Here are a few highlights of a truly exciting season:
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
Announcing the Spring 2017 Series!
Thursday, September 22, 2016
Stephen Burt, Leading American Poetry Critic, to Offer Free Community Poetry Class
Stephen Burt, “one of the most influential poetry critics of
his generation” and “heir to the intellectual mantle long held by giants like
Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler” (The
New York Times),
will
lead a discussion and reading of poems based on his new book, The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary
American Poems and How to Read Them (Sept 2016).Read More......
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
NYS Writers Institute Announces Spring 2016 Schedule
The NYS Writers Institute announces a
spectacular calendar of free events for the Spring of 2016.
Headliners will include bestselling author and
mountaineer Jon Krakauer (Into the Wild, Into Thin Air); Pulitzer-winning
playwright and UAlbany alum Stephen Adly Guirgis (Between Riverside
and Crazy); pioneering Black female Hollywood director Darnell Martin
(Their Eyes Were Watching God); Pulitzer-winning New York Times business
reporter Charles Duhigg whose previous book The Power of Habit spent
120 weeks on the Times bestseller list; visionary computer scientist who
foresaw the Internet and who teaches computers to write poetry, David
Gelernter; New York Times health reporter Sheri Fink, author
of the major bestseller about Hurricane Katrina, Five Days at Memorial; 2013
Tony Winner for Best Director, Pam MacKinnon (the revival of Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf?); major Irish fiction writer Colm Toibin,
author of Brooklyn, the basis of the Oscar-nominated film; local son and
Pulitzer winner Richard Russo with the new novel, Everybody’s
Fool, the sequel to his beloved classic Upstate New York novel, Nobody’s
Fool; and much, much more. Visit the links below for more details.
Mark your calendars for the State Author and Poet inauguration
ceremony on February 11th at 8PM at Page Hall. The new State Author
will be Edmund White, one of America’s finest prose writers, and its
leading chronicler of Gay experience. The new State Poet will be Yusef
Komunyakaa, Pulitzer winner and one of America’s most influential and most
anthologized poets.
In honor of the Pulitzer Centennial (1916-2016),
the series will feature seven Pulitzer winners— if you include William
Kennedy who will present a special program on Old Albany in March.
For more on the Visiting Writers Series,
visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#.Vp5_S01wXs0
For more on the Classic Film Series,
visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html#.Vp5_W01wXs0
We
hope to see you soon!
For more information, visit us online at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst
or call us at 518-442-5620.
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
2015 NYS Summer Writers Institute Reading Series
The Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore in Saratoga will run from July 29 through July 24.
All readings are at 8PM in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall, Skidmore College, 815 N. Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866.
For more information: 518-580-5000, info@skidmore.edu
Monday, April 20, 2015
Joan Murray in the Times Union
Poet Joan Murray discusses her friendship with poet Alicia Ostriker in the Times Union. The two poets will visit together on Thursday, April 23rd:
"I've known Alicia since we were both young poets in the second wave feminist movement in the '70s. We were attracted to each other's work, because we were both young moms writing about motherhood and war. We've kept up a literary friendship since then, staying in touch and seeing each other now and then. Alicia is fun, but she's also famous and brilliant in a down-to-earth way."
"While our poems are different, we're both dramatic, and we can riff like the old masters when we want to. We both deal with serious social and political issues. We also write about God, though we're not believers. (Alicia has a whole book talking with him.) And we're both risk-takers: I have that book in the voice of the Niagara woman, and Alicia's new book is in the voices of an old woman, a tulip and a dog."
More in the Times Union interview with Elizabeth Floyd Mair: http://www.timesunion.com/tuplus-features/article/Writing-from-experiences-6204800.php
More about the upcoming visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/ostriker_murray15.html
Thursday, October 23, 2014
Lemon Andersen on the front page of the TU Preview section
Andersen is profiled on the front page of the Times Union "Preview" section by Connor Kelly:
Brooklyn wordsmith, artist and actor Lemon Andersen, 39, will be visiting the University at Albany next month, but the group he will resonate most with just might be high school students.
