Director of Sci Journalism Program at Columbia Visits Today

One of the world's leading teachers and practitioners of science journalism will be visiting Albany today to talk about her new history of Manhattan's street grid.

Marguerite Holloway has been teaching at the Journalism School since 1997. She won a Presidential Teaching Award in 2009 and the Distinguished Teacher of the Year award in 2001. Holloway has been a long-time contributor to Scientific American, where she has covered many topics, particularly environmental issues, public health, neuroscience and women in science.

Holloway has a B.A. in comparative literature from Brown University and an M.S. from the Journalism School (class of 1988). Before she joined Scientific American in 1990, she worked as a reporter for the Medical Tribune and freelanced for publications including The Village Voice and Mother Jones. Her work has appeared in many other magazines and newspapers, among them Discover, The New York Times, Natural History and Wired. Her book, The Measure of Manhattan, has just been published by W.W. Norton.

More on her visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#holloway

Read More......

Bill Kennedy Receives SUNY Honor

William Kennedy was named the first honorary inductee of the newly established SUNY Distinguished Academy, which honors the achievements of SUNY faculty throughout the state, in a a ceremony last May.

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......

Jayne Anne Phillips: “Teaching Shoots Writing in the Head”

Many writers confess to a love-hate relationship with teaching, a near-polar ambivalence. On the one hand, teaching appears to occupy—in a total, exclusive, and painfully distracting fashion— a part of the brain that is necessary for writing. On the other hand, teaching is a deeply satisfying and rewarding activity, one that keeps not only the writer, but also civilization itself, alive.

Jayne Anne Phillips, a beloved teacher and writer-in-residence at Boston and Brandeis Universities for many years, had this to say about the pressures of teaching in a 1998 essay that appears in the collection Why I Write: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction (1998), edited by Will Blythe:

“[T]eaching shoots writing in the head. Sometimes the writer lives on afterward, blinking to say what he wants. But it's like when you stop smoking: the writer quits teaching, and the lungs pick up in ten weeks, the brain relearns its functions. The writer is an autonomic nervous system, a heart that won't stop pumping.”

Ten years later she has succeeded in striking an impressive balance between competing professions. The architect of a newly-created creative writing program at Rutgers Newark that The Atlantic calls, “one of the most exciting in the country,” Phillips has also completed— despite the demands of her first full year as director of the program— a major new novel, Lark and Termite (January 2009).

Note: Fiction writer Jayne Anne Phillips will visit the Writers Institute on Tuesday, January 27, 2009. She will hold an informal workshop at 4:15 PM in Assembly Hall, Campus Center, on the University at Albany’s uptown campus, 1400 Washington Ave. In the evening, at 8 PM, Phillips will read from and discuss her new novel Lark and Termite in the Recital Hall of the Performing Arts Center on the uptown campus.

Read More......