Photo: Harry Mattison

Carolyn Forché, poet and human rights activist
January 30 (Thursday)
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Standish Room, Science Library, Uptown Campus
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, Uptown Campus

Carolyn Forché has made poetry of her experiences with political strife and violent conflict around the globe. Most recently, she is the co-editor with Duncan Wu of a new anthology, Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500 – 2001 (2014), featuring 300 poems “composed at an extreme of human endurance—while their authors awaited execution, endured imprisonment, fought on the battlefield, or labored on the brink of breakdown or death.” The book is a companion to Forché’s landmark 1993 anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. Forché, winner of the 2013 Academy of American Poets Fellowship for “distinguished poetic achievement,” is also the author of the collections, The Country Between Us (1981), The Angel of History (1994), and Blue Hour (2003).

Photo: Jeff Foley Photography

Walter Mosley, bestselling author of more than 40 books, and “one of this nation’s finest writers” (Boston Globe), is America’s leading author of detective fiction in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Mosley is best-known for a series of mystery novels set in Los Angeles featuring African American private investigator Easy Rawlins. Mosley’s twelfth Rawlins mystery, his first in six years, is Little Green (2013). Publishers Weekly called it “superb,” and Booklist said, “The return of Easy Rawlins is a major event for crime-fiction fans.” Among his other works are Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1998), Cinnamon Kiss (2005), and The Long Fall (2009).

Frankie Y. Bailey, UAlbany Criminal Justice professor and novelist, is the author most recently of The Red Queen Dies (2013), the first novel in a “near-future” police procedural series set in Albany. Booklist said that the novel’s protagonist, detective Hannah McCabe, “shows she has what it takes to succeed at her work and to win readers.” Bailey’s earlier books include Wicked Albany: Lawlessness & Liquor in the Prohibition Era (with Alice Green, 2009); African American Mystery Writers (2008); and the Edgar-nominated Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters in Crime and Detective Fiction (1991). She is also the author of five books in the Silver Dagger mystery series, featuring crime historian Lizzie Stuart.

Photo: American
Place Theatre

Photo: Rose Redwood

Photo: Tam Turse

Nick Turse, award-winning journalist specializing in national security and military issues, is the managing editor of TomDispatch.com and Investigative Fund fellow at the Nation Institute. His newest book is the New York Times bestseller Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam (2013), an account of U.S. war crimes against Vietnamese civilians based on previously classified documents. His investigations of U.S. war crimes have earned him a special Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction. His earlier books include The Changing Face of Empire (2012), The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan (2010), and The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (2008).

Cosponsored by Women Against War, and UAlbany’s Journalism Program in conjunction with its 40th Anniversary

Photo: Gasper Tringale

E. L. Doctorow, recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2013 Gold Medal, and the National Book Foundation’s 2013 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, is “a writer of dazzling gifts and boundless, imaginative energy…. our great chronicler of American mythology” (Joyce Carol Oates). His novels include World’s Fair (1985), winner of the National Book Award, and four other finalists for the same prize—The Book of Daniel (1971), Loon Lake (1980), Billy Bathgate (1989) and The March (2005). His 1975 novel Ragtime became a 1998 Tony Award-winning Broadway musical, as well as a 1981 film. His newest novel is Andrew’s Brain (2014), one man’s reflections on his eventful life, loves, and tragedies, and a probing inquiry into the reliability of memory. (See Classic Film Series schedule February 7 listing for screening of RAGTIME)

Photo: Katia Feltrin

Reading by Pierre Joris — 8:00 p.m., Standish Room, Science Library, Uptown Campus

Pierre Joris, poet, translator, and scholar taught at UAlbany from 1992 to 2013. Joris’s work bridges North American, European, and North African literary traditions and cultures. He is the author of more than 25 books and chapbooks of poetry, including Breccia: Selected Poems 1972-1986 (1987), Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999 (2001), and Barzakh: Selected Poems 2000-2012 (forthcoming 2014). Other notable works include the essay collection A Nomad Poetics (2003) and three volumes of the avant-garde anthology series, Poems for the Millennium (1995,1998, co-edited with Jerome Rothenberg; 2012 co-edited with Habib Tangour). He is also one of the foremost translators of avant-garde poetry into both French and English, and winner of the 2005 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and the 2013 MLA Scaglione Prize for his translation of Paul Celan’s The Meridian: Final Version–Drafts–Materials.

Cosponsored by the Writers Institute and UAlbany’s English Department, with additional support from University Auxiliary Services, the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Fence, and Barzakh.

