Capital Region Curated: September 14-20
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark on Roy Cohn at UAlbany, Suketu Mehta on immigration and citizenship, a free Shakespeare production at Hudson Valley Community College, and a jazz trio at SUNY Schenectady.
Alan Koslow
28
mins read time
Originally published at
Substack: Capital Region Curated
Capital Region Curated, Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events.
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
A Big Fall Week Arrives 🎬🎭📚🎶🎨
Roy Cohn, Immigration, Brownsville Bred, Shakespeare, Jazz, Opalka, and a Very Full Friday
Brownsville Bred screens at UAlbany on Friday, September 18, followed by a discussion with writer-director Elaine Del Valle.
The fall campus calendar has arrived.
This is the first week of the season that feels truly full: major public-affairs conversations, Constitution Day programming, a free Shakespeare production, international film, professional jazz, museum tours, gallery programming, and two regional-extension picks strong enough to justify the drive.
The week opens with Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark discussing their new biography of Roy Cohn. It continues with Mutale Nkonde on AI and bias, Suketu Mehta on immigration and belonging, Will Kempe’s Players performing Shakespeare at Hudson Valley Community College, Brownsville Bred at Page Hall, and Pilc Moutin Hoenig Trio at SUNY Schenectady.
Friday is unusually crowded. Readers will have to choose carefully.
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🧭 Start Here: What’s Inside This Week
This is a full fall week, so start here if you want to scan before choosing.
⭐ Top Picks: Roy Cohn, Suketu Mehta, Brownsville Bred, and Hell in a Handbag
🏛️ Public Affairs: AI bias, banned books, Constitution Day, immigration, and American civic life
🎭 Theater: Measure for Measure at Hudson Valley Community College
🎬 Film & Media: Woman, Life, Freedom Film Festival and Brownsville Bred
🎨 Museums, Galleries & Visual Culture: Tang Teaching Museum, Opalka Gallery, and Williams/WCMA
🎶 Concerts: Pilc Moutin Hoenig Trio and Bard’s Gernsheim/Brahms program
🏞️ Regional History: Curt Stager on The First Adirondackers at Union
🔥 Plan Ahead: Albany Book Festival, American diplomacy, Albany Symphony/Opalka, The Giver, Filene Celebration Concert, and EMPAC immersive audio
⭐ Top Picks
These are the events most worth building your week around.
⭐ Top Pick #1 — Power, Law, Politics, and Roy Cohn
Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark discuss American Scoundrel, their new biography of Roy Cohn, at UAlbany’s Page Hall on Monday, September 14.
American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump — Kai Bird & Susan Goldmark
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute
📅 Monday 9/14, 7:30 PM
📍 Where: Page Hall, UAlbany Downtown Campus, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird and coauthor Susan Goldmark come to Page Hall for one of the week’s strongest public-affairs events.
Their new book, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, follows one of the most consequential and corrosive figures in modern American political and legal culture. Cohn’s life runs through the McCarthy era, New York power politics, celebrity law, organized-crime circles, and eventually Donald Trump’s political formation.
Bird is best known as coauthor of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography that became the basis for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. That alone gives the event weight. But the subject makes it especially timely: Cohn is not simply a historical character. He is part of the genealogy of modern American combat politics.
This is a serious intellectual event and one of the clearest must-consider listings of the week.
⭐ Top Pick #2 — Immigration, Citizenship, and America’s 250th
Suketu Mehta appears twice on Thursday, September 17: first at UAlbany and then at Opalka Gallery.
Suketu Mehta — An Immigrant’s Manifesto
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute and Russell Sage / Opalka Gallery
📅 Thursday 9/17, 4:30–5:30 PM — UAlbany Performing Arts Center Recital Hall
📅 Thursday 9/17, 7:30–8:30 PM — Opalka Gallery, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public; Opalka registration encouraged
🔗 Links: UAlbany map | Opalka map | UAlbany details | Opalka details/register
Suketu Mehta, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found and This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, appears twice on Thursday in two separate public events.
The afternoon event at UAlbany focuses on immigration, cities, migration, identity, and belonging. Mehta’s work is rooted in lived experience, reporting, history, and argument. He writes about immigrants not as an abstract policy category, but as people whose lives are shaped by borders, labor, family, memory, and political fear.
The evening conversation at Opalka Gallery is connected to Constitution Day and America’s 250th anniversary programming. That setting gives the event a different charge. Immigration is not treated only as a current political issue, but as a constitutional, civic, historical, and human question.
Readers interested in immigration, public affairs, journalism, cities, American identity, or the meaning of citizenship should consider one of the two appearances — or both.
⭐ Top Pick #3 — Film, Memory, Brooklyn, and Puerto Rican Girlhood
Brownsville Bred — Screening and Discussion with Elaine Del Valle 🎬
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute
📅 Friday 9/18, 7:00 PM
📍 Where: Page Hall, UAlbany Downtown Campus, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
Brownsville Bred screens at Page Hall, followed by a discussion with writer-director Elaine Del Valle.
The film is a Nuyorican coming-of-age story rooted in Del Valle’s own Puerto Rican girlhood in 1980s Brownsville, Brooklyn. Its path is unusual: the story has existed as a one-woman show, an award-winning short, a young-adult novel, and now a feature film.
That makes this more than a standard screening. It is a chance to see how one autobiographical story moves across forms: stage, page, screen, and public conversation. The film was also the only U.S. Latina-directed live-action narrative to earn Oscar eligibility in 2025, giving the event broader significance within contemporary Latino and independent film.
This is one of Friday night’s major conflicts — and one of the week’s strongest choices.
⭐ Top Pick #4 — Strange, Sharp, One-Night Performance at EMPAC
Jibz Cameron brings Dynasty Handbag to EMPAC for one performance on Saturday, September 19.
Hell in a Handbag — Dynasty Handbag / Jibz Cameron
📅 Saturday 9/19, 7:00–8:15 PM
📍 Where: EMPAC Theater, Troy
🎟️ Cost: $5 general; free with RPI ID
🔗 Links: Map | Details/Tickets
Performance artist Jibz Cameron brings Dynasty Handbag to EMPAC for one night only.
This is not conventional theater, and it should not be sold that way. Cameron’s Dynasty Handbag work moves through character, memoir, absurdist comedy, queer performance, multimedia, readings, and deliberate discomfort. It has the feel of an artist using comedy as both mask and weapon.
The reader value is unusually strong: a professional contemporary-performance artist, one performance only, EMPAC’s theater, and a $5 general ticket. For people who want something stranger, sharper, and less predictable than a standard campus event, this is the pick.
🏛️ Lectures, Public Affairs & Civic Programs
New Tech, Old Biases: AI’s Impact on Gender, Race, and the Classroom — Mutale Nkonde
UAlbany / Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
📅 Monday 9/14, 3:00 PM
📍 Where: Humanities 354, UAlbany Uptown Campus
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
Mutale Nkonde is founder of AI for the People and a nationally recognized researcher and policy adviser working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, race, gender, and technology.
This lecture is timely because the public conversation about AI often races toward novelty: new tools, new efficiencies, new promises. Nkonde’s work pushes in the other direction, asking how old inequalities can be carried into new systems and then made harder to see because they appear inside supposedly neutral technology.
For readers following education, technology, civil rights, public policy, or the social impact of AI, this is one of the week’s strongest lecture options.
The Life & Times of General William North — Kenneth M. Jones
📅 Monday 9/14, 1:30–3:00 PM
📍 Where: Emeritus Center, UAB 134, UAlbany Uptown Campus
🎟️ Cost: Free
🔗 Links: Map | UAlbany calendar
Kenneth M. Jones presents the concluding session of a public-history program on General William North, a Revolutionary War officer, aide to Baron von Steuben, U.S. senator, and significant figure in early New York history.
This is the quieter kind of public-history programming that can be easy to miss on a large campus calendar. It will be most useful to readers interested in Revolutionary-era New York, military history, early American politics, and the local figures whose names rarely receive the same attention as the founders at the center of the national story.
📅 Tuesday 9/15, 11:30 AM–1:00 PM
📍 Where: University Library, Minerva / Reading Room, UAlbany Uptown Campus
🎟️ Cost: Free
🔗 Links: Map | Details / reader sign-up
The Banned Books Read-Out is a participatory Constitution Day week program centered on the freedom to read, censorship, and books that have been banned, challenged, restricted, or targeted for removal.
Readers can sign up to share a short passage, or simply attend and listen. That flexibility makes the event more inviting than a formal panel. It is also a practical reminder that the fights over books and speech are not abstract; they show up in schools, libraries, public institutions, and local communities.
This is a strong civic-humanities listing, especially for readers interested in libraries, education, free expression, and the public life of books.
Constitution Day Live Marathon Reading
📅 Thursday 9/17, 1:00–2:30 PM
📍 Where: University Library Main Entrance, UAlbany Uptown Campus
🎟️ Cost: Free
UAlbany marks Constitution Day with a live marathon reading connected to the university’s broader civic-engagement programming.
The value here is symbolic and public. A live reading slows down a document that is usually invoked in fragments and arguments. It asks people to hear the Constitution as language, not just as a political reference point.
For readers interested in civic life, constitutional history, speech, rights, and public participation, this is a useful daytime campus event.
🎭 Theater & Performance
Will Kempe’s Players bring Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure to Hudson Valley Community College on Wednesday, September 16.
Measure for Measure — Will Kempe’s Players
Hudson Valley Community College / Cultural Affairs Program
📅 Wednesday 9/16, 7:00–9:30 PM
📍 Where: Maureen Stapleton Theatre, Siek Campus Center, HVCC, Troy
🎟️ Cost: Free
Will Kempe’s Players brings Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure to HVCC for a free public performance.
This is one of Shakespeare’s trickier plays: part comedy, part moral drama, part study of justice, power, sexuality, hypocrisy, mercy, and public authority. It is also a play that keeps returning to relevance because it asks what happens when the people enforcing morality are themselves compromised.
A free full-length Shakespeare production is one of the week’s best values. It also broadens the campus-performance map beyond the usual four-year college venues, which is exactly the kind of public programming this newsletter should surface.
🎬 Film & Media
Woman, Life, Freedom Film Festival
Siena University / Creative Arts
📅 Thursday 9/17, 5:15–7:45 PM
📍 Where: The Key Auditorium, Roger Bacon 202, Siena University, Loudonville
🎟️ Cost: Free
Siena University participates in the Woman, Life, Freedom Film Festival, a program of short films created by women from multiple countries addressing women’s experiences and issues.
The international frame is what makes this stand out. Siena’s page describes the festival as being presented during the same period in cities including Paris, London, Prague, and Toronto. That gives the local screening a broader context: a campus audience in Loudonville is joining a larger international cultural conversation.
For readers interested in women’s rights, global film, international arts programming, and campus media events that reach beyond the region, this is one of Thursday’s stronger options.
🎨 Museums, Galleries & Visual Culture
Adam Tinkle leads a curator’s tour of Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move at the Tang Teaching Museum on Friday, September 18.
Curator’s Tour ofElevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move
Skidmore / Tang Teaching Museum
📅 Friday 9/18, 12:00 PM
📍 Where: Atrium, Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
Adam Tinkle, Skidmore Associate Professor and Director of MDOCS, leads a curator’s tour of Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move.
This is not just an “exhibition on view” notice. It is a timed public program with a curator-scholar guiding the audience into the work. That matters because the Tang often builds exhibitions through layers of sound, image, history, teaching, and contemporary practice that become clearer with interpretation.
The noon timing makes it a useful Friday option for Saratoga-area readers before the evening calendar gets crowded.
Opalka Gallery Pop-Up Beer Garden — Student Appreciation / Art Market
📅 Friday 9/18, 6:00–9:00 PM
📍 Where: Opalka Gallery, 140 New Scotland Ave., Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free admission; food and drink available for purchase
Opalka Gallery’s pop-up beer garden continues Friday with a Student Appreciation / Art Market edition tied to the gallery’s fall programming.
The evening includes live music from Swamp Baby and JJ’s OK, beer from Allied Brewing and Fort Orange Brewing, food vendors, gallery access, and an art market with regional makers and vendors.
Although the theme includes student appreciation, this is public-facing Opalka programming rather than a closed student social. It is a good casual option for readers who want art, music, food, and a low-pressure way to visit the gallery.
Kids’ Art Workshop —Light and Transient Causes
📅 Saturday 9/19, 1:00–2:30 PM
📍 Where: Opalka Gallery, 140 New Scotland Ave., Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free; registration required; class size limited
🔗 Links: Map | Details/Register
Opalka Gallery offers a public kids’ art workshop connected to Light and Transient Causes, led by Russell Sage MAT Art Education students.
This is a useful family listing because it connects children directly to the exhibition rather than treating artmaking as a generic craft activity. The workshop gives families a hands-on way into the gallery’s current ideas and makes the exhibition feel accessible to younger visitors.
Registration is required and class size is limited, so this is one to handle before Saturday arrives.
Skidmore / Tang Teaching Museum
📅 Sunday 9/20, 2:00 PM
📍 Where: Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
The Sunday Tang Guide Tour offers a lower-key way to enter the museum’s current exhibitions.
A guided tour is especially helpful at the Tang because the museum’s exhibitions often connect contemporary art, teaching, student engagement, sound, media, and cultural history. A guide can turn a casual visit into a more coherent encounter with the work.
This is the weekend’s quieter museum option and a useful Sunday listing for Saratoga Springs readers.
🎶 Concerts
Pilc Moutin Hoenig Trio performs at SUNY Schenectady on Friday, September 18.
SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz
📅 Friday 9/18, 7:00 PM
📍 Where: Carl B. Taylor Auditorium, Begley Building, SUNY Schenectady
🎟️ Cost: $25 at the door; $26.95 online
Jean-Michel Pilc, François Moutin, and Ari Hoenig bring professional-level jazz to SUNY Schenectady through A Place for Jazz.
This is not a student recital. It is an established jazz trio with international reputations and a performance style built around interplay, improvisation, technical command, and risk. The trio format is also part of the draw: piano, bass, and drums leave nowhere to hide.
Friday night is crowded, but jazz readers should look hard at this one. It is one of the week’s strongest music events.
🏞️ Regional History & the Adirondacks
The First Adirondackers — Curt Stager
Union College / Kelly Adirondack Center
📅 Friday 9/18, 5:30 PM
📍 Where: Old Chapel, Union College, Schenectady
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
Scientist and author Curt Stager discusses The First Adirondackers, created with Mohawk artist David Kanietakeron Fadden.
The program challenges the old claim that the Adirondack uplands were essentially uninhabited before European settlement. Stager and Fadden bring together environmental science, archaeology, Indigenous knowledge, and art to argue for a much longer and richer human presence in the Adirondacks.
This is a particularly good Capital Region Curated listing because it connects regional history, Indigenous presence, science, art, and place. It is also early enough Friday evening to work before some later events — though travel time will matter.
🚗 Regional Extension Picks
Worth the drive if the subject speaks to you
Kelly Akashi gives the Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art at Williams on Thursday, September 17.
Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art: Kelly Akashi
Williams College Museum of Art
📅 Thursday 9/17, 6:00–7:30 PM; reception 5:00 PM
📍 Where: The Williams Inn, Williamstown, MA
🎟️ Cost: Free; reservations requested
🔗 Links: Map | Details / reservations
Internationally exhibited artist Kelly Akashi gives the Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art at Williams College Museum of Art.
Akashi’s talk focuses on her new commission for the new WCMA building: a multipart sculpture to be installed in the east meadows, facing toward campus. WCMA describes this as the first opportunity to learn details of the project, which brings together botanical and ecological references with a scale and placement designed to change how visitors relate to the surrounding landscape.
This clears the Williams regional-extension threshold because it is not routine campus programming. It combines an internationally shown contemporary artist, an established Williams lecture, and a major commission tied to the future of the museum itself.
Leon Botstein conducts The Orchestra Now in Gernsheim and Brahms at Bard’s Fisher Center, September 18–19.
🚗 Regional Extension Pick — Gernsheim Festival Weekend at Bard
“Public program; check Fisher Center listing for reservation details.”
Bard College / Fisher Center / The Orchestra Now
📍 Where: Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson
🔗 Links: Map | Festival / Tickets
Bard has built a substantial weekend around the rediscovery of composer Friedrich Gernsheim, not simply two concerts.
This is exactly the kind of Bard programming that justifies the roughly one-hour drive: a U.S. premiere, a New York revival after more than a century, Leon Botstein, Orion Weiss, scholarship, chamber music, and orchestral performance. Readers can make this a serious Saturday trip — or turn it into an entire weekend.
The festival centers on Gernsheim, a German Jewish composer, pianist, and conductor whose music was later suppressed in Nazi Germany. Bard and The Orchestra Now are treating him not as a footnote, but as a composer worth hearing, studying, and placing back into the larger Romantic tradition.
Saturday 9/19, 11:00 AM — The Life and Legacy of Friedrich Gernsheim
🎟️ Cost: Free; reservations required
🔗 Details: Fisher Center calendar
The day begins with a discussion of Gernsheim’s life, career, historical context, and musical legacy.
This is the scholarship layer of the weekend — the part that helps listeners understand why Gernsheim disappeared from standard concert life and why Bard is making a case for his return. For readers who like music history, Jewish cultural history, recovered composers, or Bard’s distinctive style of contextual programming, this is the place to start.
Saturday 9/19, 1:00 PM — Gernsheim at the Piano
🎟️ Cost: Free; reservations required
🔗 Details / Reservations: Gernsheim at the Piano
The afternoon chamber program features The TŌN Chamber Players and pianist Francis Chung-Yang Huang in music Gernsheim himself premiered in the late 1800s.
The program includes Piano Quartet No. 3 and Piano Quintet No. 2, giving listeners a more intimate way into Gernsheim’s musical language before the evening orchestral concert.
This is what makes the weekend more than a one-off performance: readers can hear the composer in conversation, in chamber scale, and then in full orchestral form.
Saturday 9/19, 7:00 PM — Epic Narratives: Gernsheim and Brahms
Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater
🎟️ Cost: In-person tickets start at $15; free for Bard students; livestream pay what you wish
🔗 Details / Tickets: Epic Narratives: Gernsheim and Brahms
The Orchestra Now performs Gernsheim and Brahms under conductor Leon Botstein, with pianist Orion Weiss.
The program includes:
Friedrich Gernsheim — Zu einem Drama, first New York performance since 1913
Friedrich Gernsheim — Symphony No. 3, “Song of Miriam”, U.S. premiere
Brahms — Piano Concerto No. 1
This is the flagship event of the weekend. The pairing with Brahms matters because Gernsheim and Brahms were contemporaries, and Bard is asking listeners to hear Gernsheim inside that larger Romantic world rather than as an isolated rediscovery.
The same orchestral program is also offered Friday 9/18 at 7:00 PM, but Saturday is the better newsletter recommendation for readers who want the full festival arc.
Sunday 9/20, 11:00 AM — The Romantic Arc
🎟️ Cost: Free; reservations required
🔗 Details: Fisher Center calendar
The weekend concludes with a chamber program continuing the exploration of Gernsheim and his musical world.
This final program gives readers another entry point into the composer beyond the big orchestral evening. For those making a weekend of it, this is the quieter concluding chapter: smaller forces, closer listening, and a final chance to hear why Bard is arguing that Gernsheim deserves renewed attention.
Why this clears the Regional Extension threshold: This is not routine Bard programming. The actual signals are the American premiere, the revival of music unheard in New York for more than a century, Leon Botstein, internationally established pianist Orion Weiss, a full weekend of scholarship and performance, and Bard’s serious institutional commitment to the rediscovery of Friedrich Gernsheim. “Public program; check Fisher Center listing for reservation details.”
For readers who follow classical music, Jewish cultural history, recovered composers, or Bard’s deep-context festival model, this is one of the strongest regional-extension opportunities of the month.
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🔥 Plan Ahead: September 20–October 11
These are the events worth knowing about before their week arrives — because they require planning, offer unusual public value, or may be the sort of event you regret discovering too late.
The 9th Annual Albany Book Festival fills UAlbany’s Campus Center on Saturday, September 26.
📚 9th Annual Albany Book Festival
A full Saturday of writers, panels, books, and public conversation
NYS Writers Institute / UAlbany
📅 Saturday 9/26, 10:30 AM–5:00 PM
📍 Where: UAlbany Campus Center, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
The Albany Book Festival should be on the calendar now.
This is the NYS Writers Institute’s major annual all-day public literary event: authors, panels, conversations, booksellers, signings, open-mic activities, literary organizations, and more than 60 local authors and publishers throughout the Campus Center.
The key point is the time commitment. This is 10:30 AM–5:00 PM, not a single author appearance. Readers who want to get real value from the festival should look at the schedule in advance and protect a substantial part of Saturday.
The festival’s strength is its range. You can build a day around environmental writing, fiction, memoir, international politics, food and restaurant culture, psychological thrillers, young-adult literature, literary criticism, local authors, or simply wander from session to session and discover writers you did not know you needed.
That is why this belongs at the top of Plan Ahead. It is not ticket urgency. It is calendar urgency.
📚 Albany Book Festival Author Watch — Week 2
Capital Region Curated is highlighting a few writers each week so readers can think ahead about which conversations they may want to prioritize during the festival day.
This week: Gish Jen, Porochista Khakpour, and Arash Azizi.
Gish Jen is one of the major fiction writers in this year’s festival lineup, with a career that repeatedly explores immigration, family, American identity, cultural inheritance, and the friction between individual desire and communal expectation.
Her work often has a comic surface, but the comedy is not lightweight. Jen is interested in how people try to belong — to a country, a family, a class, a generation, a story about themselves — and how awkward, painful, and funny that process can be.
At the festival, Jen’s presence is especially interesting because she appears in conversation with Carol Gilligan in the Bad Girls program. Jen’s recent Bad Bad Girl turns toward memoir and family, making the conversation a bridge between fiction, psychology, autobiography, mothers and daughters, and the moral language used to judge women’s lives.
For readers who like fiction that is intelligent, socially observant, emotionally complicated, and often funny in ways that cut deeper than expected, Jen is a festival priority.
Porochista Khakpour brings a different kind of force to the festival: novelist, essayist, memoirist, Iranian American writer, and public voice on illness, exile, identity, politics, and the messy realities of literary life.
Khakpour’s work is personal without being narrow. She writes about the body, migration, addiction, fear, family, literary culture, and dislocation in ways that resist tidy categories. Her public voice is frank, sharp, and unwilling to flatten difficult experience into a comforting lesson.
That makes her a particularly good festival presence. Some authors are best encountered quietly on the page. Others bring an energy to public conversation that changes the room. Khakpour belongs in that second category.
For readers interested in contemporary memoir, Iranian American writing, illness narratives, identity, exile, and the emotional cost of making a literary life, she is one of the festival’s most distinctive figures.
Arash Azizi gives the festival an important international-affairs and political-history dimension.
Azizi writes about Iran, revolution, dictatorship, democracy, left politics, and the long struggle over the future of Iranian society. His work helps readers understand Iran beyond the usual headlines — not simply as a geopolitical problem, but as a country shaped by competing histories, ideologies, movements, exiles, state violence, and acts of resistance.
For Capital Region readers, Azizi’s appearance also connects well to this week’s Siena screening of the Woman, Life, Freedom Film Festival. Both point toward Iranian and global struggles over gender, rights, dissent, and public memory.
If your festival interests include history, international politics, democracy movements, Iran, journalism, or the relationship between political events and human lives, Azizi should be on your schedule.
🌍 2026 Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy
A public program on what diplomats actually do
International Center of the Capital Region / UAlbany
📅 Tuesday 10/6, 7:00–9:00 PM; doors open 6:30 PM
📍 Where: UAlbany Performing Arts Center Recital Hall, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free; registration available
🔗 Links: Map | Details/Register
Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy is one of the strongest civic and international-affairs programs currently announced for early fall.
The featured presentation, Portraits of American Diplomacy, is by recently retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer Tom Selinger. Drawing on oral histories from the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, the program looks at what diplomats actually do: helping Americans during international crises, opening markets, strengthening alliances, and advancing democratic values.
That practical frame is what makes the event stronger than a routine foreign-policy lecture. Diplomacy is often discussed in abstractions — alliances, strategy, treaties, national interest. This program brings it back to people: the diplomats sent overseas, the Americans they assist, the crises they manage, the local relationships they build, and the human judgment required when policy meets real events.
Readers interested in government service, foreign affairs, history, national security, international relations, public service, or America’s role in the world should mark this now. It is the sort of civic program that can draw well beyond a campus audience.
🎶 David Alan Miller in Conversation with Celka Ojakangas
A conductor, a composer, and live Albany Symphony musicians inside Opalka Gallery
David Alan Miller joins composer Celka Ojakangas at Opalka Gallery on Saturday, October 3.
Opalka Gallery / Albany Symphony
📅 Saturday 10/3, 1:00–2:30 PM
📍 Where: Opalka Gallery, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free; advance registration encouraged
🔗 Links: Map | Details/Register
Albany Symphony Music Director David Alan Miller joins composer Celka Ojakangas for an afternoon conversation at Opalka Gallery, followed by a live performance by Albany Symphony musicians.
The combination is what makes this strong: a major regional conductor, a working contemporary composer, and a performance component that lets audiences hear the music after hearing about it.
For a reader who has ever wondered how new music actually comes into being — how a composer thinks, how performers interpret, how a conductor frames a work for an audience — this is a unusually good opportunity. It makes contemporary music less remote and more immediate.
It is also a smart Saturday event: compact, free, early afternoon, and easy to pair with dinner or another evening plan. Register ahead and put it on the calendar before October fills up.
Skidmore introduces some of its strongest new young musicians
Skidmore College / Arthur Zankel Music Center
📅 Friday 10/2, 7:00–9:00 PM
📍 Where: Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall, Arthur Zankel Music Center, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Cost: Free; no ticket required; RSVP encouraged
🔗 Links: Map | Skidmore Music
The Filene Celebration Concert showcases the winners of Skidmore’s 45th Annual Filene Scholarship Competition alongside current Filene Scholars and faculty artists.
The newly selected Class of 2030 scholars include Gina LeBeau and Lily Maynard, voice; Jacob Miller, cello; and Oliver Wyman, French horn. The Filene Scholarship is Skidmore’s prestigious merit award for exceptional young musicians, and this concert introduces some of the strongest incoming musical talent at the beginning of their Skidmore careers.
This is not just another student recital. It is a first look at young musicians whom Skidmore has chosen to support and feature. For readers who follow classical music, student performance, or Zankel programming, it is a useful early-season marker.
The value is also practical: free admission, a strong venue, and a program likely to introduce performers worth following over the next several years.
📖 Literature to Life:The Giver by Lois Lowry
A familiar book becomes live theater
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute / Performing Arts Center
📅 Monday 10/5, 7:00 PM
📍 Where: UAlbany Performing Arts Center Main Theatre, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Ticketed event; check event page for price
🔗 Links: Map | NYS Writers Institute
The Giver is one of the most widely read and discussed works of young-adult literature in the United States.
The stage presentation gives audiences a new way into Lois Lowry’s story of memory, conformity, control, choice, and the hidden costs of a supposedly perfect society. It should appeal to readers, teachers, librarians, families, and anyone interested in how a familiar book changes when it becomes live performance.
