Thursday, February 14, 2019
4:15 p.m. -- Craft talk, Multi-Purpose Room, Campus Center West Addition
8 p.m. -- Campus Center Room 375
Both events at the University at Albany, 1400 Washington Avenue, Albany.

Christopher Castellani’s new novel, Leading Men (2019), is a reflection on the nature of fame, private life, and romantic entanglement set in the social world of gay 20th century icons Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote in the 1950s.

Novelist Lauren Groff called Leading Men “a tender, psychologically devastating, and gorgeously precise novel. An extraordinary book.”

Lauren Wilkinson’s first novel is American Spy (2019), a tale of espionage, love and betrayal set in West Africa and New York City during the Cold War in the 1980s. Her protagonist is FBI intelligence officer Marie Mitchell, a young black woman working in an old boys’ club. Sara Nović (Girl at War) called it “suspenseful, tender, and funny, always smart and searingly honest.”

Castellani is the artistic director of Boston’s GrubStreet, one of the country’s leading creative writing centers.

Sponsored by the NYS Writers Institute and the University at Albany English Department in association with UAlbany’s Sexuality Month, a program of the Middle Earth Peer Assistance Program of the Center for Behavioral Health Promotion and Applied Research.