The Cole Summer Writers Institute has announced the dates for the summer 2021 institute. The institute will run from July 5-July 9, 2021. As of now the institute will run virtually, but that may change in the future. Keep checking back here for details.
Acclaimed YA and Children’s writer Leslie Connor will be the guest writer at this year’s Cole Summer Writers Institute! The Institute, running July 9-13, 2018, will feature Ms. Connor’s workshop on Wednesday, July 11, which will coincide with a full day program of activities at the Voorheesville Public Library.
Leslie Connor is the author of several award-winning books for children, including Waiting for Normal, winner of the ALA Schneider Family Book Award, Crunch, Miss Bridie Chose a Shovel, and the young adult novels Dead on Town Line and The Things You Kiss Goodbye. Her latest novel, published in 2017, is The Truth As Told By Mason Buttle.
The Cole Institute is offered to all students at Clayton A. Bouton High School and the Voorheesville Middle School (incoming sixth graders and exiting twelfth graders are always welcome). The Institute fee of $55.00 covers:
commemorative poster with original artwork
commemorative Cole 2018 Tee shirt
Pizza party on Friday
Applications can be found on our homepage, by clicking here, or by clicking on the image below.
Poet Barbara Ungar joined us today to talk poetry and all things writing! We were uprooted from our normal spot in the library and moved to the Performing Arts Center, where the thirteen of us crammed into the front rows to listen to Dr. Ungar and work with her. The students asked great questions, and were rewarded with an invitation to Dr. Ungar’s reading and open mic poetry night at Arthur’s Market & Cafe in Schenectady!
Poet Barbara Ungar , author of four books of poetry, English professor, and coordinator of the MFA program at The College of Saint Rose, will be joining Cole this summer to deliver a one-day workshop for writers! Ms. Ungar, a native of Worcester, Massachusetts and Minneapolis, Minnesota, has degrees from Stanford (BA) and CUNY (MA, PhD), and has travelled extensively.
Praise for Ms. Ungar’s work has been glowing. Samples of the critical reception to her work include:
(Immortal Medusa) “Like any great seeker, Ungar pursues the truth beneath surfaces available to the naked eye. Reading these poems, we are seized by the worlds she reveals. It is the feeling we call ravishment.” —Greg Pardlo
(Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life) “‘I who undulated like an eel now mince on knife-point’: with what glittering myths our culture hooks and reels in its women. In poems at once nightmarishly excoriating and redemptively witty, BLU plunges us into deep waters where these myths are seen joyously refracted.” —Nathalie F. Anderson
(The Origin of the Milky Way) “. . . a fearless, unflinching collection about birth and motherhood, the transformation of bodies. Ungar’s poems are honestly brutal, candidly tender. Their primal immediacy and intense intimacy are realized through her dazzling sense of craft. Ungar delivers a wonderful, sensuous, visceral poetry.” —Denise Duhamel
(Thrift) “Barbara Ungar’s poems embody, with piercing authority, the ebullience of dissolution. She is a master of sudden pathos (see ‘Garment’ or ‘For the Town Clerk’) as well as joy pulled from ‘the used, the worn, the broken in’ (see ‘To My First Address’ or ‘The Thrift Shop of My Dreams’). Ungar’s formal panache offers abundant pleasures, and manages also to be wise.”—Frank Bidart
More information about Ms. Ungar and her work can be found on her website here. The bio on her website is provided below:
Barbara Ungar has published four books of poetry, most recently Immortal Medusa and Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life, both Hilary Tham selections from The Word Works. Her prior books are Thrift and The Origin of the Milky Way, which won the Gival Press Poetry Award, a silver Independent Publishers award, a Hoffer award, and the Adirondack Center for Writing poetry award. She is also the author of several chapbooks and Haiku in English. She has published poems in Salmagundi, Rattle, The Nervous Breakdown, and many other journals. A professor of English at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, she coordinates their new MFA program.
David Klein, author of Stash and Clean Break, led the Cole writers through their paces on Wednesday, July 9th. Mr. Klein spoke at length with the students about his experiences writing and worked with them on the pieces they were currently working on in the Institute.
Hollis Seamon is this year’s featured guest author at the New York State Summer Young Writers Institute for high school-aged writers. She tied for the 2014 Independent Publisher Book Award (“Ippy”) Gold Medal for Short Fiction for her story collection, Corporeality.
Students at the Young Writers Institute will read Seamon’s 2013 young adult novel, Somebody Up There Hates You, about a 17-year-old battling cancer. Booklist said, “Seamon’s first young-adult novel is a tender, insightful, and unsentimental look at teens in extremis. It brings light to a very dark place, and in so doing, does its readers a generous service.”
Hollis Seamon, along with being the 2009 Cole Summer Writers Institute guest author, is the author of a young adult novel, Somebody Up There Hates You, published by Algonquin Books; two short story collections, Corporeality and Body Work;and a mystery novel, Flesh. Her short stories have appeared in many literary journals, including Bellevue Literary Review, Persimmon Tree, Greensboro Review, The Chicago Review, Calyx, Nebraska Review, Fiction International, and The Hudson Review. Her work has been anthologized in The Best of the Bellevue Literary Review, The Strange History of Suzanne LaFleshe and Other Stories of Women and Fatness, A Line of Cutting Women, Food and Other Enemies, Quarry: Crime Stories by New England Writers, and Sacred Ground: Stories about Home. She has received a fiction fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and won the 2009 Al Blanchard award for short fiction. Hollis is Professor of English at the College of Saint Rose in Albany NY and also teaches for the MFA in Creative Writing Program of Fairfield University, Fairfield CT.
On Thursday, July 10, the Cole Summer Writers Institute will take its first field trip! I’ll be
heading up to Skidmore College, the site of the New York State Summer Writers Institute, to hear a reading by poet Louise Gluck and novelist Caryl Phillips. Students are encouraged to attend with a parent! The reading begins at 8 pm in the Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY, and is free to the public.
The reading is part of New York State Summer Writers Institute held at Skidmore College. Readings held during the week of July 7-11 are listed below. A
complete listing of the summer readings can be found here.
JULY 7
Poetry reading by Rosanna Warren and fiction reading by Cristina Garcia.
JULY 8
Non-Fiction reading by Phillip Lopate and fiction reading by Victoria Redel.
JULY 9
Poetry reading by James Longenbach and fiction reading by Joanna Scott.
JULY 10
Poetry reading by Louise Gluck and fiction reading by Caryl Phillips.
JULY 11
Fiction reading by Joyce Carol Oates.
Thanks to the very talented Paige Bestle, Voorheesville class of 2014, for this year’s super cool poster!
We write to expose the unexposed. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer’s job is to see what’s behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words — not just into any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues. You can’t do this without discovering your own true voice, and you can’t find your true voice and peer behind the door and report honestly and clearly to us if your parents are reading over your shoulder.
~Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
Unbelievable! Looking at the calendar, I was blown away to see that the Cole Summer Writers Institute is less than six weeks away. June is always such a busy time for me and for the students, it really shouldn’t be a surprise that summer sneaks up on us. But I was thinking that it might be nice to blow off some school stress, and prep for a week of cool creative writing, by getting a set of inspirational activities/quotes to help get ready for the Institute.
So, to that end, starting Monday, I will be introducing a new quote or activity every other day for inspiration. They’re not required, obviously, but are simply suggestions to get us all in the mood to write!
I’ll start with this:
See you all soon!
The Cole Summer Writers Institute 