NYS Writers Institute Announces New State Author and Poet

ALBANY, NY (02/20/2008)(readMedia)-- New York State Writers Institute Names State Author and Poet for 2008-2010

Laureates to Read from their Work on Monday, March 3, 2008

Mary Gordon has been named New York’s new State Author and Jean Valentine has been named New York’s new State Poet for 2008-2010, the New York State Writers Institute announced today.

Gordon, novelist, short story writer, and memoirist will receive the New York State Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for fiction writers; and poet Jean Valentine will receive the New York State Walt Whitman Citation of Merit for poets. The awards will be presented by Governor Eliot Spitzer and First Lady Silda Wall Spitzer at a special ceremony on Monday, March 3, 2008. Following the ceremony the two laureates will read from their work at 8:00 p.m. at Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, on the University at Albany’s downtown campus. The evening reading is free and open to the public.

The citations were established in 1985 by the governor and state legislature to promote fiction and poetry within the state. Upon the recommendation of two advisory panels of distinguished writers convened under the aegis of the New York State Writers Institute, the governor awards the citations every two years.

Mary Gordon

Mary Gordon, one of America’s most admired prose writers, is the author of several bestselling novels, as well as short stories, memoirs, essays, and criticism. Gordon is known for work that explores Irish-American family life, single motherhood, Catholic spirituality, thwarted love, moral struggle, personal sacrifice, and female identity. She is often praised for her deep insights, lyrical writing, and what “Los Angeles Times” critic Ellen Akins called, “her delicate rendering of the drama of consciousness.”

Gordon’s latest work includes the memoir “Circling My Mother” (2007); the collection “The Stories of Mary Gordon” (2006); and the novel “Pearl” (2005), the story of a single mother who sets out to prevent her only daughter, Pearl, from killing herself in a self-imposed hunger strike.

Other recent books by Gordon include the brief biography, “Joan of Arc” (2000); the essay collection, “Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity” (2000); the novel, “Spending: A Utopian Divertimento” (1998); the bestselling memoir of her secretive, tormented father, “The Shadow Man” (1996); and the essay collection “Good Boys and Dead Girls” (1992).

Gordon’s other acclaimed novels include “The Other Side” (1989), “Men and Angels” (1985), “The Company of Women” (1981), and “Final Payments” (1978).

Upon notification of her award, Gordon responded: “New York...Writer...These are two of the most important ways I know myself, and to have the two of them combined in words that describe me...what a thrill. I am pleased and grateful at this award, which moves writing out of the ivory tower and into the larger world, makes it something connected to people who are not only readers but citizens, fellow citizens, my fellow citizens...and how lucky we all are to call ourselves New Yorkers.”

The advisory panel that recommended Gordon as state author included the present laureate, Russell Banks, novelists Sue Miller, and Alice McDermott, and novelist and Executive Director of the New York State Writers Institute, William Kennedy.

Kennedy said of the choice of Gordon as laureate: “Mary Gordon’s fiction is a fusion of emotional power and literary elegance. She writes of family, and of issues central to women’s lives, and her work is sometimes seen as autobiographical. But it transcends the personal. Her heroines do battle with forces threatening their lives – religion, sexual love, politics, male power; also with their own compulsions to yield to such forces. She has engaged major ideas and conflicts of our era, always at a very human level.”

Outgoing State Author Russell Banks said, “Mary Gordon’s fiction and memoirs have the heft and depth we expect from our very best writers, those we call ‘major’. Her books have emotional and intellectual lift-off. Beyond that, she has style, wit and grace—élan.”

Previous state authors have been Grace Paley, E. L. Doctorow, Norman Mailer, William Gaddis, Peter Matthiessen, Kurt Vonnegut, and Russell Banks.

Jean Valentine

Jean Valentine is the author of eleven books of poetry including “Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems” (Wesleyan), which won the 2004 National Book Award for poetry, and her most recent book, “Little Boat” (Wesleyan) which was published in 2007. She has also edited a collection of essays on poet Eleanor Ross Taylor.

Valentine is known for poems of striking intensity that derive much of their structure and imagery from dreams. She has long enjoyed a small but passionate following of readers and fellow poets. Writing in the “New York Times Book Review,” David Kalstone said, “Miss Valentine has a gift for tough strangeness, but also a dreamlike syntax and manner of arranging the lines of . . . short poems so as to draw us into the doubleness and fluency of feelings.”

Valentine’s first book, “Dream Barker, and Other Poems” (1965), was the recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Valentine has also been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Maurice English Prize, a Sara Teasdale Award, and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, and The New York Council for the Arts. Most recently, Valentine received the 2006 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her other poetry collections include “The Cradle of the Real Life” (2000), “Growing Darkness, Growing Light” (1997), “The Under Voice” (1995), “The River at Wolf” (1992), “Home, Deep, Blue” (1989), “The Messenger” (1979), “Ordinary Things” (1974), and “Pilgrims” (1969).

Valentine has taught in the Department of Writing at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, since 1974. She has also taught at Hunter College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, among other universities, colleges and programs.

Upon notification of her award, Valentine responded: “I’m enormously happy to be given this recognition by my favorite place on earth, New York. And to be honored alongside of Mary Gordon! Many, many thanks.”

The advisory panel that recommended Valentine as state poet included Maxine Kumin and Franz Wright, former state poets Billy Collins and John Ashbery, and poet and Institute Director, Donald Faulkner. In describing her work Faulkner said, “Jean Valentine is one of our most valiant poets. She is an intrepid explorer of the ‘thin places,’ the spaces where dream and waking, life and beyond-life, all overlap, blend, and sometimes merge. Her ability to give voice to this richness, combined with her insight and cunning craft, produces a poetry we need.” Former State Poet John Ashbery said, “As New York’s State Poet, the hugely gifted Jean Valentine may finally reach the wider audience she richly deserves.”

Previous state poets have been Stanley Kunitz, Robert Creeley, Audrey Lorde, Richard Howard, Jane Cooper, John Ashbery, and Billy Collins.

The New York State Writers Institute of the State University of New York, located at the University at Albany, was mandated as a permanent state-sponsored organization through legislation signed into law in 1984. The Writers Institute provides a milieu for renowned and experienced writers from all over the world to come together with new and aspiring writers for the purpose of instruction and creative exchange.

For additional information contact the Writers Institute at (518) 442-5620 or online at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.

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Posted Wednesday February 20, 2008 at 01:04 pm by New York State Writers Institute