Photo: Christina Pabst

Katha Pollitt, essayist, critic, and poet
January 29 (Thursday)
Seminar — 4:15 p.m., Campus Center Room 375
Reading — 8:00 p.m., Campus Center Room 375

Katha Pollitt, influential voice of American feminism and long-time columnist for The Nation, is the author of a much-talked-about new book, Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights (2014). Publishers Weekly described it as “an impassioned, persuasive case for understanding abortion in its proper context.” Pollitt received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the American Book Awards in 2010, and is a two-time winner of the National Magazine Award for commentary. Her books of poetry include The Mind-Body Problem (2010) and Antarctic Traveller (1983), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Cosponsored by Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy 

Peter Carey, Australian novelist, is one of only three writers to have received the Man Booker Prize twice (the other writers are J. M. Coetzee and Hillary Mantel). Carey received his first Booker for Oscar and Lucinda (1988), and his second for True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). His new novel is Amnesia (2015), a cyber-terrorism political thriller set in a counter-historical Australia that has endured American interference in its governmental affairs. The Guardiandescribed the book as “fantastical but completely grounded, high-spirited but serious, hectic but never hasty...a deeply engaging book [that] responds to some of the biggest issues of our time.” 

Cosponsored by The Book House of Stuyvesant Plaza

Directed by Jason Osder (United States, 2013, 88 minutes, b/w and color)
Starring Birdie Africa, Ramona Africa, Wilson Goode 

This multiple award-winning documentary presents a history of the tragic conflict between the City of Philadelphia and the Black Liberation organization, MOVE in the mid-1980s. The Variety reviewer said, “The brilliantly edited tapestry of actions and reactions exposes a pattern of prejudice and fear capable of infinitely repeating itself.”

Jason Osder teaches documentary filmmaking at the George Washington University. He is also coauthor of the filmmaking guide, Final Cut Pro Workflows: The Independent Studio Handbook (2007).

Tanya Hamilton, director and screenwriter, isa former Fellow at the Sundance Screenwriter and Filmmaker Lab, and was honored for Outstanding Achievement By a Woman in the Film Industry by the Alliance of Women Film Journalists in 2010.

Ron Simons, producer of Night Catches Us, is also a three-time Tony Award winning Broadway producer for A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder (Best Musical, 2014), Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (Best Play, 2013) and Porgy & Bess (Best Revival, 2012).

Photo: Courtesy of 
the author

Photo: Mariana Cook

Caryl Phillips, British Caribbean writer, is the author of the new novel, The Lost Child (2015). The book intertwines the life of Heathcliff, the dark-skinned orphan of Emily Brontë’s classic Victorian novel, Wuthering Heights, with the modern tale of a young woman struggling to raise her sons in the wild moors of northern England after she is cast out by her family for marrying a Caribbean man. Literary critic Pico Iyer said, “With uncanny intimacy, eloquence, and compassion, Caryl Phillips stitches together past and present….” Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and Lannan Literary Award, Phillips is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Tickets: general public $15 in advance, $20 day of; students/seniors/UA faculty & staff $10 in advance, $15 day of
Box Office: (518) 442-3997; [email protected]

Commissioned by The New York Historical Society, this “page to stage” work developed by American Place Theatre is a verbatim adaptation of Harriot Jacobs’ book of the same name. It is an inspiring tale of resilience and survival that recounts the author’s seven years spent hiding out as a fugitive in “The Loophole,” a crawl space in her grandmother’s attic, in order to protect her children and ensure their eventual freedom. This show is a Literature to Life stage presentation of Young Audiences New York.

Sponsored by UAlbany’s Performing Arts Center in conjunction with the Writers Institute, with support provided by the Office of Intercultural Student Success and Holiday Inn Express. Underground Railroad History Project of the Capital Region.

Bill Nye "The Science Guy"
March 25 (Wednesday)
Reading — 5:00 p.m., SEFCU Arena
Limited seating, TWO tickets per person
Ticket Information (click here)

Bill Nye “The Science Guy,” celebrated public television personality, is a pioneer in the field of science education and a leading defender of science in the public arena. His television series, Bill Nye the Science Guy, ran on PBS stations nationwide from 1993 to 1998, and continues to be widely distributed in syndication. Exactly 100 episodes addressed topics as diverse as garbage and music, comets and caves, and chemistry and communication. The show received 18 Emmy Awards, with Nye himself taking seven for his various roles as writer, performer and producer. Nye is the author of the new book, Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation (November, 2014), edited by Corey S. Powell. A wide-ranging presentation of the evidence that supports the theory of evolution, the new book grew out of a much-publicized debate between Nye and leading Creationist Ken Ham at the Creation Museum in Petersburg Kentucky in February 2014. Narrated with Nye’s trademark clarity, simplicity, enthusiasm and sense of fun, Undeniable demonstrates how organisms evolved and continue to evolve, with examples drawn from agriculture, dog breeding, human courtship, and the fossil record.

