New Event! Local Journalists On Stage at His Girl Friday Screening

Rosemary Armao, Marion Roach Smith and Casey Seiler will engage the audience in conversation about women in journalism at our free upcoming screening of His Girl Friday (this coming Friday, March 3rd).
March 3 (Friday): HIS GIRL FRIDAY
Pre-screening talk with Rosemary Armao, Marion Roach Smith and Casey Seiler about the challenges facing women in journalism — 7:30 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus, 1400 Washington Ave.
Film screening to follow— 8:00 p.m.
Directed by Howard Hawks (United States, 1940, 92 minutes, b/w)
Starring Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Bellamy
A newspaper editor uses every trick he can think of to stop his top reporter—and ex-wife—from quitting journalism and hopping a train to Albany to marry another man with the intention of settling into a new life as a housewife. This fast-paced comedy with overlapping dialogue was adapted by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur from their  Broadway hit The Front Page. Chicago Reader reviewer Dave Kehr described Cary Grant’s performance as “…truly virtuoso— stunning technique applied to the most challenging material.” The American Film Institute ranked His Girl Friday at #19 in its list of the best American comedies of all time. Quentin Tarantino credits the film with teaching him to write dialogue.
A new high-definition digital restoration of His Girl Friday will be shown.

Rosemary Armao, a star of WAMC’s “The Roundtable,” is the Director of the Journalism Program at the University at Albany. She is a former Executive Director of Investigative Reporters and Editors and former President of the Journalism and Women Symposium.

Marion Roach Smith is the author of four mass-market books. A former staffer at The New York Times, she has been a commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered and a talk show host on Sirius Satellite Radio. She currently teaches writing online and serves as a working member of the Friends of The New York State Writers Institute.

Casey Seiler is the Times Union state editor and columnist, and previously served as the paper’s entertainment editor.

For more information contact the New York State Writers Institute at 518 442 5620 or visit us online at www.writers.edu/inst.

A newspaper editor uses every trick he can think of to stop his top reporter—and ex-wife—from quitting journalism and hopping a train to Albany to marry another man, with the intention of settling into a new life as a housewife. This fast-paced comedy with overlapping dialogue was adapted by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur from their Broadway hit The Front Page. Chicago Reader reviewer Dave Kehr described Cary Grant’s performance as “…truly virtuoso— stunning technique applied to the most challenging material.” The American Film Institute ranked His Girl Friday at #19 in its list of the best American comedies of all time. Quentin Tarantino credits the film with teaching him to write

A new high-definition digital restoration of His Girl Friday will be shown.

Rosemary Armao, a star of WAMC’s “The Roundtable,” is the Director of the Journalism Program at the University at Albany. She is a former Executive Director of Investigative Reporters and Editors and former President of the Journalism and Women Symposium.

Marion Roach Smith is the author of four mass-market books. A former staffer at The New York Times, she has been a commentator on NPR’s All Things Considered and a talk show host on Sirius Satellite Radio. She currently teaches writing online and serves as a working member of the Friends of The New York State Writers Institute.

Casey Seiler is the Times Union state editor and columnist, and previously served as the paper’s entertainment editor.

For more information contact the New York State Writers Institute at 518 442 5620 or visit us online at www.writers.edu/inst.

 

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Regina Carter on Saturday, MacArthur Genius & Jazz Violinist

Sat. Afternoon 2/11: WAMC's Joe Donahue live in conversation with MacArthur Genius, Jazz

Violinist Regina Carter, FREE EVENT
February 11 (Saturday):
Regina Carter, jazz violinist
Conversation — 4:30 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, UAlbany Uptown Campus, 1400 Washington Ave., Free Parking.
...

Classically trained, Regina Carter is considered the foremost jazz violinist of her generation. She studied at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston and Oakland University. She lived and played in Germany and Detroit before moving to New York City to play with the New York String Trio for six years. She then launched her career as a band leader, releasing several albums of contemporary jazz, and drew attention for her work on the recording of Wynton Marsalis’s composition “Blood on the Fields” which won a Pulitzer Prize. She toured with Marsalis in 1997 and went on the road with jazz vocalist Cassandra Wilson in 1998. In 2001, Regina became the first jazz musician and the first African-American to play the 250-year-old Guarneri violin once owned by Niccolo Paganini when she performed in a special benefit concert and recorded her CD, Paganini: After a Dream, a mix of classical music and jazz. In 2006, she was selected as a recipient of the MacArthur “Genius Award.” Her current project is “Simply Ella,” celebrating the centennial of Ella Fitzgerald’s birth, which she will perform at The Egg at 8 p.m. on February 11.
For more about the conversation contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620.
(For ticket information contact The Egg Box Office at 518-473-1845.)

