NYS Writers Institute, Tuesday, October 13, 2015
4:15 p.m. Seminar | Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus
8:00 p.m. Reading | Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus

CALENDAR LISTING:
Adam Johnson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Orphan Master’s Son (2012), a novel about North Korea, will read from his new story collection, Fortune Smiles (2015), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, on Tuesday, October 13, 2015, at 8:00 p.m. in the Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, on the University at Albany’s uptown campus. Earlier that day at 4:15 p.m., the author will present an informal seminar in the same location. Free and open to the public, the events are sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute in conjunction with the department-wide reading project of UAlbany’s English Department.

PROFILE
Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer Adam Johnson will present his new story collection, Fortune Smiles (2015), which was longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award. The stories include “Nirvana,” winner of the London Sunday Times Short Story Prize, the story of a computer programmer who forms a friendship with a digital simulacrum of the U. S. President; and “Hurricanes Anonymous,” selected for the Best American Short Stories, the tale of a man who searches for the mother of his son in storm-ravaged Louisiana.  

Publishers Weekly said “Often funny, even when they’re wrenchingly sad, the stories provide one of the truest satisfactions of reading: the opportunity to sink into worlds we otherwise would know little or nothing about.” Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Lauren Groff said, “As a writer, [Johnson] is always perceptive and brave; his lines always sing and strut and sizzle and hush and wash and blaze over the reader. Fortune Smiles is a collection worthy of being read slowly and, like very good and very bitter chocolate, savored.”

Johnson received the Pulitzer Prize for The Orphan Master’s Son (2012), an epic tale about life in North Korea— its economic misery and routine corruption, its prison camps, orphanages, infiltration tunnels, factories, fishing vessels, and farm collectives, as well as the lifestyles of its privileged bureaucrats, propagandists, foreign ambassadors, paranoid generals, and peculiar cultural icons.

The Pulitzer Board described it as “an exquisitely crafted novel that carries the reader on an adventuresome journey into the depths of totalitarian North Korea and into the most intimate spaces of the human heart.”

Johnson’s earlier fiction includes the story collection, Emporium (2002), named “Debut of the Year” by Amazon.com, and the novel, Parasites Like Us (2003), winner of the California Book Award and a selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers series.

A creative writing professor at Stanford University, Johnson is a past recipient of the Stegner Fellowship and Whiting Writers’ Award. He is also the founder of the Stanford Graphic Novel Project, a for-credit student collaborative that tackles world issues through the medium of the graphic novel. He was named one of the nation’s most innovative college professors by Playboy magazine in October 2010.

Previous Visit: February 14, 2012

For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.