Alison Lurie, New York State Author
September 18 (Thursday)
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Campus Center Room 375
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center

Alison Lurie, novelist and current New York State Author (2012-2014), is widely regarded as the Jane Austen of contemporary American letters for her modern “comedies of manners,” including Truth and Consequences (2005) and the Pulitzer-winning Foreign Affairs (1984). Her new nonfiction book is The Language of Houses (2014), an exploration of the expressive power of everyday architecture. Author Edmund White said “[Lurie] has culled the best ideas from a vast literature and passed it all through the sieve of her brilliant mind.”

Edith Grossman is one of the world’s most celebrated translators of Spanish literature into English. Her newest work is Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (2014), a collection of poems by 17th century nun, poet, and feminist, Sister Juana, known to posterity as the “Phoenix of Mexico” and the “Tenth Muse.” Grossman’s acclaimed translations include several novels by Latin American Nobel Prize winners, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. Her 2003 translation of Don Quixote is widely hailed as a masterpiece.

Cosponsored by UAlbany’s Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures

Photo: Paul Davis

Photo: Lucian Perkins

Photo: Michael Bailey

Photo: Hebbah Vidali

Photo: Debbie
Grossman

Jacinda Townsend is the author of a first novel, Saint Monkey (2014), the tale of two best friends raised in hardship in rural Kentucky whose lives take different paths. In a starred Booklist review, Donna Seamon said, “This is a breathtakingly insightful, suspenseful, and gorgeously realized novel of cruelty and sorrow, anger and forgiveness, improvisation and survival, and the transcendent beauty of nature and art.” A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Townsend is currently at work on a second novel set partially in Morocco about the emotionally complicated world of international adoption.

Tiphanie Yanique is the author of a first novel, Land of Love and Drowning (2014), a family saga set in the Virgin Islands. Spanning sixty years from 1916 to the 1970s, the novel follows three generations of the Bradshaw family as they experience love and death, wealth and ruin, hurricanes, racism, and a rapacious tourist industry. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly said, “Yanique offers an affecting narrative… that pulses with life, vitality, and a haunting evocation of place.” Born and raised on St. Thomas, Yanique is the author of the story collection, How to Escape from a Leper Colony (2010), winner of the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award.

Photo: Julie
Dermanksy

Photo: Harold
Schechter

Photo: Brad Fowler

Michael Angel Viera as Lemon Anderen
Photo: Manauvaskar
Kublall

The University at Albany Foundation presents
LOOKING AT LEMON: TRANSFORMING LIFE THROUGH LITERATURE
In conjunction with the Writers Institute, Performing Arts Center, and University Art Museum

This series of events focuses on the life and work of Lemon Andersen, writer, performance artist, screen actor, and Tony Award-winning poet. Lemon is also a three-time felon who grew up in Brooklyn, the child of a Puerto Rican mother and Norwegian American father, both heroin addicts who died of AIDS before he was fifteen. Left to fend for himself, he dropped out of high school and spent years in jail and on probation. His attempts at rehabilitation faltered until he attended a poetry reading and discovered he had a gift for expressing himself through words. This series celebrates Lemon’s journey to transform his life through art.

LEMON: THE MOVIE
October 24 (Friday): Film screening, 7:30 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus
November 1 (Saturday): Film screening, 9:00 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center
Directed by Laura Brownson and Beth Levison
This intricately crafted documentary follows Lemon’s struggle to free his family from poverty and pain by embarking on a daunting journey to bring his life story to the stage. The movie features the music of hip-hop phenoms Kanye West, Mos Def, and Talib Kwel.

November 6 (Thursday): An Evening with Lemon Andersen
Presentation — 7:00 p.m., University Art Museum, Fine Arts Building
In an intimate setting, Lemon discusses his life and work, focusing on what nurtures him as an artist and how that has been the salvation in his life. An original cast member of the Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway (2002-2003), Lemon shared the 2003 Tony Award for Best Special Theatrical Event. Lemon is the author of two poetry collections, Ready Made Real (2004) and County of Kings (2009), which earned the Grand Prize at the 2010 New York Book Festival. Also an actor, Lemon has appeared in the Spike Lee films Miracle at St. Anna (2008), Inside Man (2006), She Hate Me (2004), and Sucker Free City (2004).

