NYU SCHOOL OF PROFESSIONAL STUDIES CENTER FOR PUBLISHING & APPLIED LIBERAL ARTS CONTINUING EDUCATION PROGRAMS (PALA/CE)

Continuing Education Programs in Publishing, the Humanities, Arts, Producing, Design, Writing, and Translation.

PALA/CE Faculty News

CALA Instructor Gladys Bensimon’s Documentary “A Way Out” will Premiere at NJ International Film Festival

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NYU SPS instructor, producer, and director Gladys Bensimon’s latest documentary, A Way Out, will be premiering at The New Jersey International Film Festival on June 10th at Rutgers University. A Way Out is a feature documentary about poverty and how we in America may overcome it. The film analyzes the factors of success through the stories of three minority men from Newark, New Jersey. These men successfully beat the odds…not by luck, but rather by deliberate support and opportunities that otherwise would have left them poor, incarcerated, or even dead.In addition to the illustrative and compelling stories, the documentary features the historic, economic and academic analysis of poverty, and the history of racism and inequality in the United States, featuring various social, political, and economic experts. Bensimon’s inspiration was two-fold: from her experience volunteering in a charter school in Newark, NJ, and after reading Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers. From there spurred years of research and analysis in partnership with experts to try to find the ways OUT of poverty that is possessing many cities in America.

Visit the documentary’s website here: https://www.awayoutdocumentary.com/

 

A Way Out will be showing at 7p.m. on Saturday, June 10th at Voorhees Hall #105 at Rutgers University. If you are interested in attending, ticket information is below.

Tickets at the door: 

Tickets are available on a “first-come-first-served” basis and can be purchased at the door beginning a half-hour before the start time. 

Advance tickets:  

Advance tickets are available to groups of two or more only, and can be purchased through Paypal up to the day before a screening (unless that screening is sold out). Log onto www.paypal.com, and use njmac@aol.com as the send money address. Tickets are $14 each in advance. Include the names of the attendees and the date of the screening in the memo box. We will have a list of those who pre-paid at the door as well. Advance tickets are non-refundable.

Bensimon is teaching the following course this summer:

INDEPENDENT DIGITAL DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING: FROM RESEARCHING AND WRITING TO PRODUCING AND DIRECTING

Additional courses in filmmaking, film and tv studies, film and tv writing, and audio/visual effects can be found here. 

Artists to Hold Protest Exhibition at Atlantic Gallery

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No matter what side of the political spectrum you fall on, there’s no doubt that we are currently in some of the most turbulent political times since the 1960s. It seems everyone is doing what they can to speak out about their political beliefs, and of course artists are no exception to that. One group of artists, which includes CALA studio art professor Meera Thompson, are currently putting together an exhibition called …Or Curse the Darkness: Atlantic Gallery Artists Respond to Our Moment.

The exhibition takes its name from a saying that was most famously invoked by John F. Kennedy: “Light the candle or curse the darkness.” The purpose of the event, then, seeks to shed a light on the current situation and provide people with the means to understand the modern world through art.

The show will take place at the Atlantic Gallery from May 16th to June 3rd. The gallery is open from noon to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and stays open later on Thursdays, when you can view the exhibition until 8 p.m. There will also be a panel of art historians and critics Robert C. Ferrari, James M. Saslow, Marisa Lerer, and Amara Magloughlin on Thursday, June 1st from 6 to 8 p.m. You can also click on the poster above to see the full list of artists and other information.

You also have the chance to learn from one of the artists, as Meera Thompson is teaching two courses this summer: Drawing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Drawing Techniques for Art Specialists. While neither is overtly political, you can use these classes as a jumping off point to begin your own projects that allow you to light your own candle.

CALA Creative Writing Professor Karen Heuler Nominated for Shirley Jackson Award

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The Shirley Jackson Awards honors writers each year in the genres of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic. The awards, created by the author Shirley Jackson’s estate, were established a decade ago. This year, CALA Creative Writing professor Karen Heuler was nominated in the short fiction category for her story “The Apartments,” which is published in her latest short story collection Other Places.

