Garrison Keillor, radio humorist and author, is founder and host of the acclaimed radio show A Prairie Home Companion and the daily program The Writer's Almanac. Winner of numerous broadcasting awards, he is also the author of nearly a dozen books that have sold more than five million copies in the United States. His latest book is Love Me (September 2003), a non-Wobegon novel about an ambitious writer's rise, fall, and redemption. Keillor's other books include the novels Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 (2001), Wobegon Boy (1997), and WLT: A Radio Romance (1991), and the story collections The Book of Guys (1993), and Leaving Home (1987).

The Fugs: A Literary Concert
The first underground rock band of the Sixties, The Fugs will present a Literary Concert featuring musical homages to the works of William Blake, William Shakespeare, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Matthew Arnold, Sappho, Emily Dickinson, and Heraclitus. Founded by Beat poets Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg at New York's famous Peace Eye bookstore in 1964, The Fugs pioneered a joyously chaotic blend of Beat-style lyrics, political rant, comedy and jug band music that influenced a legion of better-known bands, including Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention, The Velvet Underground, and Alice Cooper. The band's 14 albums include The Fugs (1966), which made the Billboard Top 100, Golden Filth (1969), No More Slavery (1986), The Real Woodstock Festival (1995), and Final CD, Part I (2003). This will be the band's very first Albany performance in its 40-year history.

Julie Orringer has won a number of awards for her short stories, including the Paris Review Discovery Prize, Ploughshares' Cohen Award, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Joseph Henry Jackson Award from the San Francisco Foundation. Her work has also been included in The Best New American Voices 2001 and New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 2002. Her debut story collection is How to Breathe Underwater (2003, Knopf). Orringer, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, teaches at Stanford, where she was Stegner Fellow from 1999-2001.
Ryan Harty is the winner of the 2003 John Simmons Short Fiction Award for his debut collection Bring Me Your Saddest Arizona (U Iowa Press). Harty, a graduate of UC Berkeley, received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. His stories have been published in numerous literary magazines, including the Missouri Review and Tin House, and have received the Henfield-Transatlantic Review Award. He currently teaches fiction writing at Stanford University. His work will be included in the upcoming edition of The Best American Short Stories.

Journalist Anita Pratap has worked for leading Indian and American newspapers and magazines, including Sunday, Indian Express, India Today and Time. Until 1999, she was the New Delhi Bureau Chief for CNN, reporting news from South Asia. She has won several Indian and international awards, including the prestigious George Polk award for her coverage of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in 1996. In 1998 she was awarded the Chameli Devi Jain award for her �sensitive portrayal of the human condition� and for her �talent, dedication and courage as a reporter�. She is currently freelancing, making television documentary films and writing columns for magazines. Island of Blood is her first book.

Peter Schjeldahl, art critic for The New Yorker, and previously for The Village Voice, Art News, 7 Days and The New York Times, is one of America's most influential interpreters of contemporary art. Schjeldahl's accessible, funny and elegantly written work has earned him a host of prizes, including the Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinguished art criticism. Schjeldahl's books on art include Liza Lou (1997) and Samaras Pastels (1981). Selected essays appear in the collections, Columns and Catalogues (1994), The Hydrogen Jukebox: Selected Writings 1987-1990 (1993), and 7 Days Art Columns 1988-1990 (1991). Cosponsored by the University Art Museum as part of their Art & Culture Talks. For further info call 442-4035.

Ha Jin, his pen name, was born in China (Xuefei Jin) and was a teenager when China entered the Cultural Revolution. He became a member of the People�s Liberation Army at the age of fourteen. His novel Waiting, which won him the National Book Award in 1999, was based on his experiences during his five-year service in the Red Army. Ha Jin received the Pen/Hemingway Award for his first collection of short stories, Ocean of Words, and the Flannery O�Connor prize for his second, Under the Red Flag. His latest book is Crazed. Jin taught poetry, fiction and English Literature at Emory University and currently teaches at Boston University.
Leslie Epstein has published eight books of fiction, most notably King of the Jews, Pinto and Sons, Pandaemonium, and Goldkorn Tales. His articles and stories have appeared in Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, Playboy, Harper's, The Yale Review, Triquarterly, Tikkun, Partisan Review, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. A Rhodes scholar, he has also received a Fulbright and Guggenheim Fellowship, awards for Distinction in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters for his creation of Leib Goldkorn, a residency at the Rockefeller Institute in Bellagio and various grants from the NEA. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program at Boston University.

