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NYS Writers Institute

Claire Messud and Vijay Seshadri today at the (online) NYS Summer Writers Institute

Enjoy tonight's online readings with a best-selling novelist and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet


The NYS Summer Writers Institute readings for the summer of 2022 are online and begin at 7 p.m. Reservations are not required.


Attend the readings on Zoom using this this link:

https://skidmore.zoom.us/j/93832728248?pwd=U1RiNTZpUmhCWFh0U0hUdXdTQ0RBZz09#success Schedule subject to change. For more information, call the NYS Summer Writers Institute at 518-580-5593.


7 p.m. Thursday, July 7: Claire Messud and Vijay Seshadri


Claire Messud is a professor at Harvard University, and is one of the leading fiction writers in the country.

Her novels include The Woman Upstairs, The Burning Girl, The Last Life, When The World Was Steady and the NY Times best-selling book The Emperor’s Children. Rachel Cusk says of her: “I can think of few writers capable of such thrilling seriousness expressed with so lavish a gift.”

Her most recent book is a non-fiction volume called Kant’s Little Prussian Head & Other Reasons Why I Write. She has taught at the NY State Summer Writers Institute for 13 years, and is a three-time guest of the NYS Writers Institute.


Vijay Seshadri is a Brooklyn-based poet who won the 2014 Pulitzer for Three Sections. He has been an editor at The New Yorker, and for many years a professor and chair in the undergraduate writing and MFA program at Sarah Lawrence College.

Seshadri’s poem The Disappearances came to prominence after The New Yorker published it on their back cover following the September 11 attacks in 2001.The New Yorker poetry editor, Alice Quinn, said that the poem “...summoned up, with acute poignance, a typical American household and scene...The combination of epic sweep (including the quoted allusion to one of Emily Dickinson’s Civil War masterpieces, from 1862) and piercing, evocative detail is characteristic of the contribution Seshadri has made to the American canon.”

Author of several volumes of poems, Seshadri has been praised for the “electric energy and gravitas” of his work by Frank Bidart, and for his “musicality and wit” by Eavan Boland. Campbell McGrath has written that Seshadri is “grave and witty, classical and contemporary, casually brilliant….a writer of subtle, elastic and brilliant intelligence.”



About the NYS Summer Writers Institute

The NYS Summer Writers Institute was founded and is still produced by author and professor Robert Boyers at Skidmore College, with sponsorship from Northshire Bookstores and in collaboration with the NYS Writers Institute at the University at Albany.


Previous visiting writers include Nobel Prize winner Louise Glück, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, Booker Prize winner Michael Ondaatje, Pulitzer Prize winner and NYS Writers Institute Founder William Kennedy, Mary Gordon, Tom Healy, Margo Jefferson, Binnie Kirshenbaum, John McWhorter, James Miller, Caryl Phillips, Katha Pollitt, Francine Prose and Victoria Redel.

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