Center for the literary arts in New York State

Albany came together for a marathon reading of William Kennedy’s Legs, raising $1,605 for a local food pantry and creating memories that will linger long after the last page.

Annie Wenstrup is a Dena’ina poet and the author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories .  The recipient of a 2025 Whiting Award in Poetry, her poems have been published in Alaska Quarterly Review , New England Review , Poetry, and elsewhere. In 2023, she received The Alaska Literary Award and support from The Rasmuson Foundation. She was a Smithsonian Arctic Studies Fellow, and an Indigenous Nations Poets Fellow in 2022 and 2023.   Interviewed by Moriah Hampton, PhD, an instr

"There is a community that has taken root here, a place of welcome for people often shunned by society and broken by loneliness and loss; addiction and disease; poverty and unemployment; mental illness and life’s grinding hardships." Paul Grondahl, Albany Times Union , 2020 In the past five years five days, with federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits currently suspended, food pantries across the country are seeing unprecedented demand. Across our r

Tami Charles at the KIPP School in Albany Less than 24 hours after hosting Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Adam Johnson for events at the University at Albany, our Writers Institute team was on the road this morning with author Tami Charles. Following the morning visit to the KIPP Tech Valley Primary School in Albany, Opalka Endowed Director Paul Grondahl said "Tami is super nice and a wonderful presenter" and Assistant Director Mark Koplik called the visit was a "fantastic

(Photo courtesy of UC Berkeley.) University at Albany and Hudson Valley Community College alum Omar M. Yaghi has been awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, sharing the honor with Susumu Kitagawa of Kyoto University and Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences recognized the three researchers for their development of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) — porous molecular architectures with vast internal surface area and the abilit

We’re excited to announce that several writers familiar to our audiences will be recognized at the upcoming National Book Awards ceremony...