American playwright EDWARD ALBEE has won numerous awards, including three Pulitzer Prizes (A Delicate Balance, Seascape, and Three Tall Women) and two Tony Awards (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Delicate Balance). In 1996, he received a Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award and in 1997 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Clinton. At the Kennedy Center Honors Ceremony in 1996, Albee was praised for his impact on American drama. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? will be presented as part of our Classic Film Series on Friday, September 21.

MARY HIGGINS CLARK, America's "Queen of Suspense," knows the struggles most writers experience while honing their craft. It took six years and forty rejection slips before she sold her first short story for $100. Her first suspense novel, Where Are the Children?, became her first bestseller. Mary Higgins Clark is the author of 22 bestsellers, with over 50 million copies of her books in print in the U.S. Her books are world-wide bestsellers.

MARY GAITSKILL and ELIZABETH BENEDICT
MARY GAITSKILL, novelist and short story writer, is the author of the story collections Because They Wanted To (1997) and Bad Behavior (1988), and the novel Two Girls, Fat and Thin (1991). Her work, which has received high critical praise, portrays characters journeying into the dark side of contemporary life as they search for human connections."
ELIZABETH BENEDICT is the author of Almost, Slow Dancing, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Fiction Prize, The Beginner's Book of Dreams, Safe Conduct, and The Joy of Writing Sex. Her work has appeared in Salmagundi, The New York Times, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, The American Retrospect, and other periodicals. She has taught writing at Princeton University, Swarthmore, and at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop.

SUSAN MINOT and KATE WALBERT
SUSAN MINOT is the author of Monkeys (1986), Lust and Other Stories (1989), Folly (1992), and Evening (1998, Random, ISBN 0-375-40037-0). Monkeys was her first novel and was published in a dozen countries and received the Prix Femina Entranger in France. She also wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty which will be presented as part of our Classic Film Series on Wednesday, October 10. She will provide film commentary immediately following the screening.
KATE WALBERT is the author of a short story collection Where She Went and a novel The Gardens of Kyoto (2001, Scribner, ISBN 0-684-86948-9). She has published fiction and articles in the Paris Review, Double Take, The New York Times, and numerous other publications. She has received fellowships from the national endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts.

PABLO MEDINA was born in Cuba and emigrated to the United States when he was twelve. He is the author most recently of The Return of Felix Nogara (2000) and The Floating Island (1999). His other works include The Marks of Birth, Arching into the Afterlife, of Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood, Everyone Will Have to Listen (translationsfrom the Spanish of Tania Diaz Castro), and Pork Rind and Cuban Songs. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review and Iguana Dreams among others. He lives in Miami.

MARTIN NAKELL, poet and fiction writer, is the recipient of the 1996-97 Gertrude Stein Award in Poetry, and was a finalist in the New American Poetry Series for 1999. He is the author of the novel, The Library of Thomas Rivka (1997), a playful study of the inexhaustible significance of books. His newest book is Two Fields That Face and Mirror Each Other (2001), a novel told in many voices that "interact, intersect and overlap." He currently serves as Professor of Literature at Chapman University in Orange, CA, and Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at UC San Diego.

Poet STEPHEN DUNN won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Different Hours (Norton, 2000) and is the author of eleven collections of poetry including Loosestrife (National Book Critic Circle Award finalist, 1996), New & Selected Poems: 1974-1994, Landscape at the End of the Century, Between Angels, and Riffs & Reciporicities: Prose Pairs. Among his awards are the Levinson Prize from Poetry and fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

RICHARD RUSSO, novelist, is renowned for his depiction of blue collar life in abandoned mill towns in upstate New York and northern New England, believed to be modeled after the city he grew up in, Gloversville, New York. His most recent novel, Empire Falls (2001), is set in Maine and features the author's trademark cast of loveable losers, cranks and misfits. Earlier novels include Mohawk (1986), The Risk Pool (1988), Nobody's Fool (1993), which was made into a feature film starring Paul Newman and Bruce Willis, and Straight Man (1997). Russo also cowrote the screenplay of Twilight, the 1998 film starring Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon and Gene Hackman.

PETER HANSON is a filmmaker, critic, and arts editor from Albany and the author of the biography, Dalton Trumbo, Hollywood Rebel: A Critical Survey and Filmography (2001, McFarland). It examines Trumbo's screenwriting and the scores of films he worked on and the techniques that made him, at the time he was blacklisted in 1947, Hollywood's highest-paid writer. Dalton Trumbo was the screenwriter for Roman Holiday and Hanson will provide film commentary immediately following the screening.

MICHELE SERROS is the author of Chicana Falsa, and Other Stories of Death, Identity and Oxnard (1998) and How to Be a Chicana Role Model (2000). The Oxnard, California-born poet, fiction writer and storyteller is a fast-rising literary star, particularly in the southwestern United States where her books have found their way into many high school curriculums and college English and Chicano Studies courses. Her work explores, with wit and humor, the collision and exchange between Latino and Anglo cultures. She writes commentaries regularly for magazines and radio and is producing a documentary, Medium Brown Girl, about her experiences meeting her "fans" on book tour.