Photo: Susan
Johann

Cosponsored by UAlbany’s Theatre Department

Photo: Michael
Lionstar

Dinaw Mengestu received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012, and was named one of the New Yorker magazine’s “20 Under 40” writers in 2010. Born in Ethiopia, and raised in Illinois, Mengestu is the author of the novels The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007), which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and How to Read the Air (2010). His newest novel is All Our Names (2014), about an African university student who attempts to escape his revolutionary past and invent a new identity for himself in America. Publishers Weekly named it a “Pick of the Week.”

Photo: Beowulf
Sheehan

Photo: Dennis Cowley

Julia Glass published her first novel, Three Junes (2002), at the age of 46. The book earned extraordinary praise from reviewers and received the National Book Award for Fiction. Her new novel, And the Dark Sacred Night (2014), set in the Vermont woods and on Cape Cod, tells the story of a middle-aged man who seeks to discover the identity of the father he never knew. Other novels by Glass include The Whole World Over (2006), I See You Everywhere (2008), and The Widower’s Tale (2010).

Cosponsored by the Friends of the New York State Library

Whose story is the true story? How can one grasp control of the narratives of one’s own life? Working on her new book, writer Karin Smirnoff (1880-1973) struggles to come to terms with her past in an attempt to challenge the notorious stories of her overbearing father, the world-renowned author and dramatist August Strindberg.

Eszter Szalczer is a dramaturg, theatre historian, and scholar of modern drama. Her recent book August Strindberg (Routledge Modern and Contemporary Dramatists, 2010) focuses on the Swedish playwright as one of the most radical innovators of the modern stage. It was when working on her previous book, Writing Daughters: August Strindberg’s Other Voices (Norvik Press 2008) that Eszter became interested in exploring the creative processes of writing, the role of memory, the fine line between fiction and non-fiction, and how the same story could be told differently from several different perspectives.

Francesca Marciano is an acclaimed Italian novelist and short story writer who writes her fiction in English, and an Oscar-nominated screenwriter who writes her scripts in Italian. Her newest book is the story collection, The Other Language (2014), which Jhumpa Lahiri called “an astonishing collection…. a vision of geography as it grounds us, as it shatters us, as it transforms the soul.” Marciano’s novels include The End of Manners (2008), and Casa Rossa (2002). Her recent films as a co-screenwriter include A FIVE STAR LIFE (2013), Bernardo Bertolucci’s ME AND YOU (2012), and the Oscar-nominated DON’T TELL (2005).

Film screening of MIELE [HONEY] and discussion with screenwriter Francesca Marciano — 7:00 p.m. [note early start time], Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus
Directed by Valeria Golino (Italy, 2013, 96 minutes, color, in Italian with English subtitles)
Starring Jasmine Trinca, Carlo Cecchi, Libero De Rienzo

An official selection at Cannes, HONEY is the story of Irene, an “assisted suicide activist” who performs illegal services to assist the terminally ill. She faces a painful dilemma when a healthy man requests her help in ending his life.

Lydia Davis, winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize, will read from her newest story collection, Can’t and Won’t (2014). Masterpieces in miniature, the stories feature complaint letters, reflections on dreams, and small dilemmas. Davis has been called “one of the quiet giants of American fiction” (Los Angeles Times Book Review), and “one of the best writers in America” (Oprah’s O Magazine). Her previous collections include The Collected Stories (2009), Varieties of Disturbance (2007), Samuel Johnson is Indignant (2001), Almost No Memory (1997) and Break it Down (1986).

Sponsored in conjunction with RPI’s Vollmer W. Fries Lecture and the 73rd McKinney Writing Contest and Reading
For directions see: http://www.rpi.edu/tour/index.html

Jennifer Dundas, notable film and stage actress, and socially conscious ice cream entrepreneur, will offer commentary and answer questions following the screening of the documentary, SWEET DREAMS (2012), about a women’s drumming troupe that opens Rwanda’s first ice cream parlor in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide.
(See Classic Films Series)

Cosponsored by UAlbany’s Journalism Program in celebration of its 40th Anniversary

Austin Bunn co-wrote the screenplay of the hit film KILL YOUR DARLINGS (2013) with his college roommate John Krokidas, the film’s director. Nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, the film stars Dane DeHaan as Lucien Carr and Daniel Radcliffe as poet Allen Ginsberg in a true story of murder and gay awakening set in New York City amid the nascent Beat poetry scene. Former author of the “Machine Age” technology column for the Village Voice, Bunn has published nonfiction and fiction in the New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and Wired. He also coauthored A Killer Life (2006), the autobiography of film producer Christine Vachon (Killer Films). He teaches filmmaking at Cornell University.

He will provide commentary on the film screening of KILL YOUR DARLINGS. (See Classic Films Series)