Marvin Bell is one of the great innovators of American poetry. Bell's recent collections include Nightworks: Poems, 1962-2000 (2000), Ardor (1997), A Marvin Bell Reader (1994), and The Book of the Dead Man (1994). His 1969 collection, A Probable Volume of Dreams, was a Lamont Poetry Selection of the American Academy of Poets. His 1977 collections, Stars Which See, Starts Which Do Not See, was a finalist for the National Book Award. A long-time teacher at the famed Iowa Writers Workshop, and Iowa's first Poet Laureate, Bell is the author of a column in The American Poetry Review, "Homage to the Runner," that has influenced a generation of poets.

Alexander Shurbanov, Bulgarian poet, literary critic, translator, and chair of the English Department, Sofia University, has published five volumes of poetry and three books of essays, as well as critical studies on Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, John Donne, and George Herbert. In addition to anthologies of Renaissance theater and English poetry, his translations into Bulgarian include Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales and Milton's Paradise Lost. Cosponsored by the Department of English and the Program in Russian & East European Studies.

John Cornwell, British historian and journalist, is the author most recently of Hitler's Scientists: Science, War, and the Devil's Pact (Viking, 2003), which explores German scientific genius in the first half of the twentieth century. He is also the author of Breaking Faith: The Pope, the People, and the Fate of Catholicism (2001), Hitler's Pope (1999), which was on the New YorkTimes bestseller list for five weeks, and The Power to Harm: Mind, Medicine, and Murder on Trial (1996), on the Louisville Prozac trial. Cornwell is a regular feature writer for the Sunday Times (London), and is in the department of history and philosophy of science at Cambridge University.

Jonathan Lethem is the author of five novels, including Gun, With Occasional Music and Girl In Landscape. His most recent, Motherless Brooklyn, was named the novel of the year by Esquire, and won the Salon Book Award and The National Book Critic's Circle Award, and has been translated into fifteen languages. He is also the author of a story collection, The Wall of the Sky, The Wall of the Eye, and a novella, This Shape We're In. As editor, he created The Vintage Book of Amnesia, guest-edited The Year's Best Music Writing 2001, and was the founding fiction editor of Fence Magazine. His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Esquire, McSweeney's, Tin House, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and a variety of other periodicals and anthologies. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Fiction writer and journalist Jennifer Egan is the author of two novels, The Invisible Circus (1996) and Look at Me (2002), which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and a short story collection, Emerald City (1997). Her short fiction stories have been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, GQ, Zoetrope and Ploughshares, among others, and her nonfiction appears frequently in the New York Times Magazine. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son.
Adam Johnson is the author of the debut story collection Emporium: Stories (2002), and the novel, Parasites Like Us (2003, Viking, ISBN 0-670-03235-2). Emporium (2002, Penguin, ISBN 0-14-200195-3) was listed by the San Francisco Chronicle as a favorite book of 2002. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow Stanford University his fiction has appeared in Esquire, Harper's, and The Paris Review, as well as Best New American Voices four years running. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and newborn son, James Geronimo. and

Writer-in-Residence Ed Sanders will talk about the late 1960s in Los Angeles and his investigations into the Charles Manson murder ring, which he details in his meticulously researched book The Family (1971). The Family was revised and updated in 2002 with 140 pages of new information. The Boston Phoenix calls the book "one of the best-researched, best-written, thoroughly constructed, and eminently significant books of our times. . .a masterpiece."