November 13 (Thursday): County of Kings by Lemon Andersen
Performance — 7:30 p.m., Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center
Pre-performance discussion at 7 p.m.
Advance Tickets: $15 general public / $10 students, seniors & UAlbany faculty-staff
Day of Show Tickets: $20 general public / $15 students, seniors & UAlbany faculty-staff
Box Office: (518) 442-3997; [email protected].

Originally developed and directed by Elise Thoron, American Place Theatre took Lemon’s life story and adapted it into a solo play now performed by Michael Angel Viera. Weaving hard-edged drama with urban poetry and gritty prose, the work follows Lemon’s coming-of-age memoir in an astonishing journey toward self-discovery. County of Kings is a Literature to Life stage presentation of Young Audiences New York.

Funding for this project is provided by The University at Albany Foundation; University Auxiliary Services at Albany; UAlbany’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion, Office of Intercultural Student Success, and Alumni Association; and the Holiday Inn Express. Promotional assistance provided by the Campus Programming Board.

Photo: Brigitte
Lacombe

Najla Said is the author of the new memoir Looking for Palestine: Growing Up Confused in an Arab-American Family (2013). The daughter of major Palestinian-American intellectual and political activist Edward Said, Najla spent her formative years in the largely Jewish milieu of Manhattan’s Upper West Side. A witty exploration of post-modern, hyphenated American identity, the book opens with the playful statement, “I am a Palestinian-Lebanese-American Christian woman, but I grew up as a Jew in New York City.” Kirkus Reviews called it, “an enlightening, warm, timely coming-of-age story.” Said also wrote and starred in the hit Off-Broadway play, Palestine (2009).

Photo: Michael O'Shea

William Gibson is a visionary author of speculative fiction whose work explores the future implications of contemporary human technologies. His 1984 novel, Neuromancer, winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick awards, helped to define the popular culture of the Computer Age. His other major works include Pattern Recognition (2003), Virtual Light (1993), and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). Regarding Zero History (2010), a novel about present-day consumer tracking technologies, the New York Times reviewer said, “To read Gibson is to read the present as if it were the future….” Gibson’s new novel is The Peripheral (2014), about drones, drugs, outsourcing, telepresence, trailer parks, kleptocracy, and 3D fabbing. In advance praise, Cory Doctorow called it, “Spectacular, a piece of trenchant, far-future speculation….”

Cosponsored by Rensselaer’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences; Union Speakers Forum; and Department of Communication and Media

Photo: Alex Lauren

Photo: Susie Lowe

Susan Pinker, developmental psychologist and bestselling science writer, is the author of the new book, The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter (2014). Grounded in the new field of social neuroscience, The Village Effect presents convincing evidence that electronic communication can never replace the fundamentally human need for direct interaction. Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga called the book, “Brilliant and compelling,” and said, “Pinker shows us crucial personal interactions are essential to true human feelings.” Pinker is also the author of the international bestseller, The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women and the Real Gender Gap (2008), winner of the William James Book Award of the American Psychological Association.

Photo: Dole Institute

Richard Norton Smith, historian and biographer
November 20 (Thursday)
A Conversation with Richard Norton Smith — 4:15 p.m., Standish Room, Science Library
Keynote Lecture, “On His Own Terms” — 7:30 p.m., Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, Downtown Campus

Richard Norton Smith, eminent historian of the American presidency, will deliver the keynote lecture for the Researching New York 2014 conference on his new book, On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller (2014). Fourteen years in the writing, the book is being hailed as the definitive biography of the New York governor and U.S. vice president. Historian Douglas Brinkley described the book as, “one of the greatest cradle-to-grave biographies written in the past fifty years.”

Cosponsored by UAlbany’s Department of History and the NYS Archives Partnership Trust in conjunction with the Researching New York 2014 conference. For additional information on all conference events go to: www.nystatehistory.org/researchny

Photo: Virginia Schendler

Joseph O’Neill received the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for his bestselling novel, Netherland (2008), the story of a multiracial group of immigrant cricket players living in New York City. O’Neill’s new novel, The Dog (2014), longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2014, is the story of a luckless middle-aged man who flees New York City after a traumatic break-up with his long-term girlfriend in order to take a job as the household manager of a rich and capricious family in Dubai. Calling it, “funny, smart, and sad,” Publishers Weekly reviewer Jonathan Segura said, “I’ve liked a few books this year, but this is the first one I’ve loved.”

Photo: Joyce Ravid