News from New York State Writers Institute

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

Pulitzer Prize-winning War Correspondent and Bestselling Author Chris Hedges to Speak on November 8, 2007

NYS Writers Institute Events Week of November 5 - 9, 2007

ALBANY, NY (10/24/2007; 1008)(readMedia)-- Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent, bestselling author of “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2002), and leading critic of the Iraqi war, the war on terror, and the “culture wars” of the religious right, will be the keynote speaker at a UAlbany conference, “The Ecologies of War: Life Technologies and Planetary Conflict” on Thursday, November 8, 2007 at 8:00 p.m. in the Campus Center Ballroom on the UAlbany uptown campus. The event is sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute and UAlbany English Department, and is free and open to the public.

Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent and bestselling author, will be the keynote speaker at “The Ecologies of War: Life Technologies and Planetary Conflict,” a conference that explores issues relating to global violence and change in the 21st century.

Hedges is the author of “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2002), a national bestseller that explores the seductive powers of wartime mythologies, and the challenges they pose to truth, liberty, and morality. He demonstrates how war seduces not only military personnel, but entire societies, corrupting politics, perverting cultures, and altering normal human behavior.

The book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The “New York Times” called it, “[A] powerful chronicle of modern war . . . . A persuasive call for humility and realism in the pursuit of national goals by force of arms . . . .a potent and eloquent warning.” The “Los Angeles Times” called it, “The best kind of war journalism: It is bitterly poetic and ruthlessly philosophical. It sends out a powerful message to people contemplating the escalation of the ‘war against terrorism.’”

Hedges shared the 2002 Pulitzer Prize as part of the “New York Times” reportorial team on global terrorism. As a reporter, Hedges has sent dispatches on violence and conflict from more than 50 countries over the course of the last 20 years.

His latest book is “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2007). A Harvard Divinity School graduate and son of a Presbyterian pastor, Hedges examines the religious right’s open antipathy to historical definitions of American democracy, and chronicles its determined and successful efforts to seize the halls of power in Washington. “Publishers Weekly” said, “this urgent book forcefully illuminates what many across the political spectrum will recognize as a serious and growing threat to the very concept and practice of an open society.”

Other books by Hedges include “Losing Moses on the Freeway” (2005) and “What Every Person Should Know About War” (2003).

Subtopics of the “Ecologies of War” conference will include resource scarcity; the privatization of earth’s common resources; new technologies and cybernetic violence; race war; shifts in political agendas, social orders, and cultural preoccupations; global warming and atmospheric catastrophe; the “post-polar” planetary condition; states of “permanent” and “invisible” war; the language of war; and new critical and theoretical approaches to the subject of war. For more information on the conference, go to http://www.albany.edu/english/iccc/ecologies_of_war.html.

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

“Cleo From 5 to 7” to be Screened on November 9, 2007

“Cleo From 5 to 7” (“Cléo de 5 à 7,” France, 1961, 90 minutes, b/w and color, 35 mm, in French with English subtitles, directed by Agnès Varda) will be shown on Friday, November 9, 2007 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.

Awaiting the results of a biopsy for cancer, a pretty, pampered chanteuse spends two hours searching for meaning in the streets of Paris. The film established Agnès Varda as the preeminent female director of her generation and the grandmère of the French New Wave. Film critic Molly Haskell wrote, “the director adroitly uses the camera’s addiction to beautiful women’s faces to subtly question the consequences of that fascination....” A new print will be shown.

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

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War Correspondent and Author Chris Hedges