UALBANY ENGLISH PROFESSOR AND AUTHOR, TO READ FROM HER NEW BOOK WHEN PEOPLE WROTE LETTERS: A FAMILY CHRONICLE

NYS Writers Institute, April 25, 2012
4:15 p.m. Reading | Standish Room, Science Library, Uptown Campus

CALENDAR LISTING:
Martha Rozett, University at Albany English professor, will read from her new nonfiction book When People Wrote Letters: A Family Chronicle (2011) on Wednesday, April 25, 2012 at 4:15 p.m. in the Standish Room, Science Library, on the University at Albany uptown campus. The event is sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute and is free and open to the public.

PROFILE
Martha Rozett, University at Albany English professor and Shakespearian scholar, is the author of the family memoir When People Wrote Letters: A Family Chronicle (2011).

The book’s central characters are Betty and Edith Stedman, the author’s mother and great-aunt. Their lives are recounted through wonderfully witty and moving letters, photographs, clippings, and excerpts from an unpublished autobiography and family history. The narrative follows the two women, and other family members, from nineteenth and early twentieth century New England, to Key West in the 1830s, to the Minnesota Territories in the 1860s, to France during World War I, to small towns in Texas and to China in the 1920s, to Spain in the 1930s, and across America during World War II.      

When People Wrote Letters is also an account of Edith Stedman’s extraordinary career during the early years of medical social work, and a love story in which the religious and cultural differences between New England Episcopalians and New York Jews threaten to disrupt a romance in the 1940s.

Rozett is a Shakespearian scholar who has taught at the University at Albany since 1973. She has written books about Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and about how historical fiction reimagines and reshapes the past. Her books include Constructing a World: Shakespeare’s England and the New Historical Fiction (2002), Talking Back to Shakespeare (1994), and The Doctrine of Election and the Emergence of Elizabethan Tragedy (1984). In May 2002 she was named a Collins Fellow, UAlbany’s major award for service. She received a BA in English from Harvard University and a PhD in English from The University of Michigan.

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