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Howard Frank Mosher, In Memoriam

The New York State Writers Institute mourns the passing of novelist Howard Frank Mosher who delighted Albany audiences on November 1st, 2016. Mosher was widely celebrated as "the voice of Vermont." Born in the Catskills, he spent much of his childhood in Altamont, New York.

From yesterday's Vermont Public Radio obituary:  "Acclaimed Vermont author Howard Frank Mosher has died. Mosher, 74, succumbed to cancer Sunday morning at his home in Irasburg.

His stories celebrated the Northeast Kingdom as the last bastion of a people and a way of life that has all but disappeared from Vermont."  More.


Listen to Joe Donahue's Nov. 1st WAMC interview.


More about Mosher's visit to the Writers Institute.


From the Oct. 2016 Times Union profile of Mosher by Joe Stalvey and Jack Rightmyer:  "I was actually born in the Catskill Mountains, and I lived there till I was 11 or 12," he says, "and then we moved to Altamont, where I attended grade six through nine. Many of my stories also reach back to that time in my boyhood."He fondly recalls fishing in the Helderberg Mountains and going to the Altamont Fair every summer. "The description of the county fair in my newest book 'God's Kingdom' is how I remember the Altamont Fair," he says. "("God's Kingdom") is pretty autobiographical," Mosher says. "Jim is based on me, and like him, I always wanted to be a writer. Most of the characters are based on my friends and relatives, including my wife. The newspaper editor is based on my dad, who was a teacher and once the principal of Altamont High School. He was the principal the first two years of Guilderland High School." More.

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Joyce Carol Oates Visits Thursday!

WAMC's Joe Donahue will join her on stage in conversation. William Kennedy will introduce!

Joyce Carol Oates, fiction writer, essayist, poet, and playwright
September 15 (Thursday)Conversation — 7:30 p.m., Main Theatre, Performing Arts Center


For more details:  http://readme.readmedia.com/Major-author-Joyce-Carol-Oates-and-legendary-dancer-Savion-Glover-open-new-arts-conversation-series-at-UAlbany/13976552/print

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Treasures from the Archive: Barbara Kingsolver

Major American novelist Barbara Kingsolver visited the Writers Institute in the spring of 1992, and was also interviewed by the late Tom Smith, Institute Director, for the WAMC Book Show, April 16, 1992.

Here's an excerpt from that interview:

Kingsolver: People also have asked the question if I write women’s books or to put it in the way a student asked me, “Is The Bean Trees a chick book?” I guess it is because most of the characters seem to be women but the thing is I’ve read so many white guy books in my life and it had never even occurred to me that those people in the books were white men. Lawrence of Arabia, the film, comes to my mind. I remember after I saw the film, a friend said, “Did you notice that there were no women in that movie?” We get accustomed to what literature is and literature is about a man and a great white whale. But it seems to me that what happened between two women in a kitchen can be just as interesting and just as heroic in its way as what happens between a man and a great white whale. It just happens that I know much more about what happens between two women in a kitchen than I do about whales. I think I’m on safer territory writing about the people I know.

Picture:  Kingsolver posing with locally grown leeks and asparagus in the San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 2, 2008, in an article on the locavore movement.

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Nick Turse Today on WAMC with Joe Donahue

Nick Turse, who visits UAlbany this afternoon, was interviewed this morning by Joe Donahue on the WAMC Roundtable.

http://wamc.org/post/nick-turse

Audio should be up soon.

More about Nick's visit:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/turse_nick14.html

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Writing About the Old; Gene Mirabelli on WAMC

Acclaimed novelist and beloved UAlbany professor emeritus Eugene Mirabelli (who reads on Tuesday) talked to WAMC's Joe Donahue about his most recent novel, Renato, the Painter: An Account of His Youth & His 70th Year in His Own Words.

Mirabelli says:  "I also wanted to write about someone who is old. Most novels it seems to me are about people in their 30s or 40s. At the time that I thought of the idea for this novel, I thought 70 was old. As it turns out now, I'm 11 years older than he is, and he seems like a young man."

Listen to the full interview here:  http://www.wamc.org/post/renato-painter

More about Mirabelli's visit with bestselling novelist Ann Hood:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/mirabelli_hood13.html

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Dava Sobel on WAMC This Morning

In association with her visit to the Writers Institute today, Dava Sobel will be on WAMC's The Roundtable this morning to speak about her new biography of Copernicus, the Polish astronomer who overturned humankind's understanding of the Universe, twenty years before Galileo's birth.

No exact time is available, but based on the schedule of guests, we anticipate she will be on around 11AM.

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