratives, along with other saved objects. The main characters are Betty and Edith Stedman, my mother and her aunt, two eloquent and adventurous women whose relationship serves as the book’s central narrative. Their travels, and the travels of other family members, take the reader from 19th and early twentieth century New England, to Key West in the 1830s, to the Minnesota Territories in the 1860s, to France during World War I, to small towns in Texas and to China in the 1920s, to Spain in the 1930s, and across America during World War II.
WHEN PEOPLE WROTE LETTERS is also an account of my great aunt Edith’s extraordinary career during the early years of medical social work, and a love story in which the religious and cultural differences between New England Episcopalians and New York Jews threaten to disrupt my parents’ romance in the 1940s. And finally, it is about how family chronicles emerge in piecemeal fashion from the objects and documents people save and pass on.
My book will be available after December 8th for $19.95 from the Troy Book Makers (TBMBooks.com), from Book House and other local independent bookstores, and from Amazon and B&N online. It will be available in e-book format in mid to late January. My husband (and very patient tech consultant) John has created a WHEN PEOPLE WROTE LETTERS Facebook page which will tell you more about how I came to write the book. I hope you will join my community of readers and spread the word to others.
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Tom Perrotta's New Novel To Be HBO Series
HBO is developing a series based on author Tom Perrotta's upcoming novel "The Leftovers."
Hourlong drama explores the Rapture and how the sudden disappearance of loved ones in a suburban town affects everyone left behind. Perrotta, who is writing the pilot, will exec produce with Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger.
The author has Hollywood connections, having written "Little Children" and then adapting the screenplay for the Kate Winslet-Patrick Wilson starrer. Earlier in his career, Perrotta wrote the novel "Election," which was turned into Alexander Payne's feature starring Reese Witherspoon. Both pics were Oscar nominated. More in Variety.
Tom Perrotta Tonight
Tom Perrotta visits the Writers Institute today for two events.
November 29 (Tuesday)
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus
Tom Perrotta is the author of masterpieces of satirical fiction set in the American suburbs. His new novel is The Leftovers (2011), the story of ordinary suburbanites who are forced to cope when they are left behind after “the Rapture,” the New Testament apocalypse. The Kirkus reviewer called it Perrotta’s “most ambitious book to date...,” and said, “The premise is as simple as it is startling.” His previous novels include The Abstinence Teacher (2007), and two that were adapted as major motion pictures, Little Children (2004) and Election (1998).
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Tom Perrotta on Fresh Air
Tom Perrotta, who visits the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, 11/29, spoke to Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air" in August about his new novel, The Leftovers....
"I spent a lot of time thinking about contemporary Christianity, and obviously the rapture kept coming up," he says. "My first impulse was ... to laugh it off — it's sort of a funny idea, people just floating away. But I kept thinking: What if it did happen? ... I thought, I'm such a skeptic that even if it did happen, I would resist the implications of it, and I also thought that three years later, everyone would have forgotten about it. No matter what horrible thing happens in the world, the culture seems to move on." More.
Friday, November 18, 2011
"The Best Film Ever Made About Filmmaking"
Roger Ebert proclaims Federico Fellini's 8 1/2, which will be screened tonight at 7:30PM at Page Hall (free and open to the public) the best film ever made about filmmaking.
Read the full Chicago Sun-Times reappraisal from May 28, 2000, here.
"8 1/2 is the best film ever made about filmmaking..... The critic Alan Stone, writing in the Boston Review, deplores Fellini’s 'stylistic tendency to emphasize images over ideas.' I celebrate it. A filmmaker who prefers ideas to images will never advance above the second rank because he is fighting the nature of his art. The printed word is ideal for ideas; film is made for images, and images are best when they are free to evoke many associations and are not linked to narrowly defined purposes. Here is Stone on the complexity of 8 1/2: 'Almost no one knew for sure what they had seen after one viewing.' True enough, but true of all great films— while you know for sure what you’ve seen after one viewing of a shallow one.." More.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Slaughtering Each Other by the Hundreds of Thousands
Tony Horwitz, who speaks at the New York State Museum tonight, talked Tuesday on the PBS NewsHour about his new book on John Brown's raid.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
The Trippiest Music Video of 1963
Check out the original American 1963 trailer for Federico Fellini's 8 1/2, which will be screened (at full length) on Friday, November 18 at 7:30PM in Page Hall on the downtown campus as part of the New York State Writers Institute's Classic Film Series.
The Woman Behind FDR, Friday, Nov. 18
Kirstin Downey, Washington Post reporter, will talk about her biography of Frances Perkins, the female architect of FDR's New Deal, a major historical figure now largely unknown to the public.
November 18 (Friday)Discussion — 4:00 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus
Kirstin Downey, Award-winning journalist for the Washington Post, will make an appearance at the 2011 Researching New York Conference to discuss her 2009 biography of Frances Perkins, The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life of Frances Perkins, FDR'S Secretary of Labor and His Moral Conscience.
The nation’s first female cabinet secretary, Frances Perkins (1880-1965) was one of FDR’s chief advisors, and the principal architect of the most important social welfare legislation in U.S. history. Named one of the best nonfiction books of 2009 by the Library of Congress and the American Library Association, the book was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said, “Downey provides not only a superb rendering of history but also a large dose of inspiration drawn from Perkins’s clearheaded, decisive work with FDR to solve urgent problems and to succeed in the face of insurmountable odds.”
Sponsored by UAlbany’s Department of History and the NYS Writers Institute.
For additional information on the Researching New York Conference click here.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
A Spanish Thanksgiving in St. Augustine, Florida
"Spaniards also held a thanksgiving, 56 years before the Pilgrims, when they feasted near St. Augustine with Florida Indians, probably on stewed pork and garbanzo beans."
"The early history of Spanish North America is well documented, as is the extensive exploration by the 16th-century French and Portuguese. So why do Americans cling to a creation myth centered on one band of late-arriving English — Pilgrims who weren't even the first English to settle New England or the first Europeans to reach Plymouth Harbor? (There was a short-lived colony in Maine and the French reached Plymouth earlier.)"
In the New York Times in 2008, Tony Horwitz, who visits Thursday 11/17, discusses Thanksgiving in light of the current immigration debate, and in light of what we know of Spanish activity in the North America. More.