That's because Andersen, a high school dropout himself, believes in inspiring young people through his stories, just as stories he read while in prison inspired him. He hopes those in similar situations can escape the life of poverty and crime that he experienced firsthand.
The stories Andersen crafts, typically inspired by his experiences growing up and living in Brooklyn, take the form of performance-based spoken word poetry, with a focus on rhythm and storytelling.
"I don't do anything without teaching," said Andersen. "I'm teaching what I'm learning everywhere I go. For me, it's not a job, it's a lifestyle. I like being a rock star in the classroom; I like showing up with a strong curriculum — hopefully, it inspires alternatives.
More in the Times Union: http://www.timesunion.com/entertainment/article/Unorthodox-educator-5840311.php
More about our events celebrating Lemon Andersen: http://www.albany.edu/news/54982.php Read More......
Monday, October 20, 2014
Ed Hirsch Interviewed in the Times Union
Poet Ed Hirsch visits tomorrow (10/21) to have a conversation about poetry with fellow poets Kimiko Hahn and Marie Howe. Hirsch is interviewed by Elizabeth Floyd Mair of the Times Union about his new reference work on the art of poetry, A Poet's Glossary:
Q: You're a poet. What was it like for you to work for 15 years or so on this project of explaining in a concise yet thorough way such a huge array of poetic traditions?
A: It was a great pleasure, an offshoot of my vocation. I found working on "A Poet's Glossary" utterly absorbing. Of course, I also worked on other things during those 15 years — I had poems to write, a job to go to — but I always seemed to return to the glossary with renewed curiosity. I see the world of poets as a kind of extended family. I was always wondering what other members of the family were doing at different times in different parts of the world. Sometimes I was outraged, sometimes delighted. But I was always interested in what they were up to.
More in the Times Union: http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/Chapter-and-verse-5827472.php
More about the event: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/poets_hirschhahnhowe14.html
Monday, October 6, 2014
Contenders for the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature
Nearly 30% of the leading contenders for the 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature (according to British betting giant, Ladbrokes, for what that's worth) have visited Albany under the sponsorship of the New York State Writers Institute.
They include frequent frontrunner Philip Roth; upstate New York native and Summer Writers Institute stalwart Joyce Carol Oates; Polish poet Adam Zagajewski; Chinese poet Bei Dao; Somali novelist Nuruddin Farah (who visited twice); Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood; Bronx novelist Don DeLillo (twice); Israeli novelist Amos Oz; American novelist Richard Ford (twice); Irish poet Paul Muldoon; Australian poet Les Murray; and Irish novelist Colm Toibin.
The Wall St. Journal discusses Ladbrokes' oddsmaking regarding the Nobel Prize in Literature here: http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/09/30/bookmakers-weigh-in-on-who-will-win-the-nobel-prize-for-literature/ Read More......
Monday, September 8, 2014
NYS Poet Marie Howe in the Huffington Post
"This morning I stumbled upon the poetry of Marie Howe, and once again I'm humbled by the power of words on a page, and a writer's ability to bestow meaning to feelings that would otherwise remain forever trapped inside me. In a recent podcast interview, the poet Marie Howe was speaking of the power of words to reveal the human condition, and how the older she gets, the more of herself she unmasks through her writing. She later said, 'to be able to move through your life transparently would be a relief.'"
More in the Huffington Post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeanpaul-bedard/in-the-company-of-words-and-strangers_b_5762190.html
Reigning New York State Poet Marie Howe visits the Writers Institute on Tuesday, October 21st with fellow poets Edward Hirsch and Kimiko Hahn.
For a full schedule of events, visit our webpage: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/#.VA26El_D_s1
For more about NY State Poet Marie Howe: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/howe_marie12.html
Tuesday, March 18, 2014
Short Essay Contest, Deadline April 15th
You are invited to enter the first New York State “Poetry
Unites” short essay contest.