This is worth noting early because it has broader community appeal than the average campus arts event. Many readers will know the novel from school, parenting, teaching, library programs, or banned-book discussions. Seeing it performed live can reopen the story for adults as well as younger audiences.
The themes are still sharp: Who controls memory? What does a peaceful society hide? What is lost when choice is traded for safety? That makes this a strong Plan Ahead listing, especially for families, educators, and readers who want a literary event that is accessible without being simplistic.
EMPAC’s INTERFACE series explores immersive audio with Felix Deufel and Matthew Goodheart on October 8.
EMPAC opens a door into spatial sound and experimental listening
📅 Thursday 10/8, 6:00–7:00 PM
📍 Where: EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman, Troy
🎟️ Cost: Free
EMPAC’s INTERFACE series brings artists and researchers together around the places where technology and artistic practice meet.
This installment features Felix Deufel, director of the Center for Media Art, Music, and Technology in Leipzig, and RPI composer/technologist Matthew Goodheart, in conversation about spatial sound, acoustics, composition, and immersive audio.
The October 8 talk is part of a broader cluster: Deufel leads a Grapes 3D audio-software workshop on October 9, and his work can be heard October 10 on EMPAC Studio 1’s 39-speaker ambisonic system.
This is specialized, but that is the point. EMPAC exists partly to give Capital Region audiences access to experimental work they would otherwise need to travel to a major research or contemporary-art center to experience. For readers interested in sound, music, technology, immersive environments, acoustics, or the future of performance spaces, this is worth planning around.
📅 By Day Calendar
Monday — September 14
• The Life & Times of General William North — UAlbany Emeritus Center, UAB 134 (1:30–3:00 PM) — Free
• New Tech, Old Biases: AI’s Impact on Gender, Race, and the Classroom — UAlbany, Humanities 354 (3:00 PM) — Free
• American Scoundrel: Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark — UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute, Page Hall (7:30 PM) — Free
Tuesday — September 15
• Banned Books Read-Out — UAlbany Libraries, Minerva / Reading Room (11:30 AM–1:00 PM) — Free
Wednesday — September 16
• Measure for Measure — HVCC / Will Kempe’s Players, Maureen Stapleton Theatre (7:00–9:30 PM) — Free
Thursday — September 17
• Constitution Day Live Marathon Reading — UAlbany Libraries, University Library Main Entrance (1:00–2:30 PM) — Free
• Suketu Mehta — UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute, PAC Recital Hall (4:30–5:30 PM) — Free
• Woman, Life, Freedom Film Festival — Siena University, The Key Auditorium, Roger Bacon 202 (5:15–7:45 PM) — Free
• Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art: Kelly Akashi — Williams College Museum of Art / Williams Inn (reception 5:00 PM; lecture 6:00 PM) — Free; reservations requested
• Suketu Mehta — Opalka Gallery (7:30–8:30 PM) — Free; registration encouraged
Friday — September 18
• Curator’s Tour of Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move — Tang Teaching Museum, Atrium (12:00 PM) — Free
• The First Adirondackers — Union College / Kelly Adirondack Center, Old Chapel (5:30 PM) — Free
• Opalka Gallery Pop-Up Beer Garden — Student Appreciation / Art Market — Opalka Gallery (6:00–9:00 PM) — Free admission; food and drink available for purchase
• Pilc Moutin Hoenig Trio — SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz, Carl B. Taylor Auditorium (7:00 PM) — $25 at door; $26.95 online
• Brownsville Bred — UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute, Page Hall (7:00 PM) — Free
• Epic Narratives: Gernsheim and Brahms — Bard / Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater (7:00 PM) — Tickets start at $15; livestream pay what you wish
Saturday — September 19
• Kids’ Art Workshop — Light and Transient Causes — Opalka Gallery (1:00–2:30 PM) — Free; registration required
• Hell in a Handbag — RPI / EMPAC Theater (7:00–8:15 PM) — $5 general; free with RPI ID
• Epic Narratives: Gernsheim and Brahms — Bard / Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater (7:00 PM) — Tickets start at $15; livestream pay what you wish
Sunday — September 20
• Tang Guide Tour — Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs (2:00 PM) — Free
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Capital Region Curated: September 14-20
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark on Roy Cohn at UAlbany, Suketu Mehta on immigration and citizenship, a free Shakespeare production at Hudson Valley Community College, and a jazz trio at SUNY Schenectady.
Alan Koslow
28
mins read time
Originally published at
Substack: Capital Region Curated
Capital Region Curated, Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events.
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
A Big Fall Week Arrives 🎬🎭📚🎶🎨
Roy Cohn, Immigration, Brownsville Bred, Shakespeare, Jazz, Opalka, and a Very Full Friday
Brownsville Bred screens at UAlbany on Friday, September 18, followed by a discussion with writer-director Elaine Del Valle.
The fall campus calendar has arrived.
This is the first week of the season that feels truly full: major public-affairs conversations, Constitution Day programming, a free Shakespeare production, international film, professional jazz, museum tours, gallery programming, and two regional-extension picks strong enough to justify the drive.
The week opens with Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark discussing their new biography of Roy Cohn. It continues with Mutale Nkonde on AI and bias, Suketu Mehta on immigration and belonging, Will Kempe’s Players performing Shakespeare at Hudson Valley Community College, Brownsville Bred at Page Hall, and Pilc Moutin Hoenig Trio at SUNY Schenectady.
Friday is unusually crowded. Readers will have to choose carefully.
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🧭 Start Here: What’s Inside This Week
This is a full fall week, so start here if you want to scan before choosing.
⭐ Top Picks: Roy Cohn, Suketu Mehta, Brownsville Bred, and Hell in a Handbag
🏛️ Public Affairs: AI bias, banned books, Constitution Day, immigration, and American civic life
🎭 Theater: Measure for Measure at Hudson Valley Community College
🎬 Film & Media: Woman, Life, Freedom Film Festival and Brownsville Bred
🎨 Museums, Galleries & Visual Culture: Tang Teaching Museum, Opalka Gallery, and Williams/WCMA
🎶 Concerts: Pilc Moutin Hoenig Trio and Bard’s Gernsheim/Brahms program
🏞️ Regional History: Curt Stager on The First Adirondackers at Union
🔥 Plan Ahead: Albany Book Festival, American diplomacy, Albany Symphony/Opalka, The Giver, Filene Celebration Concert, and EMPAC immersive audio
⭐ Top Picks
These are the events most worth building your week around.
⭐ Top Pick #1 — Power, Law, Politics, and Roy Cohn
Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark discuss American Scoundrel, their new biography of Roy Cohn, at UAlbany’s Page Hall on Monday, September 14.
American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump — Kai Bird & Susan Goldmark
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute
📅 Monday 9/14, 7:30 PM
📍 Where: Page Hall, UAlbany Downtown Campus, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird and coauthor Susan Goldmark come to Page Hall for one of the week’s strongest public-affairs events.
Their new book, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, follows one of the most consequential and corrosive figures in modern American political and legal culture. Cohn’s life runs through the McCarthy era, New York power politics, celebrity law, organized-crime circles, and eventually Donald Trump’s political formation.
Bird is best known as coauthor of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography that became the basis for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. That alone gives the event weight. But the subject makes it especially timely: Cohn is not simply a historical character. He is part of the genealogy of modern American combat politics.
This is a serious intellectual event and one of the clearest must-consider listings of the week.
⭐ Top Pick #2 — Immigration, Citizenship, and America’s 250th
Suketu Mehta appears twice on Thursday, September 17: first at UAlbany and then at Opalka Gallery.
Suketu Mehta — An Immigrant’s Manifesto
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute and Russell Sage / Opalka Gallery
📅 Thursday 9/17, 4:30–5:30 PM — UAlbany Performing Arts Center Recital Hall
📅 Thursday 9/17, 7:30–8:30 PM — Opalka Gallery, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public; Opalka registration encouraged
🔗 Links: UAlbany map | Opalka map | UAlbany details | Opalka details/register
Suketu Mehta, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found and This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, appears twice on Thursday in two separate public events.
The afternoon event at UAlbany focuses on immigration, cities, migration, identity, and belonging. Mehta’s work is rooted in lived experience, reporting, history, and argument. He writes about immigrants not as an abstract policy category, but as people whose lives are shaped by borders, labor, family, memory, and political fear.
The evening conversation at Opalka Gallery is connected to Constitution Day and America’s 250th anniversary programming. That setting gives the event a different charge. Immigration is not treated only as a current political issue, but as a constitutional, civic, historical, and human question.
Readers interested in immigration, public affairs, journalism, cities, American identity, or the meaning of citizenship should consider one of the two appearances — or both.
⭐ Top Pick #3 — Film, Memory, Brooklyn, and Puerto Rican Girlhood
Brownsville Bred — Screening and Discussion with Elaine Del Valle 🎬
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute
📅 Friday 9/18, 7:00 PM
📍 Where: Page Hall, UAlbany Downtown Campus, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
Brownsville Bred screens at Page Hall, followed by a discussion with writer-director Elaine Del Valle.
The film is a Nuyorican coming-of-age story rooted in Del Valle’s own Puerto Rican girlhood in 1980s Brownsville, Brooklyn. Its path is unusual: the story has existed as a one-woman show, an award-winning short, a young-adult novel, and now a feature film.
That makes this more than a standard screening. It is a chance to see how one autobiographical story moves across forms: stage, page, screen, and public conversation. The film was also the only U.S. Latina-directed live-action narrative to earn Oscar eligibility in 2025, giving the event broader significance within contemporary Latino and independent film.
This is one of Friday night’s major conflicts — and one of the week’s strongest choices.
⭐ Top Pick #4 — Strange, Sharp, One-Night Performance at EMPAC
Jibz Cameron brings Dynasty Handbag to EMPAC for one performance on Saturday, September 19.
Hell in a Handbag — Dynasty Handbag / Jibz Cameron
📅 Saturday 9/19, 7:00–8:15 PM
📍 Where: EMPAC Theater, Troy
🎟️ Cost: $5 general; free with RPI ID
🔗 Links: Map | Details/Tickets
Performance artist Jibz Cameron brings Dynasty Handbag to EMPAC for one night only.
This is not conventional theater, and it should not be sold that way. Cameron’s Dynasty Handbag work moves through character, memoir, absurdist comedy, queer performance, multimedia, readings, and deliberate discomfort. It has the feel of an artist using comedy as both mask and weapon.
The reader value is unusually strong: a professional contemporary-performance artist, one performance only, EMPAC’s theater, and a $5 general ticket. For people who want something stranger, sharper, and less predictable than a standard campus event, this is the pick.
🏛️ Lectures, Public Affairs & Civic Programs
New Tech, Old Biases: AI’s Impact on Gender, Race, and the Classroom — Mutale Nkonde
UAlbany / Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
📅 Monday 9/14, 3:00 PM
📍 Where: Humanities 354, UAlbany Uptown Campus
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
Mutale Nkonde is founder of AI for the People and a nationally recognized researcher and policy adviser working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, race, gender, and technology.
This lecture is timely because the public conversation about AI often races toward novelty: new tools, new efficiencies, new promises. Nkonde’s work pushes in the other direction, asking how old inequalities can be carried into new systems and then made harder to see because they appear inside supposedly neutral technology.
For readers following education, technology, civil rights, public policy, or the social impact of AI, this is one of the week’s strongest lecture options.
The Life & Times of General William North — Kenneth M. Jones
📅 Monday 9/14, 1:30–3:00 PM
📍 Where: Emeritus Center, UAB 134, UAlbany Uptown Campus
🎟️ Cost: Free
🔗 Links: Map | UAlbany calendar
Kenneth M. Jones presents the concluding session of a public-history program on General William North, a Revolutionary War officer, aide to Baron von Steuben, U.S. senator, and significant figure in early New York history.
This is the quieter kind of public-history programming that can be easy to miss on a large campus calendar. It will be most useful to readers interested in Revolutionary-era New York, military history, early American politics, and the local figures whose names rarely receive the same attention as the founders at the center of the national story.
📅 Tuesday 9/15, 11:30 AM–1:00 PM
📍 Where: University Library, Minerva / Reading Room, UAlbany Uptown Campus
🎟️ Cost: Free
🔗 Links: Map | Details / reader sign-up
The Banned Books Read-Out is a participatory Constitution Day week program centered on the freedom to read, censorship, and books that have been banned, challenged, restricted, or targeted for removal.
Readers can sign up to share a short passage, or simply attend and listen. That flexibility makes the event more inviting than a formal panel. It is also a practical reminder that the fights over books and speech are not abstract; they show up in schools, libraries, public institutions, and local communities.
This is a strong civic-humanities listing, especially for readers interested in libraries, education, free expression, and the public life of books.
Constitution Day Live Marathon Reading
📅 Thursday 9/17, 1:00–2:30 PM
📍 Where: University Library Main Entrance, UAlbany Uptown Campus
🎟️ Cost: Free
UAlbany marks Constitution Day with a live marathon reading connected to the university’s broader civic-engagement programming.
The value here is symbolic and public. A live reading slows down a document that is usually invoked in fragments and arguments. It asks people to hear the Constitution as language, not just as a political reference point.
For readers interested in civic life, constitutional history, speech, rights, and public participation, this is a useful daytime campus event.
🎭 Theater & Performance
Will Kempe’s Players bring Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure to Hudson Valley Community College on Wednesday, September 16.
Measure for Measure — Will Kempe’s Players
Hudson Valley Community College / Cultural Affairs Program
📅 Wednesday 9/16, 7:00–9:30 PM
📍 Where: Maureen Stapleton Theatre, Siek Campus Center, HVCC, Troy
🎟️ Cost: Free
Will Kempe’s Players brings Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure to HVCC for a free public performance.
