NYS Writers Institute

The Writers Institute’s central aim is to enhance and celebrate literature, writing, and performance, and to recognize the position of writers as a community within the larger community. Books, films, plays, and their creators can provide portals through which the most personal or complex issues of human understanding can be explored. Each year the Writers Institute brings 40-50 writers to Albany to conduct informal seminars, writing workshops, and readings as part of its Visiting Writers Series. As of 2016 the Institute has hosted well over 1300 writers, poets, journalists, historians, dramatists, and filmmakers. The list includes eight Nobel Award winners, nearly 200 Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners, several Motion Picture Academy Award winners and nominees, and numerous other literary prize recipients. In addition the Institute has hosted many up-and-coming writers to provide them with exposure at the beginning of their writing careers. Our visiting writers represent not only a diversity of literary genres, but also of academic fields, from art to zoology, but also a diversity of race, language, ethnic origin, religion and lifestyle.