Monday, March 3, 2014
Poetic Provocateur: Celebrating Pierre Joris
Elizabeth Floyd Mair of the Times Union interviews Pierre Joris (who visits Wed. 3/5 for 3 events):
Q: You write poetry in English, which — astonishingly — is not your first language, and you advocate moving away from "the prison-house of the mother-tongue" toward the "other tongue," or the recognition that "all languages are foreign." Can you tell me about this?
A: By luck of birth I come from a multilingual culture: Letzeburgesch [Editor's note: Letzeburgesch is a Germanic dialect widely spoken in Luxembourg] was spoken at home and in the street, but education was in German and French, and in high school I added English and Spanish as "foreign" languages.
More: http://www.timesunion.com/default/article/Poetic-provocateur-5274494.php
More about our Celebration of Pierre Joris this coming Wednesday: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/joris_pierre14.html Read More......
Monday, February 10, 2014
Maxine Kumin (1925-2014)
Kumin visited the New York State Writers Institute and UAlbany on March 15, 2005.
Among other things, she spoke about recovering from her catastrophic horseback riding accident at the age of 73 (she broke her neck), her close friendship with the poet Anne Sexton (they had a dedicated phone line which they left connected all day long), and her hatred of woodchucks (because of the hazards their holes pose to horses).
Here's a short video clip from her visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHPrcou0ixs
Here's our dedicated page: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/kumin_maxine.html
Here's the New York Times obit: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/08/books/maxine-kumin-pulitzer-winning-poet-dies-at-88.html?_r=0 Read More......
Friday, January 31, 2014
New Poetry Bestseller!
We are pleased that Poetry of Witness (2014) edited by Carolyn Forche (who visited us yesterday), has flown to the to the top of poetry bestseller lists nationwide. Among other things, it is the #1 best selling poetry anthology on Amazon.com and the #4 best selling poetry volume overall (trailing slightly behind Poe, Shakespeare and Homer).
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Books-Poetry-Anthologies/zgbs/books/10250
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Books-Poetry/zgbs/books/10248
Her appearance Wednesday on the PBS NewsHour may have helped in this regard:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/poet-carolyn-forche-gathers-500-years-of-suffering-in-new-anthology/
Forche reads poems from the collection here:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/poetry/carolyn-forche-explores-writing-as-an-outcry-of-the-soul-in-poetry-of-witness/ Read More......
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Carolyn Forche on PBS NewsHour Yesterday!
Carolyn Forche who visits us today appeared yesterday on the PBS NewHour, January 29, 2014:
Poet Carolyn Forché gathers 500 years of suffering in new anthology....
The poets featured in Carolyn Forché’s anthology “Poetry of Witness” have endured extreme conditions: warfare, censorship, forced exile. The Georgetown professor and poet herself calls the collection an “outcry of the soul.” Jeffrey Brown sat down with Forché to discuss this style of writing and its enduring power.
Website: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/poet-carolyn-forche-gathers-500-years-of-suffering-in-new-anthology/
She also reads two poems: Major John McCrae's poem "In Flanders Field," and Emily Dickinson's poem "They Dropped Like Flakes." Watch and listen here: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/poetry/carolyn-forche-explores-writing-as-an-outcry-of-the-soul-in-poetry-of-witness/
More on Forche's visit to UAlbany here: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/forche_carolyn14.html Read More......
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Booklist Review of Carolyn Forche's New Book
Carolyn Forche's new anthology of poems about political violence receives a rave from Donna Seaman in Booklist. Forche visits UAlbany to make two free presentations this coming Thursday.
