Friday, April 5
Presentation/Conversation and a set of original music by singer-songwriter Olivia Quillio — 7:30 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus, Albany NY 12203 See map.

Free and open to the public.

The NYS Writers Institute welcomes award-winning novelist T.C. Boyle back to the University at Albany for a reading and conversation on "Making Sense of the Sixties" to be held 7:30 p.m. Friday, April 5, at Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue on the UAlbany Downtown Campus in Albany.

The event will also feature a reading with Mark Berger, author of the forthcoming memoir, Something’s Happening Here: A Sixties Odyssey from Brooklyn to Woodstock, and a musical performance with singer-songwriter Olivia Quillio.

T.C. Boyle's new novel, Outside Looking In (2019), takes us back to the 1960s and to the early days of a drug whose effects have reverberated widely throughout our culture: LSD. Boyle's book tells the story of Harvard Ph.D. students whose lives veer out of control after they are drawn into the orbit of renowned psychologist and LSD enthusiast Timothy Leary.

A Des Moines Register review praised the Outside Looking In as "a masterful tale by a masterful storyteller, and a must-read for hardcore Boyle fans." The Booklist review found the novel "spellbinding...Boyle’s latest work of countercultural, biographical fiction will lure his devotees and the newly curious alike.”

T. C. Boyle, also known as Thomas Coraghessan Boyle and T. Coraghessan Boyle, was born and raised in Peekskill, New York. He is the author of 28 books of fiction and his work has been translated into more than two dozen languages. His novel, Drop City, wasa finalist for the National Book Award in 2003 and his third book, World's End, a darkly comic historical novel which explores several generations of families in the Hudson River Valley, won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1988.
Boyle's stories have appeared in most of the major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, and The Paris Review. This will be his third event with the NYS Writers Institute, following visits in 2003 and 2013.   

Mark Berger

Mark Berger's memoir, Something’s Happening Here: A Sixties Odyssey from Brooklyn to Woodstock, begins in Brooklyn in 1961, where Berger, determined to be true to himself, pledges to live his life boldly. His journey takes him to Bethel, New York, four days in advance of the 1969 Woodstock music festival, where the decade culminates in a 72-hour celebration that has taken on mythical proportions.

Combining folk, jazz, and soul, singer-songwriter Olivia Quillio creates songs that feel at once raw and luminous. Quillio has been praised for her “commendable lyrical guile,” “refreshingly honest” music, and passionate, intimate live performances. 

A Troy native, Quillio lived in Austin, Texas, and toured the country during the past decade before returning upstate to record her third full length album, "Earthside."

The event is presented in association with the English Graduate Student Association annual conference.

T.C. Boyle at the NYS Writers Institute in 2013

T.C. Boyle on writing short stories & novels; and on his process (2015)