NYS Writers Institute Hosts Reading by State Author Alison Lurie and State Poet Marie Howe, September 20, 2012

Inauguration ceremony to precede reading

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Marie Howe, New York State Poet 2012 - 2014 Photo: Brad Fowler

ALBANY, NY (09/06/2012)(readMedia)-- The newly-appointed New York State Author Alison Lurie and New York State Poet Marie Howe will be inaugurated at a special ceremony on Thursday, September 20, 2012 at 8:00 p.m. in Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, on the University at Albany's downtown campus. Lurie will receive the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit for fiction writers, and Howe will receive the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit for poets. Following the ceremony, the new laureates will read from their work. Sponsored by the New York State Governor's Office, New York State Writers Institute, and University at Albany's Offices of the President and Provost, the event is free and open to the public.

Alison Lurie has been named New York's new State Author and Marie Howe has been named New York's new State Poet for 2012-2014. The laureates were recently appointed by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and will serve under the aegis of the New York State Writers Institute.

The State Author and State Poet 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 by the New York State Writers Institute, the Governor awards the citations every two years.

In announcing the new awardees Governor Andrew Cuomo said, "Marie and Alison represent the rich talent and diversity that New York has to offer. Both of them have inspired New Yorkers all across the state, and their works are major assets to us all. They are truly deserving of this honor, and hopefully their great work will now reach a new and even wider audience."

Alison Lurie

Alison Lurie, is celebrated for witty and satirical novels that examine middle class American life, particularly in small northeastern college towns inspired by Ithaca, New York (where she has lived since 1961), and on the campuses of colleges inspired by Cornell University (where she taught from 1968 until her retirement as the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of American Literature in 1998).

For her nuanced understanding and lifelike portrayal of social customs and the relationships between the sexes, Lurie is widely regarded as the Jane Austen of contemporary American letters. William Kennedy, Executive Director of the NYS Writers Institute, and ex-officio chair of the review committee for the State Author award describes Lurie as "a wise and masterful teller of tales that often center on marital strife, domestic disorder, and academic absurdity-comedies of manners of our time but with a deeply human strain. She is a superior prose stylist with a wickedly satirical talent."

Born in Chicago in 1926, Lurie grew up in White Plains, New York. She attended Radcliffe College, graduating in 1946 with a B.A. in literature and history. Her first novel, Love and Friendship, was published in 1962. She is the author of nine additional novels including Real People (1969), The War Between the Tates (1974), Foreign Affairs (1984), which received the Pulitzer Prize, and her most recent book, Truth and Consequences (2005).

Lurie is also a pioneering champion of children's literature and has written both children's books and scholarly nonfiction on the importance to global literacy and culture of children's literature.

Marie Howe

Marie Howe is widely admired for poetry that seeks answers to metaphysical questions in ordinary day-to-day experience. In Howe's work, little incidents and inconsequential memories help to shed light on the nature of the soul and the self, as well as the meaning of life, death, love, pain, hope, despair, sin, virtue, solitude, community, impermanence, and the eternal.

Donald Faulkner, Director of the NYS Writers Institute, and ex-officio chair of the review committee for the Walt Whitman Award for State Poet of New York, praised Howe's work for its "sense of honesty, intimacy, and candor. Marie Howe writes with refreshing openness about love, loss, and redemption. Hers is a voice that will continue to grow in its magic and sheer bravery."

Born in Rochester, New York in 1950, Howe graduated from the University of Windsor in Ontario, and worked as a reporter for a Rochester newspaper. She enrolled in the MFA program at the Columbia University School of the Arts where she received mentorship from the late poet Stanley Kunitz, who served as the first New York State Poet (1986-88). In 1988, Howe published her first poetry collection, The Good Thief, an exploration of human relationships, attachment, loss, and personal transcendence. The book was selected by Margaret Atwood for the National Poetry Series. Also in 1988 she was selected by Stanley Kunitz to receive the Lavan Younger Poets Prize of the American Academy of Poets.

In 1997 Howe published her second collection of poems, What the Living Do, an elegy for her brother John who died of AIDS. Howe also published a highly-praised 1994 anthology, coedited with Michael Klein, In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic, which presents the voices of a wide range of writers, known and unknown, male and female, gay and straight. Her third poetry collection, The Kingdom of Ordinary Time, was published in 2008.

Howe is a member of the Writing Faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, and taught previously at Columbia University and New York University.

For additional information on the State Author and Poet awards and Alison Lurie and Marie Howe contact the Writers Institute at (518) 442-5620 or online at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/awardees.html.

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