This is one of Shakespeare’s trickier plays: part comedy, part moral drama, part study of justice, power, sexuality, hypocrisy, mercy, and public authority. It is also a play that keeps returning to relevance because it asks what happens when the people enforcing morality are themselves compromised.
A free full-length Shakespeare production is one of the week’s best values. It also broadens the campus-performance map beyond the usual four-year college venues, which is exactly the kind of public programming this newsletter should surface.
🎬 Film & Media
Woman, Life, Freedom Film Festival
Siena University / Creative Arts
📅 Thursday 9/17, 5:15–7:45 PM
📍 Where: The Key Auditorium, Roger Bacon 202, Siena University, Loudonville
🎟️ Cost: Free
Siena University participates in the Woman, Life, Freedom Film Festival, a program of short films created by women from multiple countries addressing women’s experiences and issues.
The international frame is what makes this stand out. Siena’s page describes the festival as being presented during the same period in cities including Paris, London, Prague, and Toronto. That gives the local screening a broader context: a campus audience in Loudonville is joining a larger international cultural conversation.
For readers interested in women’s rights, global film, international arts programming, and campus media events that reach beyond the region, this is one of Thursday’s stronger options.
🎨 Museums, Galleries & Visual Culture
Adam Tinkle leads a curator’s tour of Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move at the Tang Teaching Museum on Friday, September 18.
Curator’s Tour ofElevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move
Skidmore / Tang Teaching Museum
📅 Friday 9/18, 12:00 PM
📍 Where: Atrium, Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
Adam Tinkle, Skidmore Associate Professor and Director of MDOCS, leads a curator’s tour of Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move.
This is not just an “exhibition on view” notice. It is a timed public program with a curator-scholar guiding the audience into the work. That matters because the Tang often builds exhibitions through layers of sound, image, history, teaching, and contemporary practice that become clearer with interpretation.
The noon timing makes it a useful Friday option for Saratoga-area readers before the evening calendar gets crowded.
Opalka Gallery Pop-Up Beer Garden — Student Appreciation / Art Market
📅 Friday 9/18, 6:00–9:00 PM
📍 Where: Opalka Gallery, 140 New Scotland Ave., Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free admission; food and drink available for purchase
Opalka Gallery’s pop-up beer garden continues Friday with a Student Appreciation / Art Market edition tied to the gallery’s fall programming.
The evening includes live music from Swamp Baby and JJ’s OK, beer from Allied Brewing and Fort Orange Brewing, food vendors, gallery access, and an art market with regional makers and vendors.
Although the theme includes student appreciation, this is public-facing Opalka programming rather than a closed student social. It is a good casual option for readers who want art, music, food, and a low-pressure way to visit the gallery.
Kids’ Art Workshop —Light and Transient Causes
📅 Saturday 9/19, 1:00–2:30 PM
📍 Where: Opalka Gallery, 140 New Scotland Ave., Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free; registration required; class size limited
🔗 Links: Map | Details/Register
Opalka Gallery offers a public kids’ art workshop connected to Light and Transient Causes, led by Russell Sage MAT Art Education students.
This is a useful family listing because it connects children directly to the exhibition rather than treating artmaking as a generic craft activity. The workshop gives families a hands-on way into the gallery’s current ideas and makes the exhibition feel accessible to younger visitors.
Registration is required and class size is limited, so this is one to handle before Saturday arrives.
Skidmore / Tang Teaching Museum
📅 Sunday 9/20, 2:00 PM
📍 Where: Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
The Sunday Tang Guide Tour offers a lower-key way to enter the museum’s current exhibitions.
A guided tour is especially helpful at the Tang because the museum’s exhibitions often connect contemporary art, teaching, student engagement, sound, media, and cultural history. A guide can turn a casual visit into a more coherent encounter with the work.
This is the weekend’s quieter museum option and a useful Sunday listing for Saratoga Springs readers.
🎶 Concerts
Pilc Moutin Hoenig Trio performs at SUNY Schenectady on Friday, September 18.
SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz
📅 Friday 9/18, 7:00 PM
📍 Where: Carl B. Taylor Auditorium, Begley Building, SUNY Schenectady
🎟️ Cost: $25 at the door; $26.95 online
Jean-Michel Pilc, François Moutin, and Ari Hoenig bring professional-level jazz to SUNY Schenectady through A Place for Jazz.
This is not a student recital. It is an established jazz trio with international reputations and a performance style built around interplay, improvisation, technical command, and risk. The trio format is also part of the draw: piano, bass, and drums leave nowhere to hide.
Friday night is crowded, but jazz readers should look hard at this one. It is one of the week’s strongest music events.
🏞️ Regional History & the Adirondacks
The First Adirondackers — Curt Stager
Union College / Kelly Adirondack Center
📅 Friday 9/18, 5:30 PM
📍 Where: Old Chapel, Union College, Schenectady
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
Scientist and author Curt Stager discusses The First Adirondackers, created with Mohawk artist David Kanietakeron Fadden.
The program challenges the old claim that the Adirondack uplands were essentially uninhabited before European settlement. Stager and Fadden bring together environmental science, archaeology, Indigenous knowledge, and art to argue for a much longer and richer human presence in the Adirondacks.
This is a particularly good Capital Region Curated listing because it connects regional history, Indigenous presence, science, art, and place. It is also early enough Friday evening to work before some later events — though travel time will matter.
🚗 Regional Extension Picks
Worth the drive if the subject speaks to you
Kelly Akashi gives the Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art at Williams on Thursday, September 17.
Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art: Kelly Akashi
Williams College Museum of Art
📅 Thursday 9/17, 6:00–7:30 PM; reception 5:00 PM
📍 Where: The Williams Inn, Williamstown, MA
🎟️ Cost: Free; reservations requested
🔗 Links: Map | Details / reservations
Internationally exhibited artist Kelly Akashi gives the Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art at Williams College Museum of Art.
Akashi’s talk focuses on her new commission for the new WCMA building: a multipart sculpture to be installed in the east meadows, facing toward campus. WCMA describes this as the first opportunity to learn details of the project, which brings together botanical and ecological references with a scale and placement designed to change how visitors relate to the surrounding landscape.
This clears the Williams regional-extension threshold because it is not routine campus programming. It combines an internationally shown contemporary artist, an established Williams lecture, and a major commission tied to the future of the museum itself.
Leon Botstein conducts The Orchestra Now in Gernsheim and Brahms at Bard’s Fisher Center, September 18–19.
🚗 Regional Extension Pick — Gernsheim Festival Weekend at Bard
“Public program; check Fisher Center listing for reservation details.”
Bard College / Fisher Center / The Orchestra Now
📍 Where: Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson
🔗 Links: Map | Festival / Tickets
Bard has built a substantial weekend around the rediscovery of composer Friedrich Gernsheim, not simply two concerts.
This is exactly the kind of Bard programming that justifies the roughly one-hour drive: a U.S. premiere, a New York revival after more than a century, Leon Botstein, Orion Weiss, scholarship, chamber music, and orchestral performance. Readers can make this a serious Saturday trip — or turn it into an entire weekend.
The festival centers on Gernsheim, a German Jewish composer, pianist, and conductor whose music was later suppressed in Nazi Germany. Bard and The Orchestra Now are treating him not as a footnote, but as a composer worth hearing, studying, and placing back into the larger Romantic tradition.
Saturday 9/19, 11:00 AM — The Life and Legacy of Friedrich Gernsheim
🎟️ Cost: Free; reservations required
🔗 Details: Fisher Center calendar
The day begins with a discussion of Gernsheim’s life, career, historical context, and musical legacy.
This is the scholarship layer of the weekend — the part that helps listeners understand why Gernsheim disappeared from standard concert life and why Bard is making a case for his return. For readers who like music history, Jewish cultural history, recovered composers, or Bard’s distinctive style of contextual programming, this is the place to start.
Saturday 9/19, 1:00 PM — Gernsheim at the Piano
🎟️ Cost: Free; reservations required
🔗 Details / Reservations: Gernsheim at the Piano
The afternoon chamber program features The TŌN Chamber Players and pianist Francis Chung-Yang Huang in music Gernsheim himself premiered in the late 1800s.
The program includes Piano Quartet No. 3 and Piano Quintet No. 2, giving listeners a more intimate way into Gernsheim’s musical language before the evening orchestral concert.
This is what makes the weekend more than a one-off performance: readers can hear the composer in conversation, in chamber scale, and then in full orchestral form.
Saturday 9/19, 7:00 PM — Epic Narratives: Gernsheim and Brahms
Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater
🎟️ Cost: In-person tickets start at $15; free for Bard students; livestream pay what you wish
🔗 Details / Tickets: Epic Narratives: Gernsheim and Brahms
The Orchestra Now performs Gernsheim and Brahms under conductor Leon Botstein, with pianist Orion Weiss.
The program includes:
Friedrich Gernsheim — Zu einem Drama, first New York performance since 1913
Friedrich Gernsheim — Symphony No. 3, “Song of Miriam”, U.S. premiere
Brahms — Piano Concerto No. 1
This is the flagship event of the weekend. The pairing with Brahms matters because Gernsheim and Brahms were contemporaries, and Bard is asking listeners to hear Gernsheim inside that larger Romantic world rather than as an isolated rediscovery.
The same orchestral program is also offered Friday 9/18 at 7:00 PM, but Saturday is the better newsletter recommendation for readers who want the full festival arc.
Sunday 9/20, 11:00 AM — The Romantic Arc
🎟️ Cost: Free; reservations required
🔗 Details: Fisher Center calendar
The weekend concludes with a chamber program continuing the exploration of Gernsheim and his musical world.
This final program gives readers another entry point into the composer beyond the big orchestral evening. For those making a weekend of it, this is the quieter concluding chapter: smaller forces, closer listening, and a final chance to hear why Bard is arguing that Gernsheim deserves renewed attention.
Why this clears the Regional Extension threshold: This is not routine Bard programming. The actual signals are the American premiere, the revival of music unheard in New York for more than a century, Leon Botstein, internationally established pianist Orion Weiss, a full weekend of scholarship and performance, and Bard’s serious institutional commitment to the rediscovery of Friedrich Gernsheim. “Public program; check Fisher Center listing for reservation details.”
For readers who follow classical music, Jewish cultural history, recovered composers, or Bard’s deep-context festival model, this is one of the strongest regional-extension opportunities of the month.
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🔥 Plan Ahead: September 20–October 11
These are the events worth knowing about before their week arrives — because they require planning, offer unusual public value, or may be the sort of event you regret discovering too late.
The 9th Annual Albany Book Festival fills UAlbany’s Campus Center on Saturday, September 26.
📚 9th Annual Albany Book Festival
A full Saturday of writers, panels, books, and public conversation
NYS Writers Institute / UAlbany
📅 Saturday 9/26, 10:30 AM–5:00 PM
📍 Where: UAlbany Campus Center, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
The Albany Book Festival should be on the calendar now.
This is the NYS Writers Institute’s major annual all-day public literary event: authors, panels, conversations, booksellers, signings, open-mic activities, literary organizations, and more than 60 local authors and publishers throughout the Campus Center.
The key point is the time commitment. This is 10:30 AM–5:00 PM, not a single author appearance. Readers who want to get real value from the festival should look at the schedule in advance and protect a substantial part of Saturday.
The festival’s strength is its range. You can build a day around environmental writing, fiction, memoir, international politics, food and restaurant culture, psychological thrillers, young-adult literature, literary criticism, local authors, or simply wander from session to session and discover writers you did not know you needed.
That is why this belongs at the top of Plan Ahead. It is not ticket urgency. It is calendar urgency.
📚 Albany Book Festival Author Watch — Week 2
Capital Region Curated is highlighting a few writers each week so readers can think ahead about which conversations they may want to prioritize during the festival day.
This week: Gish Jen, Porochista Khakpour, and Arash Azizi.
Gish Jen is one of the major fiction writers in this year’s festival lineup, with a career that repeatedly explores immigration, family, American identity, cultural inheritance, and the friction between individual desire and communal expectation.
Her work often has a comic surface, but the comedy is not lightweight. Jen is interested in how people try to belong — to a country, a family, a class, a generation, a story about themselves — and how awkward, painful, and funny that process can be.
At the festival, Jen’s presence is especially interesting because she appears in conversation with Carol Gilligan in the Bad Girls program. Jen’s recent Bad Bad Girl turns toward memoir and family, making the conversation a bridge between fiction, psychology, autobiography, mothers and daughters, and the moral language used to judge women’s lives.
For readers who like fiction that is intelligent, socially observant, emotionally complicated, and often funny in ways that cut deeper than expected, Jen is a festival priority.
Porochista Khakpour brings a different kind of force to the festival: novelist, essayist, memoirist, Iranian American writer, and public voice on illness, exile, identity, politics, and the messy realities of literary life.
Khakpour’s work is personal without being narrow. She writes about the body, migration, addiction, fear, family, literary culture, and dislocation in ways that resist tidy categories. Her public voice is frank, sharp, and unwilling to flatten difficult experience into a comforting lesson.
That makes her a particularly good festival presence. Some authors are best encountered quietly on the page. Others bring an energy to public conversation that changes the room. Khakpour belongs in that second category.
For readers interested in contemporary memoir, Iranian American writing, illness narratives, identity, exile, and the emotional cost of making a literary life, she is one of the festival’s most distinctive figures.
Arash Azizi gives the festival an important international-affairs and political-history dimension.
Azizi writes about Iran, revolution, dictatorship, democracy, left politics, and the long struggle over the future of Iranian society. His work helps readers understand Iran beyond the usual headlines — not simply as a geopolitical problem, but as a country shaped by competing histories, ideologies, movements, exiles, state violence, and acts of resistance.