The winners won’t be announced until July 16, when they will be presented at Readercon in Quincy, Massachusetts, which leaves plenty of time to read the nominees’ works. The full list can be read here, and information about Heuler’s Other Places can be found here, along with details on her upcoming novel In Search of Lost Time.

You also have the opportunity to learn from Heuler through CALA by taking her summer online course, Short Story Writing. And if you’re a high school student, you may be interested in her week-long summer intensive Creative Writing: Finding Your Muse in the Metropolis.

Other writing courses being offered this summer can be found here.

More about Karen:

Karen Heuler’s stories have appeared in over 90 literary and speculative magazines and anthologies, from Alaska Quarterly Review to Clarkesworld to Weird Tales. She has published four novels and two story collections with university and small presses, and her last collection was chosen for Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2013 list. She has received an O. Henry award, been shortlisted for a Pushcart prize, for the Iowa short fiction award, the Bellwether award and the Shirley Jackson award for short fiction. Later this year, Aqueduct Press will be publishing her next collection, which follows women facing strange circumstances on this world and others.

The Art and Passion of Translation

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Left to Right: Alessandra Ginzburg, Giovanna Calvino, Jenny McPhee, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ann Goldstein, and Lynne Sharon Schwartz

An extraordinary panel of translators and writers celebrated Jenny McPhee’s new translation of Natalia Ginzburg’s novel, Family Lexicon, last Friday at Casa Italiana. The panel, composed entirely of women, was moderated by historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and featured Jhumpa Lahiri, Ann Goldstein, Giovanni Calvino, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, and Jenny McPhee. As a surprise guest, Natalia Ginzburg’s daughter, Alessandra Ginzburg, also joined the discussion.

Natalia Ginzburg’s stories of her family were woven throughout the panelists wonderfully collaborative and enticing discussion about the art and science of translation. Among the many ideas explored were Jhumpa Lahiri’s vivid descriptions of climbing into the basement of the novel to examine the mechanics of a writer’s language. Jenny McPhee described Ginzburg’s writing as deceptively simple in style but extraordinarily complex in meaning, using uncomplicated language to reveal layers of meaning. 

Casa Italiana had a full house with an overflow room to accommodate as many guests as possible. The conversation, and the stories each woman told, to illuminate their relationship to writing, language, and to mining the depths of another’s writing when translating, were riveting. The serendipitous timing of McPhee’s translation of Lessico Famigliare was not lost on the panel, or the audience, given its relevance to our current political climate.

Family Lexicon has been receiving great reviews, including from Bookforum and the Los Angeles Review of Books, which said it was “masterfully translated.” You can also look at the book here.

To find out more about translation and literature, you can look through CALA’s course offerings for the summer semester and register today:

And for those of you who are serious about learning the art of translation, we also offer an MS in Translation.

Lastly, you can check out more of the pictures from the panel below courtesy of Suzanne Kaplan-Fonseca. Thank you all for such an inspiring event!

New York City Art and Fashion Superstars at CALA

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Ben Copperwheat just finished teaching The Fashion Designer as an Artist at CALA this spring and for the final session he introduced Scooter LaForge and Patricia Fox to his students for a vibrant discussion of their work – photo below. 

CALA students with Ben, Patricia, and Scooter.

Fashion and art, two apparently very different worlds, have been crossing over and merging for the past century, right up to the present day, as contemporary art and fashion collaborations have become the norm, from the runway to the high street. Design labels such as Vivienne Westwood, Alexander McQueen, and Comme des Garçons have expressed vision so forward and revolutionary that it deems to be called art.

Patricia Fox

This has been the theme for record-breaking museum exhibits, such as Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Met, which presented the work of the fashion designer as an artist, and David Bowie Is at the V&A, which explored the relationship between the artist and fashion designers.

Scooter LaForge suit for Walter Van Beirendonck

This summer Ben Copperwheat will be teaching Fashion Design in New York City at the NYU SPS High School Academy. For information and to register some lucky high school student click here: Fashion Design.

During the Fall 2017 Semester he will teach The Fashion Designer as an Artist again so watch this space for registration details and schedule.

