Former lieutenant Governor Richard Ravitch 
Michael Kammen, Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural historian who visited the Writers Institute in 2007, has died.
From the New York Times obituary:
Michael Kammen, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose scholarly aim was no less than the illumination of the collective American psyche, died on Nov. 29 in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 77.
Professor Kammen (pronounced KAY-man) received the 1973 Pulitzer for history for People of Paradox: An Inquiry Concerning the Origins of American Civilization, published the previous year. That book sought to describe the national character from the country’s earliest days to the 20th century.
More in the Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/07/us/michael-kammen-historian-of-us-psyche-dies-at-77.html
More about Kammen's visit to UAlbany to discuss his book, Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture (2006): http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/kammen_michael.html
Here's an interview in the Times Union:
Q: Your first book was chosen for Oprah's Book Club. What has that done in terms of sales and also any pressure you may feel about your next book?
A: Certainly, the book has reached more folks than it would have otherwise. We make distinctions, which are both useful and harmful, about fiction, and sometimes readers are intimidated by classifications like literary fiction. I think we also have a tendency to label books — as an African-American story or Latino story or gay story, etc. — which results in readers thinking that perhaps a book won't resonate with them, because of whatever differences they perceive between their lives and the characters' lives. This isn't true, of course. Literature reaches across all of those kinds of false barriers.
The Oprah book club's greatest strength is that it makes a great variety of books accessible to people who may not otherwise have found them or been attracted to them. It's as though she's walking the books she chooses into living rooms and book clubs across the country, and people are a bit more willing to take a chance on them. Of course, that translates into sales, but I think the real boon has more to do with readers finding their way to books that are meaningful to them.
More: http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/Tribal-initiation-5022008.php
More about Mathis's visit today to UAlbany: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#ayana
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)
Q: A lot of your stories in this volume present characters, usually men, who are so self-absorbed that they necessarily veer toward disaster. Is your view of human nature more dark than light?
A: I have lived one of the most fortunate of human lives, surrounded by light and love. I have known my closest friend since I was 3 1/2 years old, my children are slim and tall and beautiful and smarter than all the computers in the world combined, and I remain the only writer in history only to have one wife, the legendary Karen Kvashay, my college sweetheart at SUNY Potsdam.
Still, I do suspect that the universe doesn't care much about any of this or any of us and that accident rules the world. Fiction is a place for examining the darker scenarios, the ones we hope to avoid.
Read more of Elizabeth Floyd Mair's interview in Sunday's Times Union:
http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/Tales-to-tell-4866512.php
Bill Bryson, bestselling nonfiction author, to read from his new book
October 5, 2013
Gilbert King went from writing about Mr. Potato Head to crafting an award-winning story about racial injustice.
More in The Writer from Susan Kershner Resnick:
Last year, I sent out a request on Facebook asking experienced writers to share advice with my undergraduate writing students. A few snarky responses appeared first: Go to law school; get comfortable with a life of poverty. Then Gilbert King weighed in.
“Work. Read. Work. Think. Work. Write. Work. Connect. Work. Pitch. Same as always,” he wrote.
Continue: http://www.writermag.com/2013/09/09/win-pulitzer-prize/
Gilbert King visits Albany today: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/king_gilbert13.html
“I also want beginning writers to know that you need some good luck to be successful. This book was rejected by 35 publishers, mostly because my first book didn’t sell very well.”
Gilbert King, Niskayuna native and Pulitzer-winning author of Devil in the Grove, talks to Jack Rightmyer of the Gazette about writing, Thurgood Marshall, boyhood dreams of being a baseball player, and more.
Article in the Gazette: http://www.dailygazette.com/news/2013/sep/21/marshalls-legacy-inspires-book-niskayuna-native/?free
Karen Russell, who visited us in Feb. 2011, is among the 2013 winners of a half a million dollar MacArthur Fellowship (announced today).
From the MacArthur website: "Karen Russell is a fiction writer whose haunting yet comic tales blend fantastical elements with psychological realism and classic themes of transformation and redemption. Setting much of her work in the Everglades of her native Florida, she depicts in lyrical, energetic prose an enchanting and forbidding landscape and delves into subcultures rarely encountered in contemporary American literature."
See more at: http://www.macfound.org/fellows/902/
More about Russell's visit to Albany with Julie Orringer: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/orringer_russell11.html
"The black women of the town would make him bag lunches to bring to court. The black men would stay up and guard him while he slept. Long before becoming a U.S. Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall was a charismatic and courageous criminal defense attorney. He believed that the best way to fight Jim Crow laws in the South was to go into the region's courtrooms, despite continuous death threats, to represent falsely accused black defendants."