For Capital Region readers, Azizi’s appearance also connects well to this week’s Siena screening of the Woman, Life, Freedom Film Festival. Both point toward Iranian and global struggles over gender, rights, dissent, and public memory.
If your festival interests include history, international politics, democracy movements, Iran, journalism, or the relationship between political events and human lives, Azizi should be on your schedule.
🌍 2026 Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy
A public program on what diplomats actually do
International Center of the Capital Region / UAlbany
📅 Tuesday 10/6, 7:00–9:00 PM; doors open 6:30 PM
📍 Where: UAlbany Performing Arts Center Recital Hall, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free; registration available
🔗 Links: Map | Details/Register
Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy is one of the strongest civic and international-affairs programs currently announced for early fall.
The featured presentation, Portraits of American Diplomacy, is by recently retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer Tom Selinger. Drawing on oral histories from the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, the program looks at what diplomats actually do: helping Americans during international crises, opening markets, strengthening alliances, and advancing democratic values.
That practical frame is what makes the event stronger than a routine foreign-policy lecture. Diplomacy is often discussed in abstractions — alliances, strategy, treaties, national interest. This program brings it back to people: the diplomats sent overseas, the Americans they assist, the crises they manage, the local relationships they build, and the human judgment required when policy meets real events.
Readers interested in government service, foreign affairs, history, national security, international relations, public service, or America’s role in the world should mark this now. It is the sort of civic program that can draw well beyond a campus audience.
🎶 David Alan Miller in Conversation with Celka Ojakangas
A conductor, a composer, and live Albany Symphony musicians inside Opalka Gallery
David Alan Miller joins composer Celka Ojakangas at Opalka Gallery on Saturday, October 3.
Opalka Gallery / Albany Symphony
📅 Saturday 10/3, 1:00–2:30 PM
📍 Where: Opalka Gallery, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free; advance registration encouraged
🔗 Links: Map | Details/Register
Albany Symphony Music Director David Alan Miller joins composer Celka Ojakangas for an afternoon conversation at Opalka Gallery, followed by a live performance by Albany Symphony musicians.
The combination is what makes this strong: a major regional conductor, a working contemporary composer, and a performance component that lets audiences hear the music after hearing about it.
For a reader who has ever wondered how new music actually comes into being — how a composer thinks, how performers interpret, how a conductor frames a work for an audience — this is a unusually good opportunity. It makes contemporary music less remote and more immediate.
It is also a smart Saturday event: compact, free, early afternoon, and easy to pair with dinner or another evening plan. Register ahead and put it on the calendar before October fills up.
Skidmore introduces some of its strongest new young musicians
Skidmore College / Arthur Zankel Music Center
📅 Friday 10/2, 7:00–9:00 PM
📍 Where: Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall, Arthur Zankel Music Center, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Cost: Free; no ticket required; RSVP encouraged
🔗 Links: Map | Skidmore Music
The Filene Celebration Concert showcases the winners of Skidmore’s 45th Annual Filene Scholarship Competition alongside current Filene Scholars and faculty artists.
The newly selected Class of 2030 scholars include Gina LeBeau and Lily Maynard, voice; Jacob Miller, cello; and Oliver Wyman, French horn. The Filene Scholarship is Skidmore’s prestigious merit award for exceptional young musicians, and this concert introduces some of the strongest incoming musical talent at the beginning of their Skidmore careers.
This is not just another student recital. It is a first look at young musicians whom Skidmore has chosen to support and feature. For readers who follow classical music, student performance, or Zankel programming, it is a useful early-season marker.
The value is also practical: free admission, a strong venue, and a program likely to introduce performers worth following over the next several years.
📖 Literature to Life:The Giver by Lois Lowry
A familiar book becomes live theater
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute / Performing Arts Center
📅 Monday 10/5, 7:00 PM
📍 Where: UAlbany Performing Arts Center Main Theatre, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Ticketed event; check event page for price
🔗 Links: Map | NYS Writers Institute
The Giver is one of the most widely read and discussed works of young-adult literature in the United States.
The stage presentation gives audiences a new way into Lois Lowry’s story of memory, conformity, control, choice, and the hidden costs of a supposedly perfect society. It should appeal to readers, teachers, librarians, families, and anyone interested in how a familiar book changes when it becomes live performance.
This is worth noting early because it has broader community appeal than the average campus arts event. Many readers will know the novel from school, parenting, teaching, library programs, or banned-book discussions. Seeing it performed live can reopen the story for adults as well as younger audiences.
The themes are still sharp: Who controls memory? What does a peaceful society hide? What is lost when choice is traded for safety? That makes this a strong Plan Ahead listing, especially for families, educators, and readers who want a literary event that is accessible without being simplistic.
EMPAC’s INTERFACE series explores immersive audio with Felix Deufel and Matthew Goodheart on October 8.
EMPAC opens a door into spatial sound and experimental listening
📅 Thursday 10/8, 6:00–7:00 PM
📍 Where: EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman, Troy
🎟️ Cost: Free
EMPAC’s INTERFACE series brings artists and researchers together around the places where technology and artistic practice meet.
This installment features Felix Deufel, director of the Center for Media Art, Music, and Technology in Leipzig, and RPI composer/technologist Matthew Goodheart, in conversation about spatial sound, acoustics, composition, and immersive audio.
The October 8 talk is part of a broader cluster: Deufel leads a Grapes 3D audio-software workshop on October 9, and his work can be heard October 10 on EMPAC Studio 1’s 39-speaker ambisonic system.
This is specialized, but that is the point. EMPAC exists partly to give Capital Region audiences access to experimental work they would otherwise need to travel to a major research or contemporary-art center to experience. For readers interested in sound, music, technology, immersive environments, acoustics, or the future of performance spaces, this is worth planning around.
📅 By Day Calendar
Monday — September 14
• The Life & Times of General William North — UAlbany Emeritus Center, UAB 134 (1:30–3:00 PM) — Free
• New Tech, Old Biases: AI’s Impact on Gender, Race, and the Classroom — UAlbany, Humanities 354 (3:00 PM) — Free
• American Scoundrel: Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark — UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute, Page Hall (7:30 PM) — Free
Tuesday — September 15
• Banned Books Read-Out — UAlbany Libraries, Minerva / Reading Room (11:30 AM–1:00 PM) — Free
Wednesday — September 16
• Measure for Measure — HVCC / Will Kempe’s Players, Maureen Stapleton Theatre (7:00–9:30 PM) — Free
Thursday — September 17
• Constitution Day Live Marathon Reading — UAlbany Libraries, University Library Main Entrance (1:00–2:30 PM) — Free
• Suketu Mehta — UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute, PAC Recital Hall (4:30–5:30 PM) — Free
• Woman, Life, Freedom Film Festival — Siena University, The Key Auditorium, Roger Bacon 202 (5:15–7:45 PM) — Free
• Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art: Kelly Akashi — Williams College Museum of Art / Williams Inn (reception 5:00 PM; lecture 6:00 PM) — Free; reservations requested
• Suketu Mehta — Opalka Gallery (7:30–8:30 PM) — Free; registration encouraged
Friday — September 18
• Curator’s Tour of Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move — Tang Teaching Museum, Atrium (12:00 PM) — Free
• The First Adirondackers — Union College / Kelly Adirondack Center, Old Chapel (5:30 PM) — Free
• Opalka Gallery Pop-Up Beer Garden — Student Appreciation / Art Market — Opalka Gallery (6:00–9:00 PM) — Free admission; food and drink available for purchase
• Pilc Moutin Hoenig Trio — SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz, Carl B. Taylor Auditorium (7:00 PM) — $25 at door; $26.95 online
• Brownsville Bred — UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute, Page Hall (7:00 PM) — Free
• Epic Narratives: Gernsheim and Brahms — Bard / Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater (7:00 PM) — Tickets start at $15; livestream pay what you wish
Saturday — September 19
• Kids’ Art Workshop — Light and Transient Causes — Opalka Gallery (1:00–2:30 PM) — Free; registration required
• Hell in a Handbag — RPI / EMPAC Theater (7:00–8:15 PM) — $5 general; free with RPI ID
• Epic Narratives: Gernsheim and Brahms — Bard / Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater (7:00 PM) — Tickets start at $15; livestream pay what you wish
Sunday — September 20
• Tang Guide Tour — Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs (2:00 PM) — Free
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Capital Region Curated: September 14-20
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark on Roy Cohn at UAlbany, Suketu Mehta on immigration and citizenship, a free Shakespeare production at Hudson Valley Community College, and a jazz trio at SUNY Schenectady.
Alan Koslow
28
mins read time
Originally published at
Substack: Capital Region Curated
Capital Region Curated, Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events.
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
A Big Fall Week Arrives 🎬🎭📚🎶🎨
Roy Cohn, Immigration, Brownsville Bred, Shakespeare, Jazz, Opalka, and a Very Full Friday
Brownsville Bred screens at UAlbany on Friday, September 18, followed by a discussion with writer-director Elaine Del Valle.
The fall campus calendar has arrived.
This is the first week of the season that feels truly full: major public-affairs conversations, Constitution Day programming, a free Shakespeare production, international film, professional jazz, museum tours, gallery programming, and two regional-extension picks strong enough to justify the drive.
The week opens with Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark discussing their new biography of Roy Cohn. It continues with Mutale Nkonde on AI and bias, Suketu Mehta on immigration and belonging, Will Kempe’s Players performing Shakespeare at Hudson Valley Community College, Brownsville Bred at Page Hall, and Pilc Moutin Hoenig Trio at SUNY Schenectady.
Friday is unusually crowded. Readers will have to choose carefully.
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🧭 Start Here: What’s Inside This Week
This is a full fall week, so start here if you want to scan before choosing.
⭐ Top Picks: Roy Cohn, Suketu Mehta, Brownsville Bred, and Hell in a Handbag
🏛️ Public Affairs: AI bias, banned books, Constitution Day, immigration, and American civic life
🎭 Theater: Measure for Measure at Hudson Valley Community College
🎬 Film & Media: Woman, Life, Freedom Film Festival and Brownsville Bred
🎨 Museums, Galleries & Visual Culture: Tang Teaching Museum, Opalka Gallery, and Williams/WCMA
🎶 Concerts: Pilc Moutin Hoenig Trio and Bard’s Gernsheim/Brahms program
🏞️ Regional History: Curt Stager on The First Adirondackers at Union
🔥 Plan Ahead: Albany Book Festival, American diplomacy, Albany Symphony/Opalka, The Giver, Filene Celebration Concert, and EMPAC immersive audio
⭐ Top Picks
These are the events most worth building your week around.
⭐ Top Pick #1 — Power, Law, Politics, and Roy Cohn
Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark discuss American Scoundrel, their new biography of Roy Cohn, at UAlbany’s Page Hall on Monday, September 14.
American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump — Kai Bird & Susan Goldmark
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute
📅 Monday 9/14, 7:30 PM
📍 Where: Page Hall, UAlbany Downtown Campus, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird and coauthor Susan Goldmark come to Page Hall for one of the week’s strongest public-affairs events.
Their new book, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, follows one of the most consequential and corrosive figures in modern American political and legal culture. Cohn’s life runs through the McCarthy era, New York power politics, celebrity law, organized-crime circles, and eventually Donald Trump’s political formation.
Bird is best known as coauthor of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography that became the basis for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. That alone gives the event weight. But the subject makes it especially timely: Cohn is not simply a historical character. He is part of the genealogy of modern American combat politics.
This is a serious intellectual event and one of the clearest must-consider listings of the week.
⭐ Top Pick #2 — Immigration, Citizenship, and America’s 250th
Suketu Mehta appears twice on Thursday, September 17: first at UAlbany and then at Opalka Gallery.
Suketu Mehta — An Immigrant’s Manifesto
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute and Russell Sage / Opalka Gallery
📅 Thursday 9/17, 4:30–5:30 PM — UAlbany Performing Arts Center Recital Hall
📅 Thursday 9/17, 7:30–8:30 PM — Opalka Gallery, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public; Opalka registration encouraged
🔗 Links: UAlbany map | Opalka map | UAlbany details | Opalka details/register
Suketu Mehta, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found and This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, appears twice on Thursday in two separate public events.
The afternoon event at UAlbany focuses on immigration, cities, migration, identity, and belonging. Mehta’s work is rooted in lived experience, reporting, history, and argument. He writes about immigrants not as an abstract policy category, but as people whose lives are shaped by borders, labor, family, memory, and political fear.
The evening conversation at Opalka Gallery is connected to Constitution Day and America’s 250th anniversary programming. That setting gives the event a different charge. Immigration is not treated only as a current political issue, but as a constitutional, civic, historical, and human question.
Readers interested in immigration, public affairs, journalism, cities, American identity, or the meaning of citizenship should consider one of the two appearances — or both.
⭐ Top Pick #3 — Film, Memory, Brooklyn, and Puerto Rican Girlhood
Brownsville Bred — Screening and Discussion with Elaine Del Valle 🎬
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute
📅 Friday 9/18, 7:00 PM
📍 Where: Page Hall, UAlbany Downtown Campus, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
Brownsville Bred screens at Page Hall, followed by a discussion with writer-director Elaine Del Valle.
The film is a Nuyorican coming-of-age story rooted in Del Valle’s own Puerto Rican girlhood in 1980s Brownsville, Brooklyn. Its path is unusual: the story has existed as a one-woman show, an award-winning short, a young-adult novel, and now a feature film.
That makes this more than a standard screening. It is a chance to see how one autobiographical story moves across forms: stage, page, screen, and public conversation. The film was also the only U.S. Latina-directed live-action narrative to earn Oscar eligibility in 2025, giving the event broader significance within contemporary Latino and independent film.
