The Writers Institute mourns the passing of poet and Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott who visited us in
1998.
See video from his Albany visit here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tlWeaErcVE
See more about his Albany visit here: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/walcott.html
Read the New York Times obituary here: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/17/books/derek-walcott-dead-nobel-prize-literature.html?_r=0
Derek Walcott, whose intricately metaphorical poetry captured the physical beauty of the Caribbean, the harsh legacy of colonialism and the complexities of living and writing in two cultural worlds, bringing him a Nobel Prize in Literature, died early Friday morning at his home near Gros Islet in St. Lucia. He was 87.
Saturday, March 18, 2017
Derek Walcott, in memoriam (1930-2017)
Monday, March 9, 2015
"Gorgeously crafted and emotionally shattering."
Here is the Kirkus Reviews capsule review of The Lost Child (2015) by Caryl Phillips, who visits the Writers Institute tomorrow, Tuesday, March 10:
"Award-winning novelist, essayist and playwright Phillips (Color Me English, 2011, etc.) responds to Wuthering Heights. A difficult daughter and an unhappy wife, Monica Johnson is contrary, self-destructive and—finally—mad. That Monica, in her broad outlines, resembles Cathy Earnshaw is no accident. Her story—as well as that of her husband and their sons—is interwoven with scenes inspired by Wuthering Heights and the life of its author. This is not to say that Monica is Cathy, transplanted from the moors to Oxford in the late 1950s. This is not a retelling. The interplay between this novel and Emily Brontë’s masterpiece is much more interesting than that. For example, Phillips imagines Heathcliff before Mr. Earnshaw takes him to the Heights. This boy is the son of a slave, a woman who worked a sugar plantation before being transported to England. Phillips isn’t the first to read Brontë’s “dark-skinned” antihero as black, but he also connects the boy to Monica’s husband, Julius—a man who gives up academic life in order to take up the cause of anti-colonialism in his West Indian home country—and to their neglected, dispossessed sons. The thematic links between the modern story and Wuthering Heights only become clear over time, and—even then—they’re too rich and subtle to work as simple allegory. Empire and race are among Phillips’ concerns, but he also offers heartbreaking depictions of alienation and the fragility of human relationships. While it would be easy to identify Heathcliff as the lost child of the title, it could also refer to Monica’s younger son—or her older boy. But Monica is lost, too. And then there’s Brontë, drifting further and further into her invented world as she dies. What Phillips seems to be saying, in the end, is that the lost child could be any of us—perhaps even that the lost child is all of us. Gorgeously crafted and emotionally shattering."
Source: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/caryl-phillips/the-lost-child-phillipa/
More about the visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#caryl
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Performing Voices of the Puerto Rican Diaspora
October 26 (Friday)
Conversations with Diasporican Writers — 2:15 – 3:45 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus
Moderator: Tomás Urayoán Noel, University at Albany
Guest Writers: Magdalena Gómez, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Jesús Papoleto Meléndez, and Edwin Torres
Diasporican Café: Performing Voices of the Puerto Rican Diaspora — 5:30 – 7:45 p.m., Campus Center Ballroom
Guest Writers: Giannina Braschi, Magdalena Gómez, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Jesús Papoleto Meléndez, and Edwin Torres
Five internationally known U.S. Puerto Rican writer-performers will discuss their work in an afternoon panel discussion and present readings/performances in the evening. Both events are part of the 20th Anniversary Conference of the Puerto Rican Studies Association, which is being held at UAlbany October 24 – 27. For more information on the Conference go to: http://www.puertoricanstudies.org.
Giannina Braschi is the author of the collection of poetry and fiction El imperio de los sueños (1988; Empire of Dreams, 1994) and the novels Yo-Yo Boing (1998) and United States of Banana (2011).
Magdalena Gómez, poet, playwright, and actor, is the co-founder and artistic director of Teatro V!da, a performing arts collective that explores multicultural and multigenerational issues.
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes is a poet, fiction writer, playwright, and performer. His publications include the story collection Uñas pintadas de azul (2009, Blue Fingernails), and the play Escándalo! (2003).
Jesús Papoleto Meléndez is one of the founders of New York’s Nuyorican Poets Café. An award-winning poet, his forthcoming book Hey Yo/Yo Soy! 40 Years of Nuyorican Street Poetry, is the first volume of his collected work.
Edwin Torres is known internationally for his experimentalist performance poetry that incorporates sound, visual theatre, and audience participation. He is the author of the poetry collection In the Function of External Circumstances (2010).
Sponsored by the Center for Latino, Latin American, and Caribbean Studies; the Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latino Studies; and the College of Arts and Sciences at UAlbany
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
The Work of a Single Sentence: Jamaica Kincaid
From the New York Times, June 7, 1999:
"How do I write? Why do I write? What do I write? This is what I am writing: I am writing "Mr. Potter." It begins in this way; this is its first sentence: "Mr. Potter was my father, my father's name was Mr. Potter." So much went into that one sentence; much happened before I settled on those 11 words." More.
Picture: Jamaica Kincaid with William Kennedy. Read More......
Monday, July 23, 2012
Jamaica Kincaid, Writing as "Self Rescuing"
Growing up as an only child until the age of 9, her mother and stepfather gave birth to three sons in quick succession....
"I don't know if having other children was the cause for our relationship changing - it might have changed as I entered adolescence, but her attention went elsewhere. And also our family money remained the same but there were more people to feed and to clothe and so everything got sort of shortened not only material things but emotional things, the good emotional things I got a short end of that. But then I got more of things I didn't have, like a certain kind of cruelty and neglect. In the end it didn't matter. When I was first a young person it did matter a lot because I didn't know what had happened to me.. If I hadn't become a writer I don't know what would have happened to me; that was a kind of self rescuing."
Jamaica Kincaid will share the stage with novelist Henri Cole, tomorrow, Tuesday, July 24th, 8PM, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga. Free.
Click here for more events in the series. All are free and open to the general public. Read More......
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
Louise Glück and Caryl Phillips Tonight, July 3rd
Louise Glück, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for Poetry, and Caryl Phillips [pictured here], novelist, A Distant Shore; Dancing in the Dark; In the Falling Snow, will read tonight at Skidmore, 8PM, free and open to the public, Davis Audiorium, Palamountain Hall, 815 North Broadway, Saratoga Springs. All events in the series are free and open to the general public.
In a review in The New Republic, the critic Helen Vendler wrote: "Louise Glück is a poet of strong and haunting presence. Her poems, published in a series of memorable books over the last twenty years, have achieved the unusual distinction of being neither 'confessional' nor 'intellectual' in the usual senses of those words."
"Caryl Phillips was born in St.Kitts and came to Britain at the age of four months. He grew up in Leeds, and studied English Literature at Oxford University.... He was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year in 1992 and was on the 1993 Granta list of Best of Young British Writers. His literary awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a British Council Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and Britain's oldest literary award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, for Crossing the River which was also shortlisted for the 1993 Booker Prize. A Distant Shore won the 2004 Commonwealth Writers Prize; Dancing in the Dark won the 2006 PEN/Beyond the Margins Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.... A regular contributor to The Guardian and The New Republic, his latest book, Colour Me English - Selected Essays, was published in July 2011."
Read More......