Sponsored by the University at Albany Student Association in partnership with the New York State Writers Institute

Photo: Hulya Kilicaslan

Photo: Sarah Shatz

Elisa Albert is the author of the new novel After Birth (2015), a piercingly candid and outrageously funny story of motherhood. Author Lydia Davis called it, “a fast-talking, opinionated, moody, funny, and slightly desperate account of the attempt to recover from having a baby.” Albert’s previous books include the novel, The Book of Dahlia (2008) and the short story collection, How This Night is Different (2006), winner of the Moment Magazine Emerging Writer Award for Short Fiction. 

Yelena Akhtiorskaya is the author of a brilliant debut novel, Panic in a Suitcase (2014), the story of two decades in the life of a Ukrainian immigrant family in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Hailed by the critics as “ingenious” (NPR), “marvelous” (Library Journal) and “hilarious” (Publishers Weekly), Panic in a Suitcase was named a “Notable Book of 2014” by the New York Times and Washington Post.

Photo: Josef Astor

Tina Packer, one of the world’s leading authorities on Shakespeare’s work, is the founding artistic director of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts. Her new book is Women of Will: The Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays (2015), a fierce and funny exploration of the Bard’s female characters and his changing understanding of the feminine. The book grows out of Packer’s same-named, two-person lecture and recital highlighting Shakespeare’s “strong women,” starring Packer and Nigel Gore. Writing in the Wall St. Journal, Terry Teachout praised Packer for “fearlessly impassioned acting that you’ll remember for as long as you live.” 

Cosponsored by UAlbany’s Theatre Program

Photo: Jamie
Shoenerger

Alice McDermott, winner of the National Book Award for the novel, Charming Billy (1998), is the author most recently of the novel, Someone (2013), the story of one woman’s “ordinary” life across the decades of the 20th century in an Irish-American enclave in Brooklyn, New York. Someone was named a “Best Book of the Year” by NPR, The New York Times, and the Washington Post. The New York Times described the novel as “A fine-tuned, beautiful book filled with so much universal experience, such haunting imagery, such urgent matters of life and death.” McDermott’s previous novels include three Pulitzer Prize finalists: That Night (1987), At Weddings and Wakes (1992), and After This (2006).

Cosponsored in conjunction with Rensselaer's 74th Annual McKinney Writing Contest and Reading

Photo: J.P. Ostriker

Photo: David Lee

Alicia Suskin Ostriker, author of fifteen poetry collections, is a two-time finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry for The Little Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968–1998 (1999) and The Crack in Everything (1996). Ostriker is also the author of The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems 1979-2011 (2012). Her new collection is The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog (2014), which poet Mark Doty called a “marvelously idiosyncratic, urgent, no-holds-barred book, a masque and pageant not to be missed.”

Joan Murray has been called, “one of the few poets whose work remains accessible to both scholars of poetry and the casual reader” (The Harvard Review). Her new collection is Swimming for the Ark: New & Selected Poems 1990-2015 (2015). Earlier collections include Dancing on the Edge (2002); Looking for the Parade (2000), winner of the National Poetry Series Open Competition; and Queen of the Mist (1999), for which she received a Broadway commission.

William Wellman, Jr. is the author of Wild Bill Wellman: Hollywood Rebel (2015), a biography of his father, director William A. Wellman, a giant of the motion picture industry from the Silent Era to the 1950s. Wellman’s 82 films include history’s first Academy Award winner for Best Picture, WINGS (1927), as well as such iconic films as A STAR IS BORN (1937), THE OX-BOW INCIDENT (1943), and THE HIGH AND THE MIGHTY (1954). Drawing on his father’s unpublished letters, diaries, notes and unfinished autobiography, the new book offers the first full portrait of the man. A notable character actor in his own right, Wellman Jr. is also the author of The Man and His Wings (2006), about the making of his father’s silent masterpiece.