This is one of Friday night’s major conflicts — and one of the week’s strongest choices.
⭐ Top Pick #4 — Strange, Sharp, One-Night Performance at EMPAC
Jibz Cameron brings Dynasty Handbag to EMPAC for one performance on Saturday, September 19.
Hell in a Handbag — Dynasty Handbag / Jibz Cameron
📅 Saturday 9/19, 7:00–8:15 PM
📍 Where: EMPAC Theater, Troy
🎟️ Cost: $5 general; free with RPI ID
🔗 Links: Map | Details/Tickets
Performance artist Jibz Cameron brings Dynasty Handbag to EMPAC for one night only.
This is not conventional theater, and it should not be sold that way. Cameron’s Dynasty Handbag work moves through character, memoir, absurdist comedy, queer performance, multimedia, readings, and deliberate discomfort. It has the feel of an artist using comedy as both mask and weapon.
The reader value is unusually strong: a professional contemporary-performance artist, one performance only, EMPAC’s theater, and a $5 general ticket. For people who want something stranger, sharper, and less predictable than a standard campus event, this is the pick.
🏛️ Lectures, Public Affairs & Civic Programs
New Tech, Old Biases: AI’s Impact on Gender, Race, and the Classroom — Mutale Nkonde
UAlbany / Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
📅 Monday 9/14, 3:00 PM
📍 Where: Humanities 354, UAlbany Uptown Campus
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
Mutale Nkonde is founder of AI for the People and a nationally recognized researcher and policy adviser working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, race, gender, and technology.
This lecture is timely because the public conversation about AI often races toward novelty: new tools, new efficiencies, new promises. Nkonde’s work pushes in the other direction, asking how old inequalities can be carried into new systems and then made harder to see because they appear inside supposedly neutral technology.
For readers following education, technology, civil rights, public policy, or the social impact of AI, this is one of the week’s strongest lecture options.
The Life & Times of General William North — Kenneth M. Jones
📅 Monday 9/14, 1:30–3:00 PM
📍 Where: Emeritus Center, UAB 134, UAlbany Uptown Campus
🎟️ Cost: Free
🔗 Links: Map | UAlbany calendar
Kenneth M. Jones presents the concluding session of a public-history program on General William North, a Revolutionary War officer, aide to Baron von Steuben, U.S. senator, and significant figure in early New York history.
This is the quieter kind of public-history programming that can be easy to miss on a large campus calendar. It will be most useful to readers interested in Revolutionary-era New York, military history, early American politics, and the local figures whose names rarely receive the same attention as the founders at the center of the national story.
📅 Tuesday 9/15, 11:30 AM–1:00 PM
📍 Where: University Library, Minerva / Reading Room, UAlbany Uptown Campus
🎟️ Cost: Free
🔗 Links: Map | Details / reader sign-up
The Banned Books Read-Out is a participatory Constitution Day week program centered on the freedom to read, censorship, and books that have been banned, challenged, restricted, or targeted for removal.
Readers can sign up to share a short passage, or simply attend and listen. That flexibility makes the event more inviting than a formal panel. It is also a practical reminder that the fights over books and speech are not abstract; they show up in schools, libraries, public institutions, and local communities.
This is a strong civic-humanities listing, especially for readers interested in libraries, education, free expression, and the public life of books.
Constitution Day Live Marathon Reading
📅 Thursday 9/17, 1:00–2:30 PM
📍 Where: University Library Main Entrance, UAlbany Uptown Campus
🎟️ Cost: Free
UAlbany marks Constitution Day with a live marathon reading connected to the university’s broader civic-engagement programming.
The value here is symbolic and public. A live reading slows down a document that is usually invoked in fragments and arguments. It asks people to hear the Constitution as language, not just as a political reference point.
For readers interested in civic life, constitutional history, speech, rights, and public participation, this is a useful daytime campus event.
🎭 Theater & Performance
Will Kempe’s Players bring Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure to Hudson Valley Community College on Wednesday, September 16.
Measure for Measure — Will Kempe’s Players
Hudson Valley Community College / Cultural Affairs Program
📅 Wednesday 9/16, 7:00–9:30 PM
📍 Where: Maureen Stapleton Theatre, Siek Campus Center, HVCC, Troy
🎟️ Cost: Free
Will Kempe’s Players brings Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure to HVCC for a free public performance.
This is one of Shakespeare’s trickier plays: part comedy, part moral drama, part study of justice, power, sexuality, hypocrisy, mercy, and public authority. It is also a play that keeps returning to relevance because it asks what happens when the people enforcing morality are themselves compromised.
A free full-length Shakespeare production is one of the week’s best values. It also broadens the campus-performance map beyond the usual four-year college venues, which is exactly the kind of public programming this newsletter should surface.
🎬 Film & Media
Woman, Life, Freedom Film Festival
Siena University / Creative Arts
📅 Thursday 9/17, 5:15–7:45 PM
📍 Where: The Key Auditorium, Roger Bacon 202, Siena University, Loudonville
🎟️ Cost: Free
Siena University participates in the Woman, Life, Freedom Film Festival, a program of short films created by women from multiple countries addressing women’s experiences and issues.
The international frame is what makes this stand out. Siena’s page describes the festival as being presented during the same period in cities including Paris, London, Prague, and Toronto. That gives the local screening a broader context: a campus audience in Loudonville is joining a larger international cultural conversation.
For readers interested in women’s rights, global film, international arts programming, and campus media events that reach beyond the region, this is one of Thursday’s stronger options.
🎨 Museums, Galleries & Visual Culture
Adam Tinkle leads a curator’s tour of Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move at the Tang Teaching Museum on Friday, September 18.
Curator’s Tour ofElevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move
Skidmore / Tang Teaching Museum
📅 Friday 9/18, 12:00 PM
📍 Where: Atrium, Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
Adam Tinkle, Skidmore Associate Professor and Director of MDOCS, leads a curator’s tour of Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move.
This is not just an “exhibition on view” notice. It is a timed public program with a curator-scholar guiding the audience into the work. That matters because the Tang often builds exhibitions through layers of sound, image, history, teaching, and contemporary practice that become clearer with interpretation.
The noon timing makes it a useful Friday option for Saratoga-area readers before the evening calendar gets crowded.
Opalka Gallery Pop-Up Beer Garden — Student Appreciation / Art Market
📅 Friday 9/18, 6:00–9:00 PM
📍 Where: Opalka Gallery, 140 New Scotland Ave., Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free admission; food and drink available for purchase
Opalka Gallery’s pop-up beer garden continues Friday with a Student Appreciation / Art Market edition tied to the gallery’s fall programming.
The evening includes live music from Swamp Baby and JJ’s OK, beer from Allied Brewing and Fort Orange Brewing, food vendors, gallery access, and an art market with regional makers and vendors.
Although the theme includes student appreciation, this is public-facing Opalka programming rather than a closed student social. It is a good casual option for readers who want art, music, food, and a low-pressure way to visit the gallery.
Kids’ Art Workshop —Light and Transient Causes
📅 Saturday 9/19, 1:00–2:30 PM
📍 Where: Opalka Gallery, 140 New Scotland Ave., Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free; registration required; class size limited
🔗 Links: Map | Details/Register
Opalka Gallery offers a public kids’ art workshop connected to Light and Transient Causes, led by Russell Sage MAT Art Education students.
This is a useful family listing because it connects children directly to the exhibition rather than treating artmaking as a generic craft activity. The workshop gives families a hands-on way into the gallery’s current ideas and makes the exhibition feel accessible to younger visitors.
Registration is required and class size is limited, so this is one to handle before Saturday arrives.
Skidmore / Tang Teaching Museum
📅 Sunday 9/20, 2:00 PM
📍 Where: Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
The Sunday Tang Guide Tour offers a lower-key way to enter the museum’s current exhibitions.
A guided tour is especially helpful at the Tang because the museum’s exhibitions often connect contemporary art, teaching, student engagement, sound, media, and cultural history. A guide can turn a casual visit into a more coherent encounter with the work.
This is the weekend’s quieter museum option and a useful Sunday listing for Saratoga Springs readers.
🎶 Concerts
Pilc Moutin Hoenig Trio performs at SUNY Schenectady on Friday, September 18.
SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz
📅 Friday 9/18, 7:00 PM
📍 Where: Carl B. Taylor Auditorium, Begley Building, SUNY Schenectady
🎟️ Cost: $25 at the door; $26.95 online
Jean-Michel Pilc, François Moutin, and Ari Hoenig bring professional-level jazz to SUNY Schenectady through A Place for Jazz.
This is not a student recital. It is an established jazz trio with international reputations and a performance style built around interplay, improvisation, technical command, and risk. The trio format is also part of the draw: piano, bass, and drums leave nowhere to hide.
Friday night is crowded, but jazz readers should look hard at this one. It is one of the week’s strongest music events.
🏞️ Regional History & the Adirondacks
The First Adirondackers — Curt Stager
Union College / Kelly Adirondack Center
📅 Friday 9/18, 5:30 PM
📍 Where: Old Chapel, Union College, Schenectady
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
Scientist and author Curt Stager discusses The First Adirondackers, created with Mohawk artist David Kanietakeron Fadden.
The program challenges the old claim that the Adirondack uplands were essentially uninhabited before European settlement. Stager and Fadden bring together environmental science, archaeology, Indigenous knowledge, and art to argue for a much longer and richer human presence in the Adirondacks.
This is a particularly good Capital Region Curated listing because it connects regional history, Indigenous presence, science, art, and place. It is also early enough Friday evening to work before some later events — though travel time will matter.
🚗 Regional Extension Picks
Worth the drive if the subject speaks to you
Kelly Akashi gives the Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art at Williams on Thursday, September 17.
Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art: Kelly Akashi
Williams College Museum of Art
📅 Thursday 9/17, 6:00–7:30 PM; reception 5:00 PM
📍 Where: The Williams Inn, Williamstown, MA
🎟️ Cost: Free; reservations requested
🔗 Links: Map | Details / reservations
Internationally exhibited artist Kelly Akashi gives the Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art at Williams College Museum of Art.
Akashi’s talk focuses on her new commission for the new WCMA building: a multipart sculpture to be installed in the east meadows, facing toward campus. WCMA describes this as the first opportunity to learn details of the project, which brings together botanical and ecological references with a scale and placement designed to change how visitors relate to the surrounding landscape.
This clears the Williams regional-extension threshold because it is not routine campus programming. It combines an internationally shown contemporary artist, an established Williams lecture, and a major commission tied to the future of the museum itself.
Leon Botstein conducts The Orchestra Now in Gernsheim and Brahms at Bard’s Fisher Center, September 18–19.
🚗 Regional Extension Pick — Gernsheim Festival Weekend at Bard
“Public program; check Fisher Center listing for reservation details.”
Bard College / Fisher Center / The Orchestra Now
📍 Where: Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson
🔗 Links: Map | Festival / Tickets
Bard has built a substantial weekend around the rediscovery of composer Friedrich Gernsheim, not simply two concerts.
This is exactly the kind of Bard programming that justifies the roughly one-hour drive: a U.S. premiere, a New York revival after more than a century, Leon Botstein, Orion Weiss, scholarship, chamber music, and orchestral performance. Readers can make this a serious Saturday trip — or turn it into an entire weekend.
The festival centers on Gernsheim, a German Jewish composer, pianist, and conductor whose music was later suppressed in Nazi Germany. Bard and The Orchestra Now are treating him not as a footnote, but as a composer worth hearing, studying, and placing back into the larger Romantic tradition.
Saturday 9/19, 11:00 AM — The Life and Legacy of Friedrich Gernsheim
🎟️ Cost: Free; reservations required
🔗 Details: Fisher Center calendar
The day begins with a discussion of Gernsheim’s life, career, historical context, and musical legacy.
This is the scholarship layer of the weekend — the part that helps listeners understand why Gernsheim disappeared from standard concert life and why Bard is making a case for his return. For readers who like music history, Jewish cultural history, recovered composers, or Bard’s distinctive style of contextual programming, this is the place to start.
Saturday 9/19, 1:00 PM — Gernsheim at the Piano
🎟️ Cost: Free; reservations required
🔗 Details / Reservations: Gernsheim at the Piano
The afternoon chamber program features The TŌN Chamber Players and pianist Francis Chung-Yang Huang in music Gernsheim himself premiered in the late 1800s.
The program includes Piano Quartet No. 3 and Piano Quintet No. 2, giving listeners a more intimate way into Gernsheim’s musical language before the evening orchestral concert.
This is what makes the weekend more than a one-off performance: readers can hear the composer in conversation, in chamber scale, and then in full orchestral form.
Saturday 9/19, 7:00 PM — Epic Narratives: Gernsheim and Brahms
Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater
🎟️ Cost: In-person tickets start at $15; free for Bard students; livestream pay what you wish
🔗 Details / Tickets: Epic Narratives: Gernsheim and Brahms
The Orchestra Now performs Gernsheim and Brahms under conductor Leon Botstein, with pianist Orion Weiss.
The program includes:
Friedrich Gernsheim — Zu einem Drama, first New York performance since 1913
Friedrich Gernsheim — Symphony No. 3, “Song of Miriam”, U.S. premiere
Brahms — Piano Concerto No. 1
This is the flagship event of the weekend. The pairing with Brahms matters because Gernsheim and Brahms were contemporaries, and Bard is asking listeners to hear Gernsheim inside that larger Romantic world rather than as an isolated rediscovery.
The same orchestral program is also offered Friday 9/18 at 7:00 PM, but Saturday is the better newsletter recommendation for readers who want the full festival arc.
