Devil in the Grove, by Gilbert King (who visits Albany today), will be a Hollywood film from Lionsgate studios, which reportedly sees the film as a high priority.
Adam Cooper and Bill Collage, the co-writers of Ridley Scott's forthcoming biblical epic, Exodus, will write the script. Allison Shearmur, who produced The Hunger Games, is producing.
Read more in Deadline Hollywood: http://www.deadline.com/2013/06/lionsgate-acquires-pulitzer-prize-winner-devil-in-the-grove-seminal-civil-rights-case-for-thurgood-marshall/
Thursday, September 26, 2013
Devil in the Grove to be a Major Motion Picture
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Karen Russell, Young Novelist, Wins $500,000 MacArthur Grant!
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
Gil King, Finalist for 2013 Dayton Literary Peace Prize
Gilbert King, who visits us tomorrow to discuss his 2013 Pulitzer-winning book, Devil in the Grove, which was just named a runner-up for the 2013 Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
More about King's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#king
About the prize: The Dayton Literary Peace Prize, inaugurated in 2006, is
the first and only annual U.S. literary award recognizing the power of the
written word to promote peace. The Dayton Literary Peace Prize invites
nominations in adult fiction and nonfiction books published within the past year
that have led readers to a better understanding of other cultures, peoples,
religions, and political points of view. Both awards carry a $10,000 cash prize.
More: http://www.daytonliterarypeaceprize.org/
The 2013 winners include Adam Johnson (fiction) for The Orphan Master's Son, which he presented at the Writers Institute in 2012: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/johnson_adam12.html
Also among the finalists is Louise Erdrich, who visited us back in 1987.
Monday, September 23, 2013
Gilbert King in the Times Union
"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
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Gilbert King, Pulitzer Winning Author, to Visit Next Week
Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Devil in the Grove (2012),
a nonfiction account of an early case in the legal career of Thurgood Marshall,
America's first African-American Supreme Court Justice, will read from and
discuss his work on Thursday, September 26, 2013 at 8:00 p.m. in the Recital
Hall, Performing Arts Center, on the University at Albany's uptown campus.
Earlier that same day at 4:15 p.m., the author will present an informal seminar
in the same location. The events are free and open to the public, and are
sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute in conjunction with CELEBRATE
AND ADVANCE, a weeklong celebration culminating in the inauguration of
UAlbany's 19th President, Robert J. Jones, Ph.D.
Gilbert King, Niskayuna native, received the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for General
Nonfiction for Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys,
and the Dawn of a New America (2012), a meticulously researched, elegantly
written account of the future Supreme Court Justice's role in defending four
black men falsely accused of raping a white woman in Florida in 1949. Of the
four defendants, one was murdered by a white mob before he could stand trial,
and two were murdered by the local county sheriff after they had been
exonerated by the U. S. Supreme Court.
The Salon reviewer said, "King recreates an important yet
overlooked moment in American history with a chilling, atmospheric narrative
that reads more like a Southern Gothic novel than a work of history." The
book was also named a "Best Book of 2012" by the Boston Globe,
Christian Science Monitor, and Library Journal.
In writing Devil in the Grove, King obtained access to two
heretofore unpublished and unpublicized sources of information: the
confidential files of the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the
unedited files of the FBI. In previous, more comprehensive biographies of Marshall,
the Groveland case had been treated as little more than a footnote to a
distinguished legal career. King's research, however, brings back to life the
shock and drama of a courtroom battle that established important legal
precedents on the road to ending Jim Crow laws in the South.
King's relative rise from obscurity has generated a fair amount of interest
in the writing community and on the internet. Especially remarked upon is the
fact that, after the announcement that he had won the Pulitzer Prize, the
surprised author informed a New York Times interviewer, "I'd just
gotten a notice from my publisher that the book had been 'remaindered.'"
Another ironic detail of King's biography is that he flunked English at
Niskayuna High School and had to attend summer school after his junior year,
according to an interview with Paul Grondahl of the Times Union.
A featured contributor to the Smithsonian magazine history blog,
King is also the author of The Execution of Willie Francis: Race, Murder,
and the Search for Justice in the American South (2008), an account of the
wrongful conviction and death sentence of a 17-year-old black boy in Louisiana
in 1946. The Counterpunch magazine reviewer called it, "...almost
certainly the best book on capital punishment in America since Mailer's The
Executioner's Song."
King's appearance is sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute in
conjunction with "Celebrate and Advance," a weeklong celebration at
UAlbany culminating in the inauguration of the new University president, Robert
J. Jones. For additional information on all inauguration week events go to: www.albany.edu/inauguration .
For additional information on Gilbert King's appearances, contact the
Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.
Enthralling theater and television....
“Enthralling theater and television… This is dramatized legal history of the best kind,” said New York Times reviewer Ginia Bellafante of Friday's film, Thurgood, 7:30 p.m. at Page Hall, 9/20.
Bellafante approaches this piece of filmed theater skeptically at first, but is wildly enthusiastic by the end of her review:
"As a form the teleplay is mired in its own noble pedantry, which is why the arrival of “Thurgood” on HBO on Thursday initially seems dubious — especially so, perhaps, because it is a one-man enterprise even more heavily prone to the sensibility of tutorial."
Full review here: http://tv.nytimes.com/2011/02/24/arts/television/24thurgood.html?_r=0
Full Classic Film Series schedule here: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/cfs.html
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
National Book Award Longlist for Nonfiction Announced
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
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