Pulitzer Prize–Winning Author William Kennedy To Give Reading, Hold Workshops on Campus

Playwright, screenwriter, and Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist William Kennedy will inaugurate the writing program’s Distinguished Visiting Writers Series September 13–17. Kennedy will give a public reading, conduct writing workshops with students, and present a talk that will follow the screening of a movie based on his novel Ironweed.

"The writing program at Ithaca College is comprehensive," says program coordinator and associate professor Marian MacCurdy. "Our curriculum includes both creative and expository writing, and we deal with those areas with a great deal of depth. We feel we offer undergraduates something they can’t get elsewhere, and exposing them to a writer of William Kennedy’s stature will teach them a lot about the creative as well as the business side of writing."

In addition to a week of workshops, Kennedy will read a selection from his Albany cycle of novels on Tuesday, September 14, at 7:30 p.m. in Park Hall Auditorium. On Thursday, September 16, at 7:00 p.m. in that auditorium, there will be a screening of the 1987 film Ironweed, starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep. The film is based on Kennedy’s 1983 novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN-Faulkner Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Kennedy also wrote the film’s screenplay; after the screening he will share his experiences as an author and screenwriter and respond to questions from the audience. Both events are free and open to the public.

Kennedy was born in Albany in 1928 and grew up there. He joined the sports staff of the Post Star in Glens Falls and later worked for an army newspaper in Europe, but his experiences as a reporter for the Albany Times-Union gave him a chance to explore his hometown and use it as his fictional landscape. Kennedy’s first novel, The Ink Truck, appeared in 1969 and told the story of a newspaper strike in New York’s capital city.

Kennedy went on to write children’s literature, plays, and movie scripts, but his reputation as an internationally acclaimed author rests on his Albany cycle of novels, which includes Legs (1975), Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game (1978), Ironweed (1983), and Very Old Bones (1992).

"What Saul Bellow did for Chicago, Kennedy has done for Albany," wrote critic James Atlas in Vogue. "Outcasts and machine politicians and lowlifes populate an imagined Albany as real as any city of bricks."

Kennedy’s awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. He is currently a professor of English at the State University of New York at Albany.

For more information contact Marian MacCurdy at 274-3138.

Selected Bibliography of William Kennedy

Nonfiction: O Albany!: Improbable City of Political Wizards, Fearless Ethnics, Spectacular Aristocrats, Splendid Nobodies, and Underrated Scoundrels; The Making of Ironweed; Riding the Yellow Trolley Car

Screenplays: The Cotton Club, coauthored with Francis Ford Coppola; Ironweed

Plays: Grand View

Children’s Books: Charlie Marlarkey and the Belly Button Machine (coauthored with Brendan Kennedy); Charlie Marlarkey and the Singing Moose (coauthored with Brendan Kennedy)