NYSWI Fall Schedule of Events

Dear Readers, Writers, Teachers, Students and All Members of the General Public,

The New York State Writers Institute invites you, your friends and students, to attend our Fall 2011 Visiting Writers Series and Classic Film Series. This semester’s program features writers from a wide variety of genres, including fiction, nonfiction, journalism, poetry, science writing, art criticism, travel writing, humor, biography, history, horror, drama and film. All events are FREE and open to the public, with only two exceptions (cosponsor charges admission).

We will be presenting five Pulitzer Prize winners including journalist Isabel Wilkerson reading from her magisterial history of the African American “Great Migration”; poet Philip Schultz, reading from a memoir about his own dyslexia; journalist Tony Horwitz, reading from his new book on abolitionist John Brown’s pre-Civil War raid on Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia; two-time Pulitzer winner Robert Caro, biographer of Robert Moses and LBJ, receiving an award from the NYS Archives Partnership Trust; and our own William Kennedy, reading from Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes (2011) his first new novel in nearly a decade.

Other highlights include Sylvia Nasar, author of the international bestseller A Beautiful Mind, reading from her new history of the invention of modern economics; New Yorker humorist and travel writer Ian Frazier speaking about his adventures in Siberia; journalist Eliza Griswold telling of her world tour of nations divided by Christianity and Islam; Nicole Krauss, reading from her New York Times bestselling novel, Great House; essayist Wayne Koestenbaum, meditating on personal humiliation; Colson Whitehead reading from Zone One, his new zombie horror novel set in Manhattan; Ken Johnson, speaking about the impact of 1960s drug culture on the art world; science writer Dava Sobel, presenting her new biography of the astronomer Copernicus; satirist of suburbia Tom Perrotta, reading from his new novel about survivors of “the Rapture,” the New Testament Apocalypse; and historian Willard Sterne Randall presenting Ethan Allen: His Life and Times, the first biography of Vermont’s guerrlla fighter in more than half a century.

We are also proud to cosponsor celebrations of major Caribbean poet Aime Cesaire (1913-2008) and leading Spanish novelist and former UAlbany professor Gonzalo Torrente Ballester (1910-1999), as well as a dramatization of Piri Thomas’s classic Afro-Latino memoir, Down These Mean Streets, and a screening of the award-winning documentary, Raising Renee, with Oscar-nominated filmmakers Steven Ascher and Jeanne Jordan.

Our Film Series will feature a small selection of all-time classics, including Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Wallace Worsley’s silent Hunchback of Notre Dame, Luis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour, Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge, and Federico Fellini’s 8 ½.

We look forward to your participation!

Sincerely,
The Writers Institute Staff