| Maxine Kumin:Best-Loved Poet One of America's most important and best-loved poets, Maxine Kumin is reowned for her meditations on farm life, the love between parents and children, and the New England landscape. A longtime resident of rural New Hampshire, where she owns a small horse farm, Kumin has observed barnyard dramas, the life and death of animals, and the change of seasons for decades. Critics often compare her to fellow New Englanders Henry David Thoreau and Robert Frost. Her many honors and awards include the Pulitzer Prize for the collection, Up Country (1972), the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Excellence in Literature, the Levison Award and Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. In July of 1998, at age 73, Kumin was critically injured in a horse carriage accident, and was expected to die of her injuries. Her survival is the subject of her 2000 memoir, Inside the Halo and Beyond: The Anatomy of a Recovery. "This book, while telling of a most personal catastrophe, ties us continually to the natural world that is the center of this author's life and work...[Kumin] resonates wisdom while announcing a triumph of body and soul,"writes Anne Roiphe of the New York Times. Born in 1925, Kumin began writing and publishing in midlife, as the married mother of three children. Kumin's poetry is openly autobiographical."No poet writes more richly and more subtly of mother-daughter relations," said poet Alicia Ostriker. Critics have also remarked on Kumin's unsentimental relationship to nature as a hardworking breeder of Arabian and quarter hourses. Brad Crenshaw wrote in Parmassus, "in an unforgiving environment, Kumin neither flinches at the strenuous physical labors that comprise her usual responsibilities, nor quails before her emotional disappointments...Her poetry records how she stands up to disasters of weather, disease, difficult births and lamentable deaths, and how she's confident she'll remain standing until the very end." Kumin's newest collection is Jac and Other New Poems (2005), which features reflections on death, the body, beloved animals, politics, and the nature of memory. The collection is named for one of the poet's beloved horses, whom she "sold down the river" much to her later guilt and regret. Other recent poetry collections include Bringing Together: Uncollected Early Poems, 1958-88( 2003) and The Long Marriage (2001), the first volume to be published after her accident. Dedicated to her husband Victor, whom she married in 1946, The Long Marriage explores themes of loyalty, longevity, recovery, love, poetry, and nature. In the Washington Times, Henry Taylor wrote, "The Long Marriage could possibly be Kumin's best book of poems. Poetry doesn't get much better than this." A new collection, Mites to Mastodons:A Book of Animal Poems, Small and Large, is due to be published in 2006. Kumin is also the author of six novels, including the 1999 mystery novel, Quit Monks or Die! and 22 children's books, four of which she wrote with her friend, the late poet Anne Sexton. Maxine Kumin has served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress (1981-82), and Poet Laureate of the State of New Hampshire (1989-94). --Reprinted by permission from the New York State Writers Inst
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| Wednesday, March 16, 2005 • ACC Student Center Lounge • 12:30pm-2pm • Queensbury • Queensbury Hotel |
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| Russell Banks: New Yor State Author 2004-2006 In a writing career spanning five decades, Russell Banks has published five short story collections, nine novles, and four poetry collection. His fiction captures the experiences of working class people who live in the Northeast, and often deals with issues of family conflcit, addiction, economic hardship, and racism. He was chosen to be the New York State Author for 2004-2006. His most recent novel, the Darling, chronicles the life of a radical activist from her exploits with the Weather Underground in the 1960s to her exile in Liberia during its horrific civil war. Russell Banks has made his home in upstate New York since the 1980s, and his three prior novels have been set in hardscrabble upstate New York towns. The Sweet Hereafter (1991) is set in a ficitonal town near Lake Placid, and employs four narrative points of view to tell the story of a tragic school bus accident. The Los Angeles times Book Review called it, "a remarkable book, a sardonic and compassionate account of a communnity and its people, and of a catasptrophe that vivdly characterizes them even as it brutally acts upon them." Rule of the Bone (1995) is set in AuSable, New York. It follows the adventures of Chapman "Chappie" Dorset, a teenage "mall rat" from a broken family who descends into a life of crime. the Atlanta Journal- Constitution said, "Russell Banks has a singular gift for articulating the feelings of characters who would pass for inarticulate in the world. He trades in stunted lives and undernourished spirits; he gives them voices." Set in North Elba, New York, a historic free Negro community in the Adirondacks, Cloundsplitter (1998) tells the story of martyred anti-slavery activist John Brown. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the novel takes it name from New York's highest mountain, Mount Marcy, calledc "Tahawus" ("Cloudsplitter") by the native Algonquin. Banks spent seven years researching and writing the novel, which is narrated from the perspective of Brown's third son, Owen. Time magazine called the book,"Masterly...a furious, sprawlig drama that commands attention like thunder heard from just over the horizon." Affliction (1990), examines the lasting impact of a destructive father-son relationship. The Women's Review of Books hailed it as a "gripping, most beautiful, grim and wide-sweeping novel," and "a requiem for a working class manhood that careens between decency, even sweetness, and brutal violence." Afflciton was short-listed for both the PEN/Faulkner Fiction Prize and the Irish International Prize. Two of Banks's novels have been adapted for feature-length films, The Sweet Hereafter(winner of the Grand Prix and International Critics Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival) and Affliction. Banks is also the screenwriter of a forthcoming film adaptation of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, directed by Joel Schumacher, and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. Banks has won numerous awards for his work, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Creative Wrting Fellowships, Ingram Merrill Award, The St. Lawrence Award for Short Fiction, O. Henry and Best American Short Story Award, the John Dos Passos Award, and the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Heis a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Banks resides in both Saratoga Springs and Keene, New York. --Adapted and reprinted by permission from the NYS Writers Ins
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| Thursday, May 05, 2005 • Room 206 • 7pm-8:30pm • Library Auditorium • Crandall Library |
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| "Russell Banks... trades in stunted lives and undernourished spirits; he gives them voices."A.J.-C. | ||
| Restorative Justice: Cathy McDowell, ACC Graduate, Returns Cathy McDowell's book of stories and essays, the waiting place breaks new ground on many fronts. First and foremost, it combines essays with stories and poetry- something most mass-market publishers wouldn't risk publishing-prefering books which are easily pigeon-holed. Second, her book was published by RA Press, "small collection of writers who live in the Adirondacks" and who publish books which are "short, eclectic and decidedly offbeat." Third, it calls upon us, in these punitive times, to view prison inmates and their families with compassion rather than suspicion and hatred. Her essays, which act as bookends to her prose poems, analyze the dehumanizing effects of our current prison system and emphasize the need for restorative and rehabiliative justice, rather than retributive justice concerned only with revenge. Her rich prose poems give voice to a wide variety of people, from African American inmates to white women visiting their incarcerated spouses. Interspersed are her own observations of children and old men, all drawn into the "mouth" of the prison system and "swallowed." Where the essays direct our analytic minds to better solutions to crime and punishment, her stories immerse us in the human experience of the prison's "system disfunction." McDowell is a former student of ACC and remembers studying writing with Paul Pines, who told her, "Writers must develop the skin of a rhinoceros," and Jean Rikoff, who warned her, "Never let a man take you away from your typewriter." Later, she studied with Oscar Hijuelos at the Lake George Arts Project as he was writing his Pulitzer Prize-winning work, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. Explaining her book's inspiration, McDowell says, "During the time I was enrolled at ACC, I also became a registered volunteer with the New York State Department of Corrections. I helped facilitate a weekly program for inmates at Great Meadow, Washington and Mr. McGregor prisons. Going into prison was as much if not more of an education for me in addiction, systematic dysfunction, racism and discrimination, retributive-v-restorative justice, institutionalization and the effectsof incarceration of prisoners, their families and our communities. Being a writer, I chronicled everything I heard and saw. I watched the dynamics of prison visiting rooms and families trying to maintain stability in the middle of chaos. And I learneds so much from them. As a final project for Skidmore, I wrote my book, 'the waiting place.'" McDowell graduated from Skidmore College with a BS in human services and currently works in Albany at an outpatient clinic for substance abusers, many of whom are former inmates. |
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| Thursday, May 19, 2005 • 12:30pm-2pm • Visual Arts Gallery • Dearlove Hall |
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