Four days of free, online readings
We're proud to promote the NYS Summer Writers Institute, a longtime collaboration with Skidmore College with sponsorship from Northshire Bookstores. Readings for the summer of 2022 will be offered online and begin at 7 p.m. Reservations are not required. Attend the readings here Schedule subject to change. Please check the Skidmore College master calendar or call the NYS Summer Writers Institute at 518-580-5593.
Monday, June 27: Rosanna Warren and Elizabeth Benedict (more)
Tuesday, June 28: Amy Hempel and Campbell McGrath
Amy Hempel is the author of five collections of stories, most recently Sing To It. Her Collected Stories won The Ambassador Award for Best Fiction of the Year in 2006, and was one of the top five books of fiction in the NYTBR that year. Her stories have appeared in Harper's, Vanity Fair, the Harvard Review, The Yale Review, and many other publications, and have been included in the Best American Short Stories and other prize anthologies.
She is a member of The American Academy of Arts & Letters, and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and United States Artists Foundation, and was awarded the REA Award and the PEN/Malamud Award. She teaches at The MIchener Center in Austin, and in the graduate writing program at Bennington College.
From the archives: Amy Hempel at the NYS Writers Institute in 2006
Campbell McGrath teaches creativ e writing at Florida International University and has taught at the Summer Writers Institute since 2007. The winner of a MacArthur “Genius” Award, he is the author of many books of poetry, including American Noise,Pax Atomica, Spring Comes To Chicago, Seven Notebooks, Florida Poems and Capitalism. “A poet of formal eloquence and rhetorical power,” writes the reviewer for Publishers Weekly, “of vision and engagement….he descends into the maelstrom of American culture and emerges singing.” “He is our Whitman,” writes the reviewer for American Review. McGrath’s latest bookXX: Poems For The 20thCentury has been celebrated as a “tour de force” and “an improbable feat of the imagination.” www.campbellmcgrath.com
From the archives: Campbell McGrath at the NYS Writers Institute in 2008
Tuesday, June 28: Readings by New York State Summer Writers Institute students
Thursday, June 30: Russell Banks and Chase Twichell
Russell Banks is the internationally acclaimed author of twenty-one works of fiction and non-fiction, including the novels Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, The Book of Jamaica, Cloudsplitter, Lost Memory of Skin, and most recently, A Permanent Member of the Family, short stories, and Voyager: Travel Writings. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Two of his novels, Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter, were made into award-winning feature films. His essays and reviews have been published in major magazines, and he has written screenplays and poetry. www.russellbanks.com
From the archives: A frequent guest of the NYS Writers Institute, Russell Banks most recently appeared with William Kennedy at the University at Albany last November. Watch video
Chase Twichell is the author of eight books of poetry, most recently Things as It Is (Copper Canyon, 2018). After teaching for many years (Hampshire College, the University of Alabama, Princeton University), she left academia to found Ausable Press, a not-for-profit publisher of contemporary poetry, which was acquired by Copper Canyon in 2009. From 2013 to 2016 she served as Chair of the Kate and Kingsley Tufts Awards Jury. She's recently taught in the Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers.
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.