CARYL PHILLIPS, West Indian-born writer, is the author of fiction, nonfiction, plays and screen and radio plays. His fiction includes the novels The Nature of Blood (1997), Crossing the River (1993), and Cambridge (1991), all of which reflect his multinational identity and examine aspects of Caribbean, British and American cultures. His nonfiction books incude The European Tribe (1987) and most recently The Atlantic Sound (2000), a unique history of the Atlantic slave trade. Phillips has won numerous awards for his work includeing the Malcolm X Prize for Literature, the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Lannan Literary Award.

LINDA ZISQUIT has published two poetry collections, Unopened Letters (1996) and Ritual Bath (1993), and several books of translations from Hebrew including Wild Light: Selected Poems of Yona Wallach (1997) for which she received an NEA Translation Grant and a PEN Translation Award nomination.

AKASHA GLORIA HULL has taught literature and Women's Studies at a variety of institutions, most recently the University of California at Santa Cruz and has published under the name Gloria T. Hull. Her books include Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave (co-edited), and Healing Heart: Poems.

MARK DOTY is the author of five books of poems, including Sweet Machine (HarperCollins, 1998); Atlantis (1995), which received the Ambassador Book Award, the Bingham Poetry Prize, and a Lambda Literary Award; My Alexandria (1993), chosen by Philip Levine for the National Poetry Series, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and Britain's T. S. Eliot Prize, and was also a National Book Award finalist; Bethlehem in Broad Daylight (1991); and Turtle, Swan (1987). He has also published Heaven's Coast: A Memoir (1996), which won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, and Firebird (HarperCollins, 1999), an autobiography. His most recent book is Still Life with Oysters and Lemons (2001), which combines memoir with artistic and philosophical musings.

PIERRE JORIS is the Luxembourg-born author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999 (2001) and H.J.R. (1999), a poetic investigation of nomadic culture. With Jerome Rothenberg, Joris is co-editor of the monumental anthology, Poems for the Millenium: The University of California Book of Modern & Postmodern Poetry (1995 Volume 1, 1998 Volume 2). A Professor of English at the University of Albany, Joris is also an accomplished translator from French and German into English, and from English into French. His most recent translation is of Romanian-born Holocaust survivor Paul Celan's Threadsuns (2000), a work that had never before been translated in its entirety.

BEI DAO and ELIOT WEINBERGER
BEI DAO (aka Zhao Zhenkai), internationally acclaimed Chinese poet-in-exile, has been the poetic conscience of the dissident movements in China for over twenty years. Away at a literary conference in Berlin at the time of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, he was not allowed to return home. Dao is the author of Landscape Over Zero(translated by David Hinton, with Yanbing Chen), Forms of Distance (1994, translated by David Hinton), Old Snow: Poems (1991, translated by Bonnie S. McDougall and Chen Maiping), Notes From the City of the Sun : Poems (1983, edited and translated by Bonnie S. McDougall), The August Sleepwalker: Poems (1988, translated and introduced by Bonnie S. McDougall). He was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters as an 'honorary member.'
Bei Dao's reading will be translated from the Mandarin by ELIOT WEINBERGER, who will also read from his own work. Weinberger is a distinguished essayist and acclaimed translator of Octavio Paz and Jore Luis borges and is known for his work promoting Hispanic literature in the U.S. In 1999 he received the National Book Critics Chrcle Award for criticism for his edition of Selected Non Fictin of Jore Luis Borges (1999). That same year, he received the Order of the Aztec Eagle, the highest honor the Mexican government can bestow on a foreign national, for his numerous translations of Paz. Weinberger's most recently collection of essays, Karmic Traces: 1993-1999 (2000), is a record of the author's wide-ranging exploration of poetry, places, peoples and cultures.

MARION ROACH and DR. MICHAEL BADEN
MARION ROACH, journalist, is co-author with Dr. Michael Baden of the new book, Dead Reckoning: The New Science of Catching Killers (2001), an entertaining and informative examination of the latest breakthroughs in forensic pathology. Roach is also the author of Another Name for Madness (1985), a harrowing account of her mother's battle with Alzheimer's disease. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Newsday, American Health, and Prevention. A resident of Troy, she served as host of the 1996 WMHT/PBS docoumentary, Historic Views of the Collar City.
MICHAEL BADEN, M.D., is one of the world's foremost forensic pathologists and co-director of the Medicolegal Investigative Unit of the New York State Police. He has participated as investigator and expert witness in numerous high-profile homicide cases, including that of Sunny von Bulow, Nichole Brown Simpson, and JonBenet Ramsey. Dr. Baden is also the author of Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner (1989), and host of the ongoing special on HBO, Autopsy.

EDWARD HIRSCH is the author of five poetry collections including On Love (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), Earthly Measures (1994), The Night Parade (1989)--the previous two listed as notable books of the year by the New York Times Book Review--Wild Gratitude (1986), which received the Lavan Younger Poets Award. His poetry has been praised for its tenderness, intelligence and musicality. Hirsch's latest prose work is How to Read a Poem (1999, Harcourt, ISBN #0-15-600566-2). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award.