For Summer 2017 CALA is offering these courses:

Silver Lining: Fashion and Film

Drawing Techniques for Art Specialists

Linoleum Printmaking

Painting

Landscape Painting in Central Park

Drawing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Art Since 1945: What You Need to Know

The Art Scene

For all Studio Art and Art History Summer Courses please click link below:

Summer 2017 Art Courses

CALA Professor Francis Morrone to Give Lecture on Tuxedo Park’s Architect

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Lorillard Residence in Tuxedo Park

To those who have never made the trek up to Tuxedo Park, it almost sounds like a fictional name of a place in a book about the years before the depression. Interestingly, that’s not far off. The village, developed as a private hunting-and-fishing reserve by Pierre Lorillard II, which was host to famous New Yorkers like JP Morgan and William Waldorf Astor. The architect of the cottages in the area was Bruce Price, and his style went on to influence some of the most famous Modernist architects, including Frank Lloyd Wright.

Bruce Price’s name is not exactly mainstream, but at 3 p.m. this Saturday, August 22, CALA professor Francis Morrone will be giving a lecture on the man at the Tuxedo Historical Society. To find out more about the event, you can go to the official event page.

For more on the history of New York, Francis Morrone will also be teaching Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the New York of their Time this summer. We also are offering three other historical tours of the city:

CALA Instructor Annie Heminway to Host Workshops at 2017 Montreal Literary Festival Blue Metropolis

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Annie Heminway, CALA’s Advanced Creative Writing: French instructor, has been an international literary advisor for the Montreal Literary Festival Blue Metropolis for over 15 years. At this year’s festival, she will be hosting creative writing workshops with her NYUSPS students and other American and Quebecois participants at the Montreal Hotel 10, in presence of three renowned French writers. More information on each workshop can be found below.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN?
Thursday, April 27, from 3: 30 to 4:30 PM

The protagonist of Marcus Malte’s novel is a nameless mute boy, constantly on the run. The boy’s odyssey, a quest for human benevolence lasting three decades, from 1908 to 1938, takes the reader on a journey throughout France. In Le garçon, a story of initiation which also a highly critical chronicle of a specific period in French history, Malte uses a novel type of language to create a philosophical and political vision of life, adding a musical dimension to his style: “Liszt saved him, but Mendelsohn brought him happiness.”

Writing workshop, led by Annie Heminway, in the presence of Marcus Malte, recipient of the prix Femina for 2016

OF EXILE AND COURAGE
Friday, April 28, from 9:30 AM to 12:30

In Romain Gary s’en va-t-en-guerre, as in L’exercice de la médecine, Laurent Seksik blends individual destinies and History, also shedding light on his protagonist’s inner life. l’Histoire. Walking in Romain Gary’s shoes, Seksik illuminates the eminent writer’s  struggle to imaginatively transform his father’s painful absence into a spectral presence. Furthermore, Seksik suggests that the key to Gary’s genius, his exaltations, and despair may be found in the figurative presence of his absent father.

Writing workshop, led by Annie Heminway, in the presence of Laurent Seksik, recipient of the Parisien’s best French novel 2013 award and the prix littéraire de Psychanalyse, 2014.

REMEMBERING THE COLORS OF OUR CHILDHOOD
Saturday, April 29, from 9: 30 AM to 12: 30 PM             

How do we remember colors, in all their sociopolitical, physical, symbolic, literary, and artistic manifestations? Writing with charming spontaneity, Michel Pastoureau nostalgically traces the history of color in France, from the 1950s to the present. How do we, accustomed to a seemingly infinite variety of colors, remember the colors of our past. This book is a dream in which we will see the colors of our memories.