Louis Menand, a journalist and an educator, was named New York Council for the Humanities Scholar of the Year for 2002. He will deliver a talk entitled "Do Movies Have Rights?" Author of the Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in history, Menand writes about American cultural history and the development of the philosophies that shape the country. He is also the author of American Studies (2002), a collection of essays, and Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context (1987). A frequent contributor to the New Republic and New York Review of Books, Menand is a staff writer for the New Yorker. He is Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Douglas Glover, one of Canada's most noted writers, is the author of four story collections and four novels, all of which have received critical praise. His most recent works include the historical novel, Elle, and a book of selected stories, Bad News of the Heart, both published in 2003. Glover's story collection 16 Categories of Desire was named one of the best books of 2000 by the Toronto Star and was short-listed for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His 1991 story collection, A Guide to Animal Behaviour, was nominated for Canada's prestigious Governor-General's Award for Fiction and his novel Dog Attempts to Drown Man in Saskatoon (1985) received the Literary Press Group Writers Choice Award. His other works include Notes from a Prodigal Son (1999), a book of essays, and The Life and Times of Captain N (1993), an historical novel set in the Mohawk Valley of New York State during the Revolutionary War.

Tobias Wolff is a novelist, short story writer, and nonfiction writer. His short story collections include In the Garden of the North American Martyrs (1981), Back in the World (1985), and his most recent book The Night in Question (1996). His short stories have won the O. Henry Prize and the Rea Award and have been anthologized in the "Best American" series. In 1984 Wolff received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Best Work of Fiction for his novel The Barracks Thief, the story of three stateside paratroopers during the Vietnam War who are bonded together through a shared experience of self-imposed risk. Wolff published his first work of nonfiction, This Boy's Life, in 1989, a memoir of childhood and remembrance, which became the basis of a 1993 coming-of-age movie of the same name starring Ellen Barkin and Robert DeNiro. Wolff's second memoir, In Pharaoh's Army: Memories of the Lost War (1994) was chosen as a finalist for the National Book Award.

Yugoslavian-born American poet Charles Simic is the author of more than 60 books and has been widely celebrated for his poetic imagery, sardonic humor, and his social, political, and moral revelations, all framed by his childhood experiences in Belgrade during World War II. His most recent poetry volume is The Voice at 3:00 a.m.: Selected Late and New Poems (April 2003). Simic, whose work was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and 1987, won the Pulitzer in 1989 for his poetry collection The World Doesn't End. His 1996 collection, Walking the Black Cat, was a National Book Award finalist. In addition to his over 20 poetry collections, Simic has published several essay/memoir collections including most recently A Fly in the Soup: Memoirs (2000), as well as translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry. Elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000, other awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is a Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire.

Lydia Davis is a fiction writer and noted translator who was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government for her translations. Her latest translation is of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way (September 2003), the first volume of his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time. Davis is also the author of several works of fiction including the story collection Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (2002), Almost No Memory (1997), and Break it Down (1986), and the novel The End of the Story (1995). Almost No Memory (1998, The Ecco Press, ISBN 0-88001-606-X) was chosen as one of the 25 Favorite Books of 1997 by the Voice Literary Supplement and one of the 100 Best Books of 1997 by the Los Angles Times.
DAVE EGGERS CANCELLED.

Susan Orlean, staff writer for The New Yorker since 1992, is known for her feature articles that explore aspects of contemporary life in America. Her most recent book, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People (2000), is a collection of essays and profiles she wrote for Esquire, New Yorker, and Rolling Stone magazines on ordinary people with extraordinary stories. She is also the author of the bestselling book The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession (1998) which was adapted for the film Adaptation (2002) starring Nicholas Cage and Meryl Streep which was nominated for 4 Academy Awards and won Best Supporting Actor for Chris Cooper.

Carolyn Forché is known as a political poet, calling herself a "poet of witness." Her debut collection, Gathering of the Tribes (1976), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. The Country Between Us (1982), a volume that focused on the civil war in El Salvador during the 1970s, won the Lamont Poetry Prize of the Academy of American Poets. Her other books include an anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (which she edited and which was published in 1993), and The Angel of History (1994) which won her a Lannan Foundation Award and The Los Angeles Times Book Award. Margaret Atwood has written of her work: "Here is a poetry of courage and passion, which manages to be tender and achingly sensual and what is often called 'political' at the same time. This is a major voice."