Sunday 9/20, 11:00 AM — The Romantic Arc
🎟️ Cost: Free; reservations required
🔗 Details: Fisher Center calendar
The weekend concludes with a chamber program continuing the exploration of Gernsheim and his musical world.
This final program gives readers another entry point into the composer beyond the big orchestral evening. For those making a weekend of it, this is the quieter concluding chapter: smaller forces, closer listening, and a final chance to hear why Bard is arguing that Gernsheim deserves renewed attention.
Why this clears the Regional Extension threshold: This is not routine Bard programming. The actual signals are the American premiere, the revival of music unheard in New York for more than a century, Leon Botstein, internationally established pianist Orion Weiss, a full weekend of scholarship and performance, and Bard’s serious institutional commitment to the rediscovery of Friedrich Gernsheim. “Public program; check Fisher Center listing for reservation details.”
For readers who follow classical music, Jewish cultural history, recovered composers, or Bard’s deep-context festival model, this is one of the strongest regional-extension opportunities of the month.
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🔥 Plan Ahead: September 20–October 11
These are the events worth knowing about before their week arrives — because they require planning, offer unusual public value, or may be the sort of event you regret discovering too late.
The 9th Annual Albany Book Festival fills UAlbany’s Campus Center on Saturday, September 26.
📚 9th Annual Albany Book Festival
A full Saturday of writers, panels, books, and public conversation
NYS Writers Institute / UAlbany
📅 Saturday 9/26, 10:30 AM–5:00 PM
📍 Where: UAlbany Campus Center, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
The Albany Book Festival should be on the calendar now.
This is the NYS Writers Institute’s major annual all-day public literary event: authors, panels, conversations, booksellers, signings, open-mic activities, literary organizations, and more than 60 local authors and publishers throughout the Campus Center.
The key point is the time commitment. This is 10:30 AM–5:00 PM, not a single author appearance. Readers who want to get real value from the festival should look at the schedule in advance and protect a substantial part of Saturday.
The festival’s strength is its range. You can build a day around environmental writing, fiction, memoir, international politics, food and restaurant culture, psychological thrillers, young-adult literature, literary criticism, local authors, or simply wander from session to session and discover writers you did not know you needed.
That is why this belongs at the top of Plan Ahead. It is not ticket urgency. It is calendar urgency.
📚 Albany Book Festival Author Watch — Week 2
Capital Region Curated is highlighting a few writers each week so readers can think ahead about which conversations they may want to prioritize during the festival day.
This week: Gish Jen, Porochista Khakpour, and Arash Azizi.
Gish Jen is one of the major fiction writers in this year’s festival lineup, with a career that repeatedly explores immigration, family, American identity, cultural inheritance, and the friction between individual desire and communal expectation.
Her work often has a comic surface, but the comedy is not lightweight. Jen is interested in how people try to belong — to a country, a family, a class, a generation, a story about themselves — and how awkward, painful, and funny that process can be.
At the festival, Jen’s presence is especially interesting because she appears in conversation with Carol Gilligan in the Bad Girls program. Jen’s recent Bad Bad Girl turns toward memoir and family, making the conversation a bridge between fiction, psychology, autobiography, mothers and daughters, and the moral language used to judge women’s lives.
For readers who like fiction that is intelligent, socially observant, emotionally complicated, and often funny in ways that cut deeper than expected, Jen is a festival priority.
Porochista Khakpour brings a different kind of force to the festival: novelist, essayist, memoirist, Iranian American writer, and public voice on illness, exile, identity, politics, and the messy realities of literary life.
Khakpour’s work is personal without being narrow. She writes about the body, migration, addiction, fear, family, literary culture, and dislocation in ways that resist tidy categories. Her public voice is frank, sharp, and unwilling to flatten difficult experience into a comforting lesson.
That makes her a particularly good festival presence. Some authors are best encountered quietly on the page. Others bring an energy to public conversation that changes the room. Khakpour belongs in that second category.
For readers interested in contemporary memoir, Iranian American writing, illness narratives, identity, exile, and the emotional cost of making a literary life, she is one of the festival’s most distinctive figures.
Arash Azizi gives the festival an important international-affairs and political-history dimension.
Azizi writes about Iran, revolution, dictatorship, democracy, left politics, and the long struggle over the future of Iranian society. His work helps readers understand Iran beyond the usual headlines — not simply as a geopolitical problem, but as a country shaped by competing histories, ideologies, movements, exiles, state violence, and acts of resistance.
For Capital Region readers, Azizi’s appearance also connects well to this week’s Siena screening of the Woman, Life, Freedom Film Festival. Both point toward Iranian and global struggles over gender, rights, dissent, and public memory.
If your festival interests include history, international politics, democracy movements, Iran, journalism, or the relationship between political events and human lives, Azizi should be on your schedule.
🌍 2026 Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy
A public program on what diplomats actually do
International Center of the Capital Region / UAlbany
📅 Tuesday 10/6, 7:00–9:00 PM; doors open 6:30 PM
📍 Where: UAlbany Performing Arts Center Recital Hall, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free; registration available
🔗 Links: Map | Details/Register
Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy is one of the strongest civic and international-affairs programs currently announced for early fall.
The featured presentation, Portraits of American Diplomacy, is by recently retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer Tom Selinger. Drawing on oral histories from the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, the program looks at what diplomats actually do: helping Americans during international crises, opening markets, strengthening alliances, and advancing democratic values.
That practical frame is what makes the event stronger than a routine foreign-policy lecture. Diplomacy is often discussed in abstractions — alliances, strategy, treaties, national interest. This program brings it back to people: the diplomats sent overseas, the Americans they assist, the crises they manage, the local relationships they build, and the human judgment required when policy meets real events.
Readers interested in government service, foreign affairs, history, national security, international relations, public service, or America’s role in the world should mark this now. It is the sort of civic program that can draw well beyond a campus audience.
🎶 David Alan Miller in Conversation with Celka Ojakangas
A conductor, a composer, and live Albany Symphony musicians inside Opalka Gallery
David Alan Miller joins composer Celka Ojakangas at Opalka Gallery on Saturday, October 3.
Opalka Gallery / Albany Symphony
📅 Saturday 10/3, 1:00–2:30 PM
📍 Where: Opalka Gallery, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free; advance registration encouraged
🔗 Links: Map | Details/Register
Albany Symphony Music Director David Alan Miller joins composer Celka Ojakangas for an afternoon conversation at Opalka Gallery, followed by a live performance by Albany Symphony musicians.
The combination is what makes this strong: a major regional conductor, a working contemporary composer, and a performance component that lets audiences hear the music after hearing about it.
For a reader who has ever wondered how new music actually comes into being — how a composer thinks, how performers interpret, how a conductor frames a work for an audience — this is a unusually good opportunity. It makes contemporary music less remote and more immediate.
It is also a smart Saturday event: compact, free, early afternoon, and easy to pair with dinner or another evening plan. Register ahead and put it on the calendar before October fills up.
Skidmore introduces some of its strongest new young musicians
Skidmore College / Arthur Zankel Music Center
📅 Friday 10/2, 7:00–9:00 PM
📍 Where: Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall, Arthur Zankel Music Center, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Cost: Free; no ticket required; RSVP encouraged
🔗 Links: Map | Skidmore Music
The Filene Celebration Concert showcases the winners of Skidmore’s 45th Annual Filene Scholarship Competition alongside current Filene Scholars and faculty artists.
The newly selected Class of 2030 scholars include Gina LeBeau and Lily Maynard, voice; Jacob Miller, cello; and Oliver Wyman, French horn. The Filene Scholarship is Skidmore’s prestigious merit award for exceptional young musicians, and this concert introduces some of the strongest incoming musical talent at the beginning of their Skidmore careers.
This is not just another student recital. It is a first look at young musicians whom Skidmore has chosen to support and feature. For readers who follow classical music, student performance, or Zankel programming, it is a useful early-season marker.
The value is also practical: free admission, a strong venue, and a program likely to introduce performers worth following over the next several years.
📖 Literature to Life:The Giver by Lois Lowry
A familiar book becomes live theater
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute / Performing Arts Center
📅 Monday 10/5, 7:00 PM
📍 Where: UAlbany Performing Arts Center Main Theatre, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Ticketed event; check event page for price
🔗 Links: Map | NYS Writers Institute
The Giver is one of the most widely read and discussed works of young-adult literature in the United States.
The stage presentation gives audiences a new way into Lois Lowry’s story of memory, conformity, control, choice, and the hidden costs of a supposedly perfect society. It should appeal to readers, teachers, librarians, families, and anyone interested in how a familiar book changes when it becomes live performance.
This is worth noting early because it has broader community appeal than the average campus arts event. Many readers will know the novel from school, parenting, teaching, library programs, or banned-book discussions. Seeing it performed live can reopen the story for adults as well as younger audiences.
The themes are still sharp: Who controls memory? What does a peaceful society hide? What is lost when choice is traded for safety? That makes this a strong Plan Ahead listing, especially for families, educators, and readers who want a literary event that is accessible without being simplistic.
EMPAC’s INTERFACE series explores immersive audio with Felix Deufel and Matthew Goodheart on October 8.
EMPAC opens a door into spatial sound and experimental listening
📅 Thursday 10/8, 6:00–7:00 PM
📍 Where: EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman, Troy
🎟️ Cost: Free
EMPAC’s INTERFACE series brings artists and researchers together around the places where technology and artistic practice meet.
This installment features Felix Deufel, director of the Center for Media Art, Music, and Technology in Leipzig, and RPI composer/technologist Matthew Goodheart, in conversation about spatial sound, acoustics, composition, and immersive audio.
The October 8 talk is part of a broader cluster: Deufel leads a Grapes 3D audio-software workshop on October 9, and his work can be heard October 10 on EMPAC Studio 1’s 39-speaker ambisonic system.
This is specialized, but that is the point. EMPAC exists partly to give Capital Region audiences access to experimental work they would otherwise need to travel to a major research or contemporary-art center to experience. For readers interested in sound, music, technology, immersive environments, acoustics, or the future of performance spaces, this is worth planning around.
📅 By Day Calendar
Monday — September 14
• The Life & Times of General William North — UAlbany Emeritus Center, UAB 134 (1:30–3:00 PM) — Free
• New Tech, Old Biases: AI’s Impact on Gender, Race, and the Classroom — UAlbany, Humanities 354 (3:00 PM) — Free
• American Scoundrel: Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark — UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute, Page Hall (7:30 PM) — Free
Tuesday — September 15
• Banned Books Read-Out — UAlbany Libraries, Minerva / Reading Room (11:30 AM–1:00 PM) — Free
Wednesday — September 16
• Measure for Measure — HVCC / Will Kempe’s Players, Maureen Stapleton Theatre (7:00–9:30 PM) — Free
Thursday — September 17
• Constitution Day Live Marathon Reading — UAlbany Libraries, University Library Main Entrance (1:00–2:30 PM) — Free
• Suketu Mehta — UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute, PAC Recital Hall (4:30–5:30 PM) — Free
• Woman, Life, Freedom Film Festival — Siena University, The Key Auditorium, Roger Bacon 202 (5:15–7:45 PM) — Free
• Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art: Kelly Akashi — Williams College Museum of Art / Williams Inn (reception 5:00 PM; lecture 6:00 PM) — Free; reservations requested
• Suketu Mehta — Opalka Gallery (7:30–8:30 PM) — Free; registration encouraged
Friday — September 18
• Curator’s Tour of Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move — Tang Teaching Museum, Atrium (12:00 PM) — Free
• The First Adirondackers — Union College / Kelly Adirondack Center, Old Chapel (5:30 PM) — Free
• Opalka Gallery Pop-Up Beer Garden — Student Appreciation / Art Market — Opalka Gallery (6:00–9:00 PM) — Free admission; food and drink available for purchase
• Pilc Moutin Hoenig Trio — SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz, Carl B. Taylor Auditorium (7:00 PM) — $25 at door; $26.95 online
• Brownsville Bred — UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute, Page Hall (7:00 PM) — Free
• Epic Narratives: Gernsheim and Brahms — Bard / Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater (7:00 PM) — Tickets start at $15; livestream pay what you wish
Saturday — September 19
• Kids’ Art Workshop — Light and Transient Causes — Opalka Gallery (1:00–2:30 PM) — Free; registration required
• Hell in a Handbag — RPI / EMPAC Theater (7:00–8:15 PM) — $5 general; free with RPI ID
• Epic Narratives: Gernsheim and Brahms — Bard / Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater (7:00 PM) — Tickets start at $15; livestream pay what you wish
Sunday — September 20
• Tang Guide Tour — Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs (2:00 PM) — Free
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Capital Region Curated: September 14-20
Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events, with Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark on Roy Cohn at UAlbany, Suketu Mehta on immigration and citizenship, a free Shakespeare production at Hudson Valley Community College, and a jazz trio at SUNY Schenectady.
Alan Koslow
28
mins read time
Originally published at
Substack: Capital Region Curated
Capital Region Curated, Alan Koslow’s weekly guide to Capital Region campus events.
What’s worth your time at Capital Region colleges and universities.
A Big Fall Week Arrives 🎬🎭📚🎶🎨
Roy Cohn, Immigration, Brownsville Bred, Shakespeare, Jazz, Opalka, and a Very Full Friday
Brownsville Bred screens at UAlbany on Friday, September 18, followed by a discussion with writer-director Elaine Del Valle.
The fall campus calendar has arrived.
This is the first week of the season that feels truly full: major public-affairs conversations, Constitution Day programming, a free Shakespeare production, international film, professional jazz, museum tours, gallery programming, and two regional-extension picks strong enough to justify the drive.
