The National Book Critics Circle Awards are remarkably relevant for the NYS Writers Institute this year.
Toni Morrison, who was in residency here at the time of the Institute's founding, will receive the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.
Institute Writing Fellow Lynne Tillman is a finalist in the category of Criticism for her collection, What Would Lynne Tillman Do?
Ian S. MacNiven, who visited on Nov. 25, 2014, to present his new book Literchoor Is My Beat: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions, and John Lahr, who visited Oct. 1, 2014 with his new book, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh, are both finalists for the award in Biography.
MacNiven receives his nomination for a book that escaped the radar of the mainstream media (but not us!).
Other finalists in various categories who have visited the Institute in recent years include Gary Shteyngart (Autobiography for Little Failure), Marilynne Robinson (Fiction for Lila), Chang-rae Lee (Fiction for On Such a Full Sea), and Elizabeth Kolbert (General Nonfiction for The Sixth Extinction).
Full list here: http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/books/national-book-critics-circle-announces-award-finalists-1.9823168
Picture: Ian MacNiven
Showing posts with label toni morrison. Show all posts
Showing posts with label toni morrison. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
The National Book Critics Circle Awards and Us
Friday, March 1, 2013
Toni Morrison Talking to Google
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 Read More......
Friday, February 15, 2013
George Saunders, An Old Friend As It Turns Out
"When we had our first daughter, Paula was on a fellowship, studying with Toni Morrison at SUNY Albany, and I had just started working for a pharmaceutical company as a tech writer. But then her fellowship ended and that job played out, and, at the same time, it started to dawn on us that this writing thing might take longer to pay off than we’d expected."
More in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/01/on-tenth-of-december-an-interview-with-george-saunders.html
More on Saunders' upcoming visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/saunders_george13.html Read More......
Thursday, May 10, 2012
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. Read More......
Friday, January 13, 2012
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.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)