Albany Book Festival, September 21

This annual event at the University at Albany is an exercise in decision-making, with as many as 4 panels/readings going on at once, not to mention the massed book-sellers. My decisions were made a bit easier by being a moderator for one of the late sessions, & being scheduled in the Hudson Valley Writers Guild Reading.

I managed to catch a few readers in the Open Mic Reading hosted by Arch Magazine (the undergraduate literary zine), featuring the Young Writers project, friends & contributors, held at the Orb Stage in Campus Center West. What I caught was 3 readers, a variety of styles, formats, from traditional poems with a good use of rhyme & vivid images; a long personal ramble about campus life; & a well-performed piece in Slam style. The woman who did the poems in rhyme was actually a graduate student in physics. Long-time Albany poet Jil Hanifan is the advisor/mentor for Arch Magazine so as far as I’m concerned those students are in good hands.

The Hudson Valley Writers Guild Open Mic had its sign-up prior to the Festival online, & the host was HVWG Vice-President Mary Panza. The sign-up had been online at the Guild website. While I hadn’t signed up to be first, that’s where I was & since this date is International Peace Day I read a selection of my peace poems, including the 2003 “Albany/Baghdad.”

Jackie Craven who hosts the Writers Mic open mic on Zoom on the 2nd Wednesday of the month read “Clocks can’t be trusted in the electric city” from her collection of poems Whish (Press 53, 2024).

Susan Rancourt read a mix of poems from her poetry collections & newer poems, including “Thurnderbeings,” “Archilochus Comes to Shore,” “Ordinarily She Marched,” & “Bad Girls Speak.” 

Rhonda Rosenheck is the co-host (with Judith Prest) of Poetry Circle on 2nd Mondays at the Schenectady County Public Library. The poems she read included a Tanka (“Crack”), an Haiku on the end of Autumn, & poems titled “Past Tense,” “Light Sneaks Past,” a re-worked piece “Raproachment 1983,” & “I Will.”

Adonis Richards is the founder of Lucid Voices out of Schenectady which one can find on Facebook. He started off with a poem from a poetry & sculpture workshop about an owl “Nighttime Visitor,” then a sad piece about missing a father’s love while growing up a “cool nerd” fan of Pokemon, & a piece titled “To Kill a Kitten” (not as cruel as it sounds).

There were more, but I had to leave for a session I moderated titled Discovering New Narratives, a reading & discussion with author Joachim Frank about his auto-biographical novel Ierapetra, or His Sister’s Keeper. Frank is a 2017 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry & a former president of the Hudson Valley Writers Guild.

The Albany Book Festival has become an annual event here so I think we can expect it to be back in September 2025 — check the New York State Writers Institute website & the events page of the website of the Hudson Valley Writers Guild for information.