The New York State Writers Institute will offer two creative writing workshops during the fall 2014 semester. Lydia Davis, New York State Writers Institute Fellow and winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize will conduct a fiction master class workshop, and Jo Page, New York State Writers Institute Writer-in-Residence will conduct a workshop on crafting memoir. The Fiction Master Class Workshop will focus on detailed discussion of students’ work, but there may also be assigned exercises and/or readings from published novels or short stories to broaden the discussion of topics such as character, plot, style, and form. The workshop is intended for advanced writers – writers who have significant publications in literary journals. The fiction workshop will be held on five Tuesday evenings from October 7 through November 4 at the University at Albany’s uptown campus.
The Memoir Workshop is intended for writers interested in crafting longer or shorter works or memoir, using readings and participants’ individual work to explore and develop the subtleties that make a memoir a compelling story as well as a re-collection of actual events. The workshop will be held on seven Wednesday evenings from October 8 through November 19 at the University at Albany’s uptown campus.
Both workshops are offered free of charge for no credit. Admission to either workshop is based on the submission of writing samples. Complete information on the workshops and submission guidelines may be obtained by calling the Institute at 518-442-5620 or by visiting the Institute’s website at: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/workshop.html
Lydia Davis, fiction writer and translator, has received wide acclaim for her extremely brief and brilliantly inventive short stories. She has been called “one of the quiet giants . . . of American fiction” (Los Angeles Times Book Review), “an American virtuoso of the short story form” (Salon), and “one of the best writers in America” (O Magazine).
In the spring of 2013 Davis received the Man Booker International Prize, one of the most prestigious prizes in the world of literature. The award is given every two years to authors of any nationality in order to recognize an outstanding body of work in English or available in English translation.
Her newest book, which earned rave reviews, is Can’t and Won’t (2014). She is also the author of The Collected Stories (2009), a compilation of stories from four previously published volumes including Varieties of Disturbance (2007), Samuel Johnson is Indignant (2001), Almost No Memory (1997) and Break it Down (1986). Davis received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2003. A Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in France, Davis is also one of the most respected translators into English of French literary fiction by Proust and Flaubert, among others.
Davis first received serious critical attention for her collection of stories, Break It Down, which was selected as a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. The book’s positive critical reception helped Davis win a Whiting Writer’s Award in 1988.
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Jo Page‘s fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Quarterly West, Drunken Boat, Our Stories, The South Carolina Review, Stone Canoe, The MacGuffin and other journals. She was a finalist in the 2009 Hunger Mountain Creative Nonfiction Prize. Her memoir, Going Out will be published by SUNY Press in 2015.
An ordained Lutheran parish pastor, she has also taught writing at the University of Virginia, the University at Albany, Hudson Valley Community College, and The Albany Academy and has led seminars on the spirituality of writing/reading poetry.
Page received her MFA from the University of Virginia where she studied with John Casey. During graduate school, she was a finalist in the Mademoiselle Magazine Short Story Contest. For twenty years the author of the “Reckonings” column for Albany, New York’s alternative newsweekly Metroland, she now writes a column for The Albany Times Union.
For additional information contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.
