Printer-friendly versionWriters Conversations
As part of the Artist-in-Residence program, the Institute for Advanced Study is inviting prominent literary figures to speak at the Institute in a series of Writers Conversations. The series is intended to spur discussion about creative endeavors within the Institute community. These talks are NOT open to the public but are limited to the Institue community and members of the Friends of the Institute for Advanced Study.
Writers Conversations 2011-12
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Friday, January 20, 2012 Conversation with Will Eno 5:30 p.m., Dilworth Room |
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Playwright Will Eno talks about his work with Derek Bermel, the Institute’s Artist-in-Residence. Author of such plays as Tragedy: a tragedy, The Flu Season, King: a problem play, Thom Pain (based on nothing), Middletown, and Oh, the Humanity and other good intentions, Eno is a Guggenheim Fellow in playwriting and a Fellow of the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Medway Writers Retreat, and the Hawthornden Literary Institute. In 2004, he was awarded the first-ever Marian Seldes/Garson Kanin Fellowship by the Theater Hall of Fame. |
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Tuesday, November 8, 2011 Conversation with Stephen Sondheim 5:30 p.m., Dining Hall |
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American composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim talks about his life and work in a conversation with Derek Bermel, the Institute’s Artist-in-Residence. Sondheim, whose works for Broadway include A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Pacific Overtures, Into the Woods, and Assassins, received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Sunday in the Park with George in 1985. He also wrote the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy. He is the author of Finishing the Hat (Knopf, 2010) and Look, I Made a Hat (Knopf, 2011). Sondheim has received seven Tony Awards, an Academy Award, and seven Grammy Awards. He also was among the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors in 1993. |
| Video of this talk may be seen here. |
Writers Conversations 2010-11
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Friday, April 15, 2011 |
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Alex Ross, music critic of the New Yorker, joins Derek Bermel, the Institute’s Artist-in-Residence, in a discussion of the challenges in writing about music for different formats, including books, magazines, newspapers, and blogs. |
| Video of this talk may be seen here. | |
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Friday, February 18, 2011 |
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After living and working in Europe for seven years, visual artist Shimon Attie relocated to New York City in 1997 at the invitation of Creative Time to work on his first public art project in the U.S. His work is documented in several monographs, including The Writing on the Wall (1994), Sites Unseen (1998), The History of Another (2004), and The Attraction of Onlookers (2008). Renowned as a photographer and public installation artist, Attie has exhibited widely across the United States and Europe, and his work is in numerous permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin, and the Jewish Museum in New York City. |
| Video of this talk may be seen here. | |
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Friday, October 8, 2010 The 2010-11 season of Writers Conversations began with a reading and discussion with a younger generation of groundbreaking poets, curated by Institute Artist-in-Residence Derek Bermel. |
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Tracy K. Smith, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, will host poets Thomas Sayers Ellis, Suji Kwock Kim, and Wendy S. Walters in a reading and conversation. Smith's first collection of poems, The Body's Question, was awarded the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize by Kevin Young. She is the recipient of a 2004 Rona Jaffe Writers Award and a 2005 Whiting Award. Her second collection, Duende, received the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her work is published by Graywolf Press. |
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Thomas Sayers Ellis is a photographer as well as a poet. He is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, New York, and a core faculty member of the Lesley University Low Residency MFA Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Ellis is known in the poetry community as a literary activist and innovator, one whose poems "resist limitations and rigorously embrace wholeness." His first full-length collection, The Maverick Room, was published by Graywolf Press and won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares. |
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Suji Kwock Kim's first book, Notes from the Divided Country, won the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Whiting Writers’ Award, The Nation/ Discovery Award, and the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, and was a finalist for the Griffin International Prize. Poems from her second book, Disorient, have appeared or are forthcoming in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, theNation, the New Republic, and on National Public Radio and the PBS News Hour. |
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Wendy S. Walters's work resides at the intersection of the poem, essay, and lyric drama. She is the author of Longer I Wait, More You Love Me (2009) and a chapbook, Birds of Los Angeles (2005), both published by Palm Press. Walters’s poetry has been recognized with residency fellowships from Breadloaf, MacDowell, Cave Canem, and Yaddo, and her poems have recently appeared in Callaloo, HOW2, Natural Bridge, Seneca Review, and the Yalobusha Review, among several others. She has been a nominee for the Essay Prize and her lyric and personal essays have been published in Seneca Review, Seattle Review, and Harper’s Magazine. |
| Video of this talk may be seen here. | |
| Writers Conversations 2009-10 | |
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The inaugural series of Writers Conversations was introduced in the 2009-10 academic year by Artist-in-Residence Derek Bermel. |
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Video of this talk may be seen here. |
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The Daily Show After Obama Steve Bodow, Head Writer and Supervising Producer, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Friday, November 6, 2009 Steve Bodow and Derek Bermel, the Institute's Artist-in-Residence, discuss how the show has dealt with news and the news media in the year following President Obama's election. |
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