Luis Gutierrez Coming This Friday

Luis Gutierrez, Congressman and major figure in the immigration reform movement will visit the
Writers Institute on Friday, October 18, to present his new memoir, Still Dreaming (2013).

Elizabeth Floyd Mair published an interview with Gutierrez over the weekend in the Times Union.

Q: Your first successful election in Chicago as alderman helped begin to dismantle the Democratic machine that had controlled local politics for decades. We know something about political machines here in Albany, too. What are some of the key points in dismantling one?

A: Ending patronage, No. 1. And patronage comes in two types: There is the seating your unqualified buddy for a job, a buddy whose qualification is the work he does politically — not how talented he is as a carpenter or as an architect or as a city planner, but how talented he is at raising money and making sure that people vote for you. The other kind is pin-striped patronage, when it isn't the person with the lowest bid and the best product who gets the work, but the person with the closest relationship politically with those at City Hall.

More in the Times Union:  http://www.timesunion.com/default/article/Tracing-a-political-journey-4885319.php

More about the Congressman's visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/gutierrez_luis13.html

Picture: House Judiciary Committee member Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., gives his opening remarks on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2013, during the committee's hearing on America's Immigration System: Opportunities for Legal Immigration and Enforcement of Laws against Illegal Immigration. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

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Heaney Obituary in the Associated Press

"He was a wonderful raconteur. There was so much local enthusiasm for his work...." --NYS Writers Institute Director Donald Faulker, quoted in the AP obituary for Seamus Heaney (with contributions from Bethany Bump of the Schenectady Gazette).

More here:  http://www.dailygazette.net/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=U0NILzIwMTMvMDgvMzEjQXIwMzAwMA==&Mode=Gif&Locale=english-skin-custom

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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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