The NYS Writers Institute presents the 2022 NYS Summer Writers Institute, a series of online readings with acclaimed and prize-winning novelists, poets, essayists, memoirists, and cultural critics.
Fiction writer Elizabeth Benedict and poet Rosanna Warren will kick off the summer’s incredible lineup of guests tonight, June 27.
Elizabeth Benedict has published five acclaimed novels, including the bestseller Almost and the National Book Award finalist Slow Dancing, a classic book on writing fiction, The Joy of Writing Sex: A Guide for Fiction Writers, in print since 1996, and hundreds of reviews, essays, and articles. She is also the editor of three acclaimed anthologies, the New York Times bestseller What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-one Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most; Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives, and Me, My Hair and I: 27 Women Untangle an Obsession.
Rosanna Warren is the author of five books of poems. Her book of criticism, Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry, was published in 2008. Her most recent books of poems include So Forth (2020), Ghost in a Red Hat, and Departure, and her biography of Max Jacob, Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters, was published in 2020.
All of the readings are free and online via Zoom, taking place Mondays through Thursdays at 7:00 p.m. through July 21. Attend the readings using this Zoom link. Registration is not required.
- June 27: Rosanna Warren (Poetry) & Elizabeth Benedict (Fiction)
- June 28: Amy Hempel (Fiction) & Campbell McGrath (Poetry)
- June 29: Student Reading (Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction)
- June 30: Russell Banks (Fiction) & Chase Twichell (Poetry)
- July 4: Phillip Lopate (Non-Fiction) & Calvin Baker (Fiction)
- July 5: Honor Moore (Non-Fiction) & Gregory Pardlo (Poetry)
- July 6: Student Reading (Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction)
- July 7: Claire Messud (Fiction) & Vijay Seshadri (Poetry)
- July 11: Mary Gaitskill (Fiction) & Peg Boyers (Poetry)
- July 12: A Conversation: Writing & Talking About Race: John McWhorter & Thomas Chatterton Williams
- July 13: Student Reading (Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction)
- July 14: Rick Moody (Fiction) & Francine Prose (Fiction)
- July 18: Garth Greenwell (Fiction) & Frank Bidart (Poetry)
- July 19: Joyce Carol Oates (Fiction) & Adam Braver (Fiction)
- July 20: Student Reading (Poetry, Fiction, Non-Fiction)
- July 21: Jamaica Kincaid (Fiction) & Henri Cole (Poetry)
The NYS Summer Writers Institute was founded and is still produced by author and professor Robert Boyers at Skidmore College, with sponsorship from Northshire Bookstores and in collaboration with the NYS Writers Institute at the University at Albany.
Previous visiting writers include Nobel Prize winner Louise Glück, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, Booker Prize winner Michael Ondaatje, Pulitzer Prize winner and NYS Writers Institute Founder William Kennedy, Mary Gordon, Tom Healy, Margo Jefferson, Binnie Kirshenbaum, John McWhorter, James Miller, Caryl Phillips, Katha Pollitt, and Victoria Redel.
