Photo: Jean Lightman

Photo: Michael A. Schwarz

SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME
February 3 (Friday)
Film screening and commentary — 7:00 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center [Note location]

Directed by Samuel Pollard
(United States, 2012, 90 minutes, color and b/w)
Due to air on PBS in prime time on February 13 and selected for competition at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME is based on Douglas A. Blackmon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the abuse of black laborers in the United States from the end of the Civil War through the middle of the 20th century. Douglas A. Blackmon and Sheila Curran Bernard, who wrote the film, will answer questions immediately following the screening.


Douglas A. Blackmon, an acclaimed journalist and independent historian, received the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in nonfiction for Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008). He is a Senior National Correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.

Sheila Curran Bernard, an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, is Assistant Professor of History and Documentary Studies at UAlbany, and the author of Documentary Storytelling (2010).

NOTE: On Friday, February 3 at 4:15 p.m. in the Standish Room, Science Library, Uptown Campus, Blackmon will hold an informal seminar on his current project, a memoir of growing up in the racially tense South.

Cosponsored by UAlbany’s History Department and Documentary Studies Program

Teju Cole, novelist and street photographer
February 10 (Friday)
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus

Teju Cole is the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel Open City (2011), the story of a young Nigerian-German psychiatrist who wanders the streets of Manhattan exploring the city’s landscapes, people, and his own feelings of isolation. The New York Times named it a “2011 Notable Book” and described it as “An indelible novel [that] does precisely what literature should do: it brings together thoughts and beliefs, and blurs borders…A compassionate and masterly work.” Cole, who is also a street photographer, was born in the U.S., raised in Nigeria, and returned to the U.S. in 1992 at the age of 17.

Photo: Tamara Beckwith

Photo: Andrea Brizzi

Photo: Mary Cybulski

Photo: Courtesy of
Snob Magazine

Masha Gessen, Russian-American journalist
March 8 (Thursday)
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Standish Room, Science Library, Uptown Campus
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus

Masha Gessen, Moscow-based journalist, is the author of the new book, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012). Drawing on previously untapped sources, she presents a portrait of a ruthless politician underestimated by friends and enemies alike, who has dismantled his nation’s democratic and free market reforms in order to establish himself as totalitarian leader of the “new Russia.” The book was the talk of the 2011 Frankfurt Book Fair due to its provocative and closely guarded material. Publishers Weekly said, “A Putin biography secretly lights up Frankfurt…. It was the book that, as one insider put it, you had to ‘go into a closet to read.’” The author of six previous books on Russia, Gessen has written for the New York Times, Vanity Fair, New Republic, Granta, and Slate, among other publications.

Photo: Emma Hardy

Margot Livesey, fiction writer, and Jo Page, fiction and nonfiction writer
March 20 (Tuesday)
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus
Reading — 7:30 p.m., Albany Public Library, 161 Washington Avenue, Albany, NY

Margot Livesey, celebrated Scottish-born fiction writer, is the author most recently of The Flight of Gemma Hardy (2012), a modern-day retelling of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The novel follows the fortunes of a young woman who accepts a position as an au pair for a wealthy family in Scotland’s Orkney Islands. In advance praise, author Amy Bloom said, “Livesey’s prose is a garden of pleasures: precision here, lyricism there, wit and compassionate insight throughout.” Livesey’s earlier books include The House on Fortune Street (2008), winner of the PEN New England Award; Banishing Verona (2004); and Eva Moves the Furniture (2001), a finalist for the PEN New England Award.

Jo Page has published fiction and nonfiction in Quarterly West, New Millennium Writings, The South Carolina Review, and other print and online journals. She was a finalist for the 2009 Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction prize. Page has taught at the University of Virginia, Hudson Valley Community College, the New York State Writers Institute, and The Albany Academy and has led seminars on the spirituality of writing/reading poetry. Page received her MFA from the University of Virginia and has written a memoir, Going Out, and a novel, Weddings at Lakeview.

Cosponsored by the Friends of the Albany Public Library

Photo: Amy T. Zielinski

John Matteson, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer
March 22 (Thursday)
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Huxley Theatre, New York State Museum, Cultural Education Center

John Matteson, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, is the author of the new book, The Lives of Margaret Fuller (2012), a portrait of the fiery 19th century social critic who was the most famous American woman of her time. Author of the first great work of American feminism, and a celebrated columnist for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, Fuller was a leading Transcendentalist, a war columnist in Italy, and a free spirit who conceived a child out of wedlock with an Italian nobleman. Matteson received the Pulitzer Prize for his previous book, Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father (2007), a dual biography that explores a rich father-daughter relationship and intellectual partnership.

Cosponsored by the Friends of the New York State Library

Photo: Janny Scott

Joseph Lelyveld, journalist, nonfiction author, and editor
April 3 (Tuesday)
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Standish Room, Science Library, Uptown Campus
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus

Joseph Lelyveld, journalist and nonfiction author, worked at the New York Times from 1962 through 2001 serving as foreign correspondent in the Congo, South Africa, India and Pakistan, then as London bureau chief, foreign editor, managing editor, and finally executive editor from 1994 – 2001. Lelyveld’s most recent book is Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India (2011). The book reveals Gandhi’s “less palatable tendencies” as well as his vision for nonviolent revolution. Publishers Weekly described Great Soul as “A stirring evenhanded account that relates the failure of Gandhi’s politics of saintliness while attesting to its enduring power.” Lelyveld won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985 for his nonfiction book Move Your Shadow: South Africa Black and White based on his reporting tours in that country.

Resheduled Event from March 1
Shalom Auslander, fiction writer and memoirist
April 24 (Tuesday)
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Assembly Hall, Campus Center, Uptown Campus

Shalom Auslander, ex-Orthodox Jew, humorist, cultural renegade, and contributor to NPR’s This American Life, received both notoriety and praise for his story collection, Beware of God (2005), and the memoir, Foreskin’s Lament (2007). Hope: A Tragedy (2012), his first novel, tells the story of a troubled man who discovers—living in the attic of his upstate New York home—a decrepit old woman who claims to be Anne Frank. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said, “Cultural anthropologists trying to figure out if there really is a recognizably Jewish voice and sense of humor ... should consider Auslander’s debut novel.”

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.

Harry C. Staley is a noted Joyce scholar and Professor Emeritus of English at the University at Albany, where he taught from 1956 until his retirement in 1993. His poetry has been published in Groundswell, Psycho-poetry, The Little Magazine, Pennsylvania Literary Review, Arizona Quarterly, and elsewhere.

George Drew, poet and former student of Harry Staley at the University at Albany,is the author most recently of The View from Jackass Hill (2010), a collection that mourns, eulogizes, and celebrates deceased friends, family members, and favorite poets.