Elizabeth Floyd Mair of the Times Union profiles and interviews Gilbert King, who visits the Writers Institute this coming Thursday, about his Pulitzer-winning book on an early battle in the legal career of a young Thurgood Marshall, Devil in the Grove.
More in the TU: http://www.timesunion.com/living/article/Chronicling-a-fight-for-justice-4829393.php
Picture: Thurgood Marshall in 1936 at the beginning of his career with the NAACP.
More about our events with Gil King: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/king_gilbert13.html
Gretel Ehrlich, who visited the Writers Institute this past March, and Jill Lepore, who came in 2005, are among the finalists for the National Book Award in nonfiction.
Full list here: http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2013.html
Ehrlich received the nomination for Facing the Wave (2013), a book that she presented here at the Institute. The book is an account of Ehlich's travels in Japan in the aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and the subsequent meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. A student of Japanese poetry for much of her life, Ehrlich felt compelled to return to Japan to bear witness and record the stories of survivors.
More about Ehrlich (with video of her Albany visit): http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/ehrlich_gretel13.html
Jill Lepore visited in September 2005 to discuss her book about a slave uprising in colonial Manhattan, New York Burning. Her new book is Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin, about the personal ordeals of Benjamin Franklin's unschooled sister.
More about Lepore's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lepore_jill.html
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
"This novel's powerful and polarizing cultural, political, and racial energies are animated by a typically Lethem-esque cast of zanies, communalists, sexual adventurers, innocents, druggies, dreamers, and do-gooders -- cosmopolitans all -- whose lives collide and clash with gut-busting humor, heart, and hubris, which Lethem delivers in his seductively vertiginous prose."
Lethem's new novel is reviewed in the September 2013 issue of Elle (not available yet online).
Lethem visits us Wednesday, September 11th: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lethem_jonathan13.html
Here are some more reviews: http://www.randomhouse.com/book/212150/dissident-gardens-by-jonathan-lethem#praise
Janet Maslin reviews Andrea Barrett's Archangel, a new collection of short pieces of historical fiction about the struggles of women scientists.
"This is a book full of strong women..... [Barrett's] stories work as both fiction and as philosophy of science. And she need do no grandstanding to advance her belief in unstoppable progress. But this book does offer a powerfully human sense of the struggle it takes for new ideas to dislodge old ones.
Barrett visited the Writers Institute in 2007: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/barrett.html
Alison Lurie, New York State Author (2012-14) by appointment of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, under the auspices of the NYS Writers Institute, contributes a piece on knitting to the New Yorker blog:
"As a child, I thought of knitting as a kind of magic, in which a one-dimensional object became two-dimensional or even three-dimensional. While you watched, a very long piece of string somehow turned into a hat or a sock or a mitten, something with shape and weight, an inside and an outside. Appropriately, this transformation was accomplished with long shiny sticks, like the magic wands in fairy tales. "
"It wasn’t only the materials that, for me, were transformed. The people who could perform this magic seemed, in everyday life, to be everyday humans. But when they picked up their wands they turned into sorceresses or fairy godmothers, mistresses of a secret art."
More in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/08/history-of-knitting-in-literature-sweater-curse.html
More on Alison Lurie: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/lurie_alison12.html
The son of Jack McEneny, retired New York State Assemblyman, notable local historian and friend
of the Writers Institute, has received an important playwriting award at Scotland's Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
From a Times Union article by Amy Biancolli:
A play written and directed by John McEneny, son of the recently retired Albany state assemblyman, has won a prestigious Bobby Award at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
The winning play: “The Island of Doctor Moreau,” an adaptation of the H.G. Wells tale of an island occupied by a madman and his half-human, half-animal monstrosities. It originated at Brooklyn’s Piper Theatre, where McEneny serves as artistic director, and includes an original score performed live by composer Lucas Syed.
More: http://blog.timesunion.com/localarts/play-by-john-mceneny-the-younger-wins-award-at-edinburgh-fringe/29481/
David Souter, former U. S. Supreme Court Justice, will speak about the critical importance of funding humanities education and scholarship at the NY State Library in downtown Albany on September 12, 2013 on behalf of the New York Council on the Humanities.
Souter served on a special commission of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences which recently issued a report entitled, "The Heart of the Matter: The
Humanities and Social Sciences for a vibrant, competitive and secure
nation."