Writing workshop, led by Annie Heminway, in the presence de Michel Pastoureau, recipient of the prix Médicis for essays in 2010

BEING A FIREFIGHTER: AN ARDENT LIFE
Sunday 30 April 30, from 9 :30 AM to 12 :30 PM

Try to imagine—if this is not your profession professional firefighter—a firefighter’s heroic life. You are a fifteen-year veteran in Montreal’s Firehouse 15. You have witnessed many tragedies. You have extinguished a fire at Avenue du Parc, you have fiercely struggled to contain a forest fire in the Laurentians, you have helped many people—and cats—whose names you have forgotten. Looking back your career, you recall many powerful moments, painful and joyful. Relying on a few excerpts which will be provided, you will—unconstrained by the traditional regularities of time and place– recount a memorable experience, writing in the first person, or retelling an imaginary colleague’s story.

Workshop led by Annie Heminway in the presence of  firefighters/aspiring writers celebrating Montreal’s 375th Anniversary.

View the full festival program here: http://bluemetropolis.org/2014festival/

Want to learn French or sharpen your creative writing skills in English? Take a course at CALA this summer!

Culture and Language Bootcamp for Work and Study Abroad: French
French: Accelerated I and II
French II
French: Spoken Contemporary

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Advanced Writing Workshop
Character Development in Fiction
Five Weeks, One Great Short Story
New York Stories: A Writing Workshop
The Fundamentals of Fiction Writing

Annie will also be offering a new French course this Fall–stay tuned for details!

Los Angeles Review of Books: “I Know That Story!”: On Natalia Ginzburg’s “Family Lexicon”

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While “Italian writers” to many in the United States brings to mind Dante and Ferrante with nothing in between, it is unthinkable to omit the hundreds of other authors who come from that southern European country. One such author is Natalia Ginzburg, who wrote about family and fascism during the turbulent years of World War II and after. One of her books, Lessico famigliare (translated as Family Lexicon in its latest version), is being released next Tuesday, April 25, in a new translation by CALA’s own Jenny McPhee.

Eric Gudas recently reviewed the book in “‘I Know That Story!’: On Natalia Ginzburg’s ‘Family Lexicon'” for the Los Angeles Review of Books. As a summary of the plot, Gudas writes:

In her novel, Ginzburg, the daughter of a Jewish-born father and a Catholic-born mother — adamant nonbelievers and socialists both — grows up as the youngest of five siblings during Mussolini’s rise to power. The scene is Turin, home of an antifascist resistance movement into which Ginzburg’s family is increasingly drawn. The young Natalia Levi marries Leone Ginzburg, a Jewish Russian-Italian literary scholar active in the resistance, who will be killed in a Nazi prison before the war’s end, leaving his widow and their three children to return, eventually, to her parents’ home.

The book itself, of course, is not as simple as that. As the title suggests, the book places value on the modes of familial communication. In this review Gudas mentions that Family Lexicon comprises “fart jokes, mimicry, conversation scraps overheard in childhood and repeated for decades, loudly bellowed parental edicts and epithets, invented idioms, puns, libretto excerpts, doggerel, and, occasionally, lyric poems.”

It is books like these that make translation such an interesting art; when the English words must be chosen carefully to ensure they do not shift the intent of the original Italian. For anyone else interested in this process, CALA is hosting “Translation, Women, & Literature: A Panel Celebrating the Life and Work of Natalia Ginzburg.” The event, which will be next Friday, April 28, at NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimo, hosts a panel of six including Jenny McPhee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Ann Goldstein, and others. To RSVP to that event, you can click here.

For those who can’t make it to that event or simply want to dive deeper, CALA also offers a number of literature, writing and translation courses. Just a few relevant classes are listed below:

As always you can find more courses and information on our website. And of course, you can (and should) pre-order Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon now.

NYUSPS CALA Writing Instructor Featured in the New York Post

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Today’s edition of New York Post featured a piece on writing programs at colleges and universities around the city—including one of our own! CALA instructor Jennifer Mattson spoke to NYP about the success of her course, “The Art of the Essay: How to Write Op-Eds, Non-Fiction, and Personal Essays” and the growth of online learning. Read the full article below.

Take The Art of the Essay with Jennifer Mattson this summer!
More summer Writing courses: https://www.sps.nyu.edu/professional-pathways/topics.html#PS0297

Tartuffe Scenes

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Some photos of CALA faculty member, John Hart’s staged reading of Moliere’s classic comedy, Tartuffe. 

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