Director's greeting: Our Spring 2026 Season
- NYS Writers Institute
- Jan 12
- 2 min read
"This spring, we’ll introduce fresh voices in emerging genres such as podcasters and influencers, while honoring canonical literary figures from our past."
When I started out in the newspaper business nearly 50 years ago, typesetters in the “hot type” era could read upside down and backwards.
It seemed like a magic trick, but it was their craft. They melted lead to cast lines of type and spoke of pigs, slugs, and hellboxes.
Digital printing bypassed them and killed their colorful lingo, while A.I. is reshaping every aspect of the written word at warp speed.
Don’t despair. At the Writers Institute, our superpower since 1983 is looking backward and forward simultaneously, while showcasing human creativity. Nothing artificial added. This spring, we’ll introduce fresh voices in emerging genres such as podcasters and influencers, while honoring canonical literary figures from our past.
It’s not a magic trick. It’s our commitment to inspire, enlighten, and entertain our audiences, who range in age from 8 to 98. We welcome the world’s most diverse and dynamic writers to foster a vibrant community of readers and writers who engage in meaningful dialogue.
We launch the season with linguist Adam Aleksic (Jan. 29), an Albany High School graduate and
self-described “Etymology Nerd,” with over 3 million followers across social media and a New York Times bestselling book, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language.
We’ll honor the UAlbany legacy of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison (Friday, Feb. 13) by unveiling a permanent exhibit with her desk and chair used while writing her masterpiece Beloved as a faculty member here from 1984 to 1989. It’s part of a Frederick Douglass program to highlight archival preservation of Black history.
We’ll host our 6th annual “bookish” Albany Film Festival (Saturday, March 28) with dozens of
short films and conversations with filmmakers. We’ll present an Ironweed Award to Schenectady native son John Sayles, acclaimed director, screenwriter, and novelist. We’ll screen his debut film, "Return of the Secaucus 7" (Friday, Feb. 27) in the run-up to the festival.
Podcasters Andrew Leland and Albany High School graduate Adam Colman (Monday, April 27) will talk about their craft and debut a five-part Writers Institute podcast that taps into our vast archive of recorded voices of literary giants who visited campus.
Perennial favorite Selected Shorts (Saturday, May 2) is back. We close out the season celebrating the publication of Writers Institute founder William Kennedy’s Library of America edition (date TBD), placing his Albany cycle of novels in the pantheon of American literature.
Paul Grondahl
Opalka Endowed Director, NYS Writers Institute