News from New York State Writers Institute

For more information contact: Suzanne Lance, 518-442-5620

PEN International Writers and FENCE Magazine Contributors Visit Writers Institute

NYS Writers Institute Events Week of April 28 - May 2, 2008

ALBANY, NY (04/16/2008; 1051)(readMedia)-- PEN Festival of International Literature Comes to Albany; Event to Feature Major Figures of World Literature, Survivors of Political Persecution, April 29, 2008

The New York State Writers Institute and PEN American Center will cosponsor a reading by three leading figures of world literature who have endured political persecution in their native lands, including Nuruddin Farah of Somalia, Horacio Castellanos Moya of El Salvador, and Chenjerai Hove of Zimbabwe, on Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 8:00 p.m. in the Recital Hall, Performing Arts Center, on the University at Albany’s uptown campus. The event, held in association with this year’s “PEN World Voices: The New York Festival of International Literature,” is free and open to the public.

A perpetual candidate for the Nobel Prize, and winner of the 1998 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, Nuruddin Farah has been called “arguably the most important African novelist of the late 20th century... he is also the most astonishing, inventive, exuberant and mind-blowing” (Anderson Tepper, “Salon”). Farah is best known for two groups of novels, the “Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship” trilogy (1979-1982), about the fictional dictatorship of Major General Muhammad Siyad and its impact upon individual Somali families; and the “Blood in the Sun” trilogy, about orphans adrift in a landscape of war, economic collapse, civil unrest, and misguided nationalism. Farah is also widely praised for work that draws attention to the plight and status of women in African society. Born in Somalia in 1945, Farah grew up during the British and Italian colonial administrations and experienced his homeland’s rocky transition to independence. Under threat of arrest for fiction deemed critical of Somali government policy, Farah spent nearly a quarter century in exile beginning in the 1970s, but has since returned to live and teach in Mogadishu. He is an exception among major African writers in that he currently makes his home in Africa.

Horacio Castellanos Moya is hailed as El Salvador’s leading novelist and one of Central America’s most important contemporary writers. His novels include “The Devil in the Mirror” (2000), “The Weapon Man” (2001), “Dances with Serpents” (2002) and “Decay” (2007). Moya’s first book to appear in English will be “Senselessness” (2004, translation 2008) from New Directions Press. A novel about Guatemala’s “Mayan genocide,” the English translation earned Katherine Silver a PEN Translation Award, as well as a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. A journalist as well as a fiction writer, Moya edited the weekly newspaper “Primera Plana,” the chief independent voice in El Salvador’s political arena in the 1990s. Politically-motivated harassment and death threats eventually drove him into exile. He is currently a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh’s English Department and Center for Latin American Studies, as part of the North American Network of Cities of Asylum (formerly the International Parliament of Writers).

Chenjerai Hove is a Zimbabwean novelist, poet, essayist and newspaper columnist. Hailed as a leading figure of post-colonial literature in southern Africa, Hove is the past recipient of the Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, and of the German-Afrika Award for contributions to freedom of expression. His books include the novels “Bones” (1986), “Ancestors” (1988), “Shadows” (1991), as well as “Palaver Finish” (2003), an essay collection about contemporary life in Zimbabwe. Hove is a cofounder of the Zimbabwe Human Rights Association, and past president of the Zimbabwe Writers Union. An outspoken critic of the policies of the government of President Robert Mugabe, Hove endured police harassment, surveillance, repeated break-ins, and seizures of his computers and computer disks throughout the 1990s. He left Zimbabwe in 2001 and currently lives in exile as the International Writers Project fellow-in-residence at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies.

Dedicated to promoting intercultural understanding, tolerance, and freedom of expression, the PEN American Center is the largest of the 141 centers of International PEN, the world’s oldest human rights organization and the oldest international literary arts organization.

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

FENCE Magazine to Launch Spring/Summer 2008 Issue in Albany with Readings by Four Contributors, May 1, 2008

Marking its 10th year of publication, FENCE magazine will launch its Spring/Summer 2008 issue with readings by four contributors, including short story writer Vivian Heller, poet Karen Garthe, novelist Douglas A. Martin, and poet Michael Comstock on Thursday, May 1, 2008 at 8:00 p.m. in the Standish Room, Science Library, on the University at Albany’s uptown campus. The event, cosponsored by FENCE and the New York State Writers Institute, is free and open to the public.

Vivian Heller’s short stories have appeared in “BOMB” magazine and “Confrontation.” She is also the author of “James Joyce: Decadence and Emancipation” (1995), winner of the American Library Association’s Choice Award for Books of Outstanding Academic Merit, as well as “The City Beneath Us: Building the New York Subway” (2004), a volume published by the New York City Transit Museum to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the subway system. A professor of English literature, Heller has taught at The New School for Social Research, Bennington, Barnard, and Bard College.

Douglas A. Martin’s first novel, “Outline of My Lover” (2000), was selected by Colm Toibin as an International Book of the Year in the London “Times Literary Supplement” and has been adapted and staged by the Forsythe Company for their multimedia production “Kammer/Kammer.” Martin is also the author of “Branwell: A Novel of the Brontë Brother” (2005), and the short story collection, “They Change the Subject” (2005). “Booklist” praised the “spiky, spare language” of Martin’s story collection and said, “appreciators of the short story will marvel at Martin’s dexterous use of it.”

Karen Garthe’s first poetry collection, “Frayed Escort” (2006) received the 2005 Colorado Prize, selected by Cal Bedient, who said, “Evading every opportunity to be obvious and tedious, [Garthe’s] poetry somehow skips beyond even the need to be subtle: it is simply unimaginably imaginative at every point. The writing is at once lean and fantastic, crisp and mobile. All but exclusively, it exhibits, rather than thematizes, freedom—light-footed, dance-footed, sure-footed freedom.” Garthe has published poetry in numerous literary journals, including “Chicago Review,” “New American Writing,” “American Letters & Commentary,” “VOLT,” “Exquisite Corpse,” and “Columbia Poetry Review.”

Poet Michael Comstock is a 2006 graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. He has published previously in the literary journals “Diagram,” “Shampoo” and “Mustachioed.”

FENCE is a biannual journal of poetry, fiction, criticism, and art. Widely respected, the journal is known for including writing from the “experimental” community along with the work of “mainstream” authors, and for juxtaposing the work of lesser known and/or unknown writers with some of the most well-known and respected writers of our time. Edited by National Poetry Series winning poet Rebecca Wolff, FENCE is published in partnership with the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany. The magazine’s fiction editor is UAlbany English professor Lynne Tillman, winner of a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship.

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

“The Face of Another” to be Screened on May 2, 2008

“The Face of Another” (“Tanin no kao” Japan, 1966, 124 minutes, b&w, 35 mm, in Japanese with English subtitles, directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara), will be shown on Friday, May 2, 2008, at 7:30 p.m. in Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue, on the University at Albany’s downtown campus. Sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute, the screening is free and open to the public.

In this low-budget horror classic, a man disfigured by an industrial fire persuades a doctor to give him a new face. Along with it, he adopts a new and dangerously unstable personality. “Strictly Film School” (filmref.com) calls the film, “a haunting, cautionary fairytale of masquerade and revelation, defect and vanity, impersonation and self-discovery.” The film will be shown in a newly restored print.

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

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Attachments

Novelist Nuruddin Farah

Novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya

Novelist, poet and journalist Chenjerai Hove