We wish you a happy holiday season
As we put a bow on our 41st season, we extend our warmest gratitude to you for supporting the NYS Writers Institute throughout the year.
Your presence, encouragement, emails, phone calls, visits, donations, and — above all — your enthusiastic applause for our guests have meant the world to us. Together, we’ve celebrated the remarkable writers, poets, filmmakers, scientists, actors, directors, journalists, and elected officials who graced our stages in 2024.
In his 2024 season-opening message, Paul Grondahl quoted from the poem "Don't You Wonder, Sometimes?" by former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith, one of this year's featured guests:
Time never stops, but does it end? And how many lives
Before take-off, before we find ourselves
Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold?
The future isn't what it used to be...
Wishing you a joyful holiday season and peace, hope, and perhaps some glam-glow in the new year.
Thank you for being an essential part of our community.
We’ll announce our “Spring 2025” schedule of events in early January.
One more look back at the NYS Writers Institute's 41st season with a sprinkling of quotes from our 2024 guests.
"Language is the writer’s only tool - we really don’t have anything else - but our language contains within it our entire experience of the world.”
— Alice McDermott, April 11, 2024
January
Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Harding
"Lackawanna Blues" film screening
Celebrated YA author Angeline Boulley
National Book Award finalist Elizabeth Benedict
February
Sandra Guzmán, Afro Indigenous storyteller and literary editor (Daughters of Latin America: An International Anthology of Writing by Latine Women)
"The Sleepy Time Gal" film screening
Tony, Obie, Drama Desk award winner Ruben Santiago-Hudson
Aaliyah Bilal, short story writer
"The Moral Arc Toward Freedom: Lincoln, King, and the Emancipation Proclamation" special event with former State Poet Patricia Spears Jones, Professor Jennifer Burns, and Chief Curator of History at the NYS Museum Jennifer Lemak
"The Armor of Light" film screening
Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration event with Adjoa Asamoah, co-creator of the CROWN Coalition
Karin Lin-Greenberg, Siena College professor and author of the debut novel You Are Here
"Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb" film screening
“Writers and A.I.” workshop with attorney and novelist Jodé Millman
Photographer and Weimaraner dog lover William Wegman
Richard Mirabella, debut novelist (Brother & Sister Enter the Forest)
March
"The Hustler" film screening
"History is Her Story" storytelling event with Marni Gillard, Aya Mahmoud, Claire Nolan and Stephanie Ward
Prachi Gupta, author of They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us
Molly Guptill Manning (When Books Went to War: The Stories That Helped Us Win World War II)
Black Life in the North Words event with Alice Green (Outsider: Stories of Growing Up Black in the Adirondacks) and Amy Godine (The Black Woods: Pursuing Racial Justice on the Adirondack Frontier)
"Merchant Ivory" documentary film screening
Andrew Kirtzman (Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America's Mayor) and Terry Golway (I Never Did Like Politics: How Fiorello La Guardia Became America's Mayor, and Why He Still Matters)
Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder
Man Booker International Prize winner Lydia Davis
"We tell stories because we are human. And it is part of our humanity to want to speak to one another.”
— Edwidge Danticat, October 29, 2024
April
Staged reading of a play on progress with Amina Henry and Shaun Patrick Tubbs
Albany Film Festival with Oscar winner James Ivory, filmmaker Abigail Disney, and actress Jacqueline Bisset among others.
National Book Award winner Alice McDermott
Journalist David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
National Medal of Arts recipient Julia Alvarez
U.S. Poet Laureate (2017-2019) and Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith
Michael Wolff, author of Fire and Fury and The Fall: The End of Fox News
"Selected Shorts" with Joanna Gleason, Dylan Baker, and Hettiene Park
July
NYS Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs
National Youth Poet Laureate Stephanie Pacheco
August
Novelist Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora and The Stars Are Not Yet Bells
September
"Lone Star" film screening
"Imagining Ukraine" conversation with major Russian literary figure Dmitry Bykov and novelist and translator Ian Singleton
New York Times bestselling author Chris Bohjalian (The Princess of Las Vegas)
Samhita Mukhopadhyay, former editor-in-chief of Teen Vogue and author of The Myth of Making It
Actress/author Marianne Leone and Oscar-winning actor Chris Cooper
7th Annual Albany Book Festival with featured authors Shalom Auslander (Feh); Emmy Award winner Marc Guggenheim; Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez (My Side of the River); William Bryant Logan (Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth); Sarah McCammon (The Exvangelicals: Loving, Living, and Leaving the White Evangelical Church); Luis Miranda (Relentless: My Story of the Latino Spirit That Is Transforming America); Leila Philip (Beaverland: How One Weird Rodent Made America); Peng Shepherd (All This and More) among others
Poet, novelist, and Nobel Prize winning chemist Joachim Frank
Debut novelist Adelle Waldman (Help Wanted)
"I also think about what Toni Morrison said about the difference between fact and truth, and what a novel can do. History can tell us a fact but fiction, in Morrison’s words, 'discloses truth.'”
— Angie Cruz, October 8, 2024
October
Ecopoetry event with Urayoán Noel and Sarah Giragosian
John Elder Robison, author, educator, and neurodiversity advocate (Look Me in the Eye)
Novelists Angie Cruz and Lilliam Rivera
Graphic novelists Joel Christian Gill, Marcus Kwame Anderson, and David F. Walker
Historian Evan P. Sullivan (Constructing Disability after the Great War)
"Lead Belly: The Man Who Invented Rock and Roll" documentary screening
Russell Shorto, author and historian
Nobel Prize winner Thomas Cech (The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life's Deepest Secrets)
Jeff Kinney (Diary of a Wimpy Kid)
Edwidge Danticat, Haitian American novelist and short story writer
Grammy-winning folk musician Dom Flemons
Historian and Peabody Award winner Sheila Curran Bernard (Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly's Truths from Jim Crow's Lies)
November
"On the Waterfront" film screening
Neuroscientist and award-winning science author Theanne Griffith
Marathon public reading of William Kennedy's beloved 1978 novel Billy Phelan's Greatest Game
Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen
A Phillis Wheatley celebration with Professors Wendy Roberts, Cassander L. Smith, and author David Waldstreicher (The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet's Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence)
Telling the Truth 2024 symposium with television journalist Chuck Todd; TIME magazine reporter Charlotte Alter; Congressman Paul Tonko; author Timothy L. O'Brien (TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald); historian Marsha E. Barrett; and former Congressman John Faso
Former U.S. Poet Laureate and New York State Poet Billy Collins
December
Kendall Crolius (Knitting with Dog Hair: Better A Sweater From A Dog You Know and Love Than From A Sheep You'll Never Meet)
"My mother nurtured my love of reading and storytelling, and she always encouraged my dreams of being a writer and making comic books.”
— David F. Walker, October 16, 2024
On August 20, we lost an Albany icon: Alice Green, author, advocate, and civil rights champion.
Alice was founder and executive director of The Center for Law and Justice and worked for decades fighting for civil rights and racial justice in Albany and across New York.
A longtime collaborator and frequent guest at the Writers Institute, she and her husband Charles Touhey established the Carl E. Touhey Foundation -- named after Charles' father -- which funds many of our Writers Institute events and programs bringing writers of color to local schools in underserved communities.
Comments