A Tribute to Toni Morrison

Описание: A panel discussion of Toni Morrison’s life and work featuring members of the University at Albany community followed a screening of the 2019 documentary "The Pieces I Am." Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison, was a University at Albany professor (1984-89) where she forged a special connection to the NYS Writers Institute. The Nobel Prize-winning author died at age 88 on August 5, 2019, in New York City.

In the 1980s, she shared office space and collaborated frequently with Writers Institute founder William Kennedy. Morrison addressed a packed audience at UAlbany in 1984, just the second featured writer in the Institute's history. She also wrote parts of Beloved, one of the most acclaimed novels in all of American literature, while at UAlbany, and the news of her Pulitzer Prize in 1988 came with a phone call to the Institute's office.

Morrison organized the Institute's “The Birth of Black Cinema” three-day symposium at Page Hall in 1988 that included director Spike Lee. She also brought to campus Ralph Ellison, acclaimed author of The Invisible Man, as well as Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. Morrison wrote “Dreaming Emmett,” a drama about Emmett Till, and the Writers Institute co-sponsored its premiere at Capital Repertory Theatre in Albany in 1986.

Speakers at this event included Janell Hobson, Professor and Chair of the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UAlbany; Kyra Gaunt, Assistant Professor of Music & Theatre at UAlbany; Suzanne Lance, retired Associate Director of the Writers Institute and former assistant to Toni Morrison at UAlbany; and Maureen McCoy, Professor Emerita of English at Cornell University, novelist and former Schweitzer Fellow under Toni Morrison at UAlbany. Wirters Institute director Paul Grondahl, who interviewed Morrison in 1987 when he was a Times Union reporter, moderated the discussion.