http://www.booklistonline.com/Poetry-of-Witness-The-Tradition-in-English-1500-2001-/pid=6421407
The 300 poems gathered so astutely in this authoritative and stirring
anthology were written by poets of the past whose lives were changed, even
destroyed, by war, oppression, imprisonment, torture, slavery, and exile. Poet
Forché (Blue Hour,
2003) has long been a champion and practitioner of poetry of conscience,
creating the genre-defining Against
Forgetting (1993). She now teams up with fellow English professor Wu to
excavate the roots of this essential tradition of poetry that confronts “evil
and its embodiments” in “appeals for a shared sense of humanity and collective
resistance.” The sheer enormity of this “living archive,” an artistic record of
five centuries of violence and suffering and protest and truth-telling,
illuminates humankind at its most horrific and most glorious. The selections are
blazing and haunting, poems of fierce precision, communal consciousness,
courage, and reverberating beauty, and Forché and Wu succinctly establish the
historical context for each poet’s work in glinting biographical essays. William
Blake, John Keats, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson are all seen from fresh
vantage points. Here, too, are antislavery poet Lydia Maria Child; Olaudah
Equiano, an enslaved Nigerian; Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay; WWII
veteran and dissident Karl Shapiro; and conscientious objector William
Stafford—“You walk on toward / September, the depot, the dark, the light, the
dark.”
More about Forche's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/forche_carolyn14.html
Carolyn Forche in the New Yorker
Carolyn Forche's new anthology of poems written by prisoners, slaves, victims of torture, and others testifying to conditions of political oppression, Poetry of Witness (2014), is featured in a capsule review in the New Yorker's "Books to Watch Out For." Forche visits the Institute on Thursday.
Reviewer Andrea Denhoed says, "The editors’ extensive and varied selection amounts to a reconfiguration of English literary history and a consideration of the purposes and achievements of poetry."
More in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2014/01/books-to-watch-out-for-january-1.html
Details of Forche's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#forche
Friday, January 24, 2014
Carolyn Forche, Winner of 2013 Poetry Academy Fellowship
Carolyn Forche, the first guest of the NYS Writers Institute's Spring 2014 Visiting Writers Series, is the recent recipient of the 2013 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, awarded annually to an individual poet for "distinguished poetic achievement."
More: Prestigious Poetry Prize Goes to Professor, Activist Carolyn Forché
http://www.georgetown.edu/news/carolyn-forche-wins-prestigious-poetry-fellowship.html
Forche will visit the University at Albany to present her new anthology of poetry written under duress by men and women as they face political violence and persecution, Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500 – 2001 (2014), a sequel to her landmark anthology, Against Forgetting (1993).
More about Forche's visit here: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/forche_carolyn14.html
Read More......
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
National Book Award Poetry Longlist Announced
Three past visitors to the NYS Writers Institute appear on the National Book Award's longlist for the award in poetry.
They include Lucie Brock-Broido, for Stay, Illusion; Andrei Codrescu for So Recently Rent a World, New and Selected Poems: 1968-2012; and Frank Bidart for Metaphysical Dog.
See Frank Bidart speak at the Institute on Youtube in 2008:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReSgPXq2W_8
Monday, September 16, 2013
Poet Philip Levine wins $100k Prize
Former United States poet laureate Philip Levine has been awarded the Academy of American Poets’ Wallace Stevens Award for lifetime achievement. The award, which comes with a $100,000 prize, is given annually for “outstanding and proven mastery of the art of poetry.”
Here are some links:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/13/philip-levine-is-awarded-100000-poetry-prize/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24077281
Levine visited the Writers Institute in 1996: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/levine.html. A video about the visit aired in 1999 on "The Writer," a series coproduced by the Writers Institute and WMHT.
Poetry for Farmers and Retired Roofers
Q: You've written that if you picture an audience in your mind at all as you write, it's your Vermont hill farm neighbors, who, you note, would never elect to read a word of your poetry. Why write for them?
A: I have a feeling that too much poetry since the era of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot sends this message, whether subliminally or not: "Hey, you can't come in here; you haven't learned the language that we insiders use." One of the reasons I so admire Robert Frost is that any reader — from a first-grader to a graduate student to a farmer to a labor organizer — can get something out of his poems. Those poems are scarcely simple-minded; indeed they are profoundly complex. But complexity is not the same as complication.
Imagining that my beloved 90-year-old neighbor — not a farmer, but a retired roofer — might read a poem of mine and get something out of it too — keeps me from erring toward mere complication.
Read more here: http://www.timesunion.com/default/article/The-nature-of-words-4809616.php#photo-5177268
Read more about Lea's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/howe_lea13.html Read More......