The week opens with Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark discussing their new biography of Roy Cohn. It continues with Mutale Nkonde on AI and bias, Suketu Mehta on immigration and belonging, Will Kempe’s Players performing Shakespeare at Hudson Valley Community College, Brownsville Bred at Page Hall, and Pilc Moutin Hoenig Trio at SUNY Schenectady.
Friday is unusually crowded. Readers will have to choose carefully.
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🧭 Start Here: What’s Inside This Week
This is a full fall week, so start here if you want to scan before choosing.
⭐ Top Picks: Roy Cohn, Suketu Mehta, Brownsville Bred, and Hell in a Handbag
🏛️ Public Affairs: AI bias, banned books, Constitution Day, immigration, and American civic life
🎭 Theater: Measure for Measure at Hudson Valley Community College
🎬 Film & Media: Woman, Life, Freedom Film Festival and Brownsville Bred
🎨 Museums, Galleries & Visual Culture: Tang Teaching Museum, Opalka Gallery, and Williams/WCMA
🎶 Concerts: Pilc Moutin Hoenig Trio and Bard’s Gernsheim/Brahms program
🏞️ Regional History: Curt Stager on The First Adirondackers at Union
🔥 Plan Ahead: Albany Book Festival, American diplomacy, Albany Symphony/Opalka, The Giver, Filene Celebration Concert, and EMPAC immersive audio
⭐ Top Picks
These are the events most worth building your week around.
⭐ Top Pick #1 — Power, Law, Politics, and Roy Cohn
Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark discuss American Scoundrel, their new biography of Roy Cohn, at UAlbany’s Page Hall on Monday, September 14.
American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump — Kai Bird & Susan Goldmark
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute
📅 Monday 9/14, 7:30 PM
📍 Where: Page Hall, UAlbany Downtown Campus, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird and coauthor Susan Goldmark come to Page Hall for one of the week’s strongest public-affairs events.
Their new book, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, follows one of the most consequential and corrosive figures in modern American political and legal culture. Cohn’s life runs through the McCarthy era, New York power politics, celebrity law, organized-crime circles, and eventually Donald Trump’s political formation.
Bird is best known as coauthor of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography that became the basis for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. That alone gives the event weight. But the subject makes it especially timely: Cohn is not simply a historical character. He is part of the genealogy of modern American combat politics.
This is a serious intellectual event and one of the clearest must-consider listings of the week.
⭐ Top Pick #2 — Immigration, Citizenship, and America’s 250th
Suketu Mehta appears twice on Thursday, September 17: first at UAlbany and then at Opalka Gallery.
Suketu Mehta — An Immigrant’s Manifesto
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute and Russell Sage / Opalka Gallery
📅 Thursday 9/17, 4:30–5:30 PM — UAlbany Performing Arts Center Recital Hall
📅 Thursday 9/17, 7:30–8:30 PM — Opalka Gallery, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public; Opalka registration encouraged
🔗 Links: UAlbany map | Opalka map | UAlbany details | Opalka details/register
Suketu Mehta, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found and This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto, appears twice on Thursday in two separate public events.
The afternoon event at UAlbany focuses on immigration, cities, migration, identity, and belonging. Mehta’s work is rooted in lived experience, reporting, history, and argument. He writes about immigrants not as an abstract policy category, but as people whose lives are shaped by borders, labor, family, memory, and political fear.
The evening conversation at Opalka Gallery is connected to Constitution Day and America’s 250th anniversary programming. That setting gives the event a different charge. Immigration is not treated only as a current political issue, but as a constitutional, civic, historical, and human question.
Readers interested in immigration, public affairs, journalism, cities, American identity, or the meaning of citizenship should consider one of the two appearances — or both.
⭐ Top Pick #3 — Film, Memory, Brooklyn, and Puerto Rican Girlhood
Brownsville Bred — Screening and Discussion with Elaine Del Valle 🎬
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute
📅 Friday 9/18, 7:00 PM
📍 Where: Page Hall, UAlbany Downtown Campus, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
Brownsville Bred screens at Page Hall, followed by a discussion with writer-director Elaine Del Valle.
The film is a Nuyorican coming-of-age story rooted in Del Valle’s own Puerto Rican girlhood in 1980s Brownsville, Brooklyn. Its path is unusual: the story has existed as a one-woman show, an award-winning short, a young-adult novel, and now a feature film.
That makes this more than a standard screening. It is a chance to see how one autobiographical story moves across forms: stage, page, screen, and public conversation. The film was also the only U.S. Latina-directed live-action narrative to earn Oscar eligibility in 2025, giving the event broader significance within contemporary Latino and independent film.
This is one of Friday night’s major conflicts — and one of the week’s strongest choices.
⭐ Top Pick #4 — Strange, Sharp, One-Night Performance at EMPAC
Jibz Cameron brings Dynasty Handbag to EMPAC for one performance on Saturday, September 19.
Hell in a Handbag — Dynasty Handbag / Jibz Cameron
📅 Saturday 9/19, 7:00–8:15 PM
📍 Where: EMPAC Theater, Troy
🎟️ Cost: $5 general; free with RPI ID
🔗 Links: Map | Details/Tickets
Performance artist Jibz Cameron brings Dynasty Handbag to EMPAC for one night only.
This is not conventional theater, and it should not be sold that way. Cameron’s Dynasty Handbag work moves through character, memoir, absurdist comedy, queer performance, multimedia, readings, and deliberate discomfort. It has the feel of an artist using comedy as both mask and weapon.
The reader value is unusually strong: a professional contemporary-performance artist, one performance only, EMPAC’s theater, and a $5 general ticket. For people who want something stranger, sharper, and less predictable than a standard campus event, this is the pick.
🏛️ Lectures, Public Affairs & Civic Programs
New Tech, Old Biases: AI’s Impact on Gender, Race, and the Classroom — Mutale Nkonde
UAlbany / Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
📅 Monday 9/14, 3:00 PM
📍 Where: Humanities 354, UAlbany Uptown Campus
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
Mutale Nkonde is founder of AI for the People and a nationally recognized researcher and policy adviser working at the intersection of artificial intelligence, race, gender, and technology.
This lecture is timely because the public conversation about AI often races toward novelty: new tools, new efficiencies, new promises. Nkonde’s work pushes in the other direction, asking how old inequalities can be carried into new systems and then made harder to see because they appear inside supposedly neutral technology.
For readers following education, technology, civil rights, public policy, or the social impact of AI, this is one of the week’s strongest lecture options.
The Life & Times of General William North — Kenneth M. Jones
📅 Monday 9/14, 1:30–3:00 PM
📍 Where: Emeritus Center, UAB 134, UAlbany Uptown Campus
🎟️ Cost: Free
🔗 Links: Map | UAlbany calendar
Kenneth M. Jones presents the concluding session of a public-history program on General William North, a Revolutionary War officer, aide to Baron von Steuben, U.S. senator, and significant figure in early New York history.
This is the quieter kind of public-history programming that can be easy to miss on a large campus calendar. It will be most useful to readers interested in Revolutionary-era New York, military history, early American politics, and the local figures whose names rarely receive the same attention as the founders at the center of the national story.
📅 Tuesday 9/15, 11:30 AM–1:00 PM
📍 Where: University Library, Minerva / Reading Room, UAlbany Uptown Campus
🎟️ Cost: Free
🔗 Links: Map | Details / reader sign-up
The Banned Books Read-Out is a participatory Constitution Day week program centered on the freedom to read, censorship, and books that have been banned, challenged, restricted, or targeted for removal.
Readers can sign up to share a short passage, or simply attend and listen. That flexibility makes the event more inviting than a formal panel. It is also a practical reminder that the fights over books and speech are not abstract; they show up in schools, libraries, public institutions, and local communities.
This is a strong civic-humanities listing, especially for readers interested in libraries, education, free expression, and the public life of books.
Constitution Day Live Marathon Reading
📅 Thursday 9/17, 1:00–2:30 PM
📍 Where: University Library Main Entrance, UAlbany Uptown Campus
🎟️ Cost: Free
UAlbany marks Constitution Day with a live marathon reading connected to the university’s broader civic-engagement programming.
The value here is symbolic and public. A live reading slows down a document that is usually invoked in fragments and arguments. It asks people to hear the Constitution as language, not just as a political reference point.
For readers interested in civic life, constitutional history, speech, rights, and public participation, this is a useful daytime campus event.
🎭 Theater & Performance
Will Kempe’s Players bring Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure to Hudson Valley Community College on Wednesday, September 16.
Measure for Measure — Will Kempe’s Players
Hudson Valley Community College / Cultural Affairs Program
📅 Wednesday 9/16, 7:00–9:30 PM
📍 Where: Maureen Stapleton Theatre, Siek Campus Center, HVCC, Troy
🎟️ Cost: Free
Will Kempe’s Players brings Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure to HVCC for a free public performance.
This is one of Shakespeare’s trickier plays: part comedy, part moral drama, part study of justice, power, sexuality, hypocrisy, mercy, and public authority. It is also a play that keeps returning to relevance because it asks what happens when the people enforcing morality are themselves compromised.
A free full-length Shakespeare production is one of the week’s best values. It also broadens the campus-performance map beyond the usual four-year college venues, which is exactly the kind of public programming this newsletter should surface.
🎬 Film & Media
Woman, Life, Freedom Film Festival
Siena University / Creative Arts
📅 Thursday 9/17, 5:15–7:45 PM
📍 Where: The Key Auditorium, Roger Bacon 202, Siena University, Loudonville
🎟️ Cost: Free
Siena University participates in the Woman, Life, Freedom Film Festival, a program of short films created by women from multiple countries addressing women’s experiences and issues.
The international frame is what makes this stand out. Siena’s page describes the festival as being presented during the same period in cities including Paris, London, Prague, and Toronto. That gives the local screening a broader context: a campus audience in Loudonville is joining a larger international cultural conversation.
For readers interested in women’s rights, global film, international arts programming, and campus media events that reach beyond the region, this is one of Thursday’s stronger options.
🎨 Museums, Galleries & Visual Culture
Adam Tinkle leads a curator’s tour of Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move at the Tang Teaching Museum on Friday, September 18.
Curator’s Tour ofElevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move
Skidmore / Tang Teaching Museum
📅 Friday 9/18, 12:00 PM
📍 Where: Atrium, Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
Adam Tinkle, Skidmore Associate Professor and Director of MDOCS, leads a curator’s tour of Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move.
This is not just an “exhibition on view” notice. It is a timed public program with a curator-scholar guiding the audience into the work. That matters because the Tang often builds exhibitions through layers of sound, image, history, teaching, and contemporary practice that become clearer with interpretation.
The noon timing makes it a useful Friday option for Saratoga-area readers before the evening calendar gets crowded.
Opalka Gallery Pop-Up Beer Garden — Student Appreciation / Art Market
📅 Friday 9/18, 6:00–9:00 PM
📍 Where: Opalka Gallery, 140 New Scotland Ave., Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free admission; food and drink available for purchase
Opalka Gallery’s pop-up beer garden continues Friday with a Student Appreciation / Art Market edition tied to the gallery’s fall programming.
The evening includes live music from Swamp Baby and JJ’s OK, beer from Allied Brewing and Fort Orange Brewing, food vendors, gallery access, and an art market with regional makers and vendors.
Although the theme includes student appreciation, this is public-facing Opalka programming rather than a closed student social. It is a good casual option for readers who want art, music, food, and a low-pressure way to visit the gallery.
Kids’ Art Workshop —Light and Transient Causes
📅 Saturday 9/19, 1:00–2:30 PM
📍 Where: Opalka Gallery, 140 New Scotland Ave., Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free; registration required; class size limited
🔗 Links: Map | Details/Register
Opalka Gallery offers a public kids’ art workshop connected to Light and Transient Causes, led by Russell Sage MAT Art Education students.
This is a useful family listing because it connects children directly to the exhibition rather than treating artmaking as a generic craft activity. The workshop gives families a hands-on way into the gallery’s current ideas and makes the exhibition feel accessible to younger visitors.
Registration is required and class size is limited, so this is one to handle before Saturday arrives.
Skidmore / Tang Teaching Museum
📅 Sunday 9/20, 2:00 PM
📍 Where: Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
The Sunday Tang Guide Tour offers a lower-key way to enter the museum’s current exhibitions.
A guided tour is especially helpful at the Tang because the museum’s exhibitions often connect contemporary art, teaching, student engagement, sound, media, and cultural history. A guide can turn a casual visit into a more coherent encounter with the work.
This is the weekend’s quieter museum option and a useful Sunday listing for Saratoga Springs readers.
🎶 Concerts
Pilc Moutin Hoenig Trio performs at SUNY Schenectady on Friday, September 18.
SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz
📅 Friday 9/18, 7:00 PM
📍 Where: Carl B. Taylor Auditorium, Begley Building, SUNY Schenectady
🎟️ Cost: $25 at the door; $26.95 online
Jean-Michel Pilc, François Moutin, and Ari Hoenig bring professional-level jazz to SUNY Schenectady through A Place for Jazz.
This is not a student recital. It is an established jazz trio with international reputations and a performance style built around interplay, improvisation, technical command, and risk. The trio format is also part of the draw: piano, bass, and drums leave nowhere to hide.
Friday night is crowded, but jazz readers should look hard at this one. It is one of the week’s strongest music events.
🏞️ Regional History & the Adirondacks
The First Adirondackers — Curt Stager
Union College / Kelly Adirondack Center
📅 Friday 9/18, 5:30 PM
📍 Where: Old Chapel, Union College, Schenectady
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
Scientist and author Curt Stager discusses The First Adirondackers, created with Mohawk artist David Kanietakeron Fadden.
The program challenges the old claim that the Adirondack uplands were essentially uninhabited before European settlement. Stager and Fadden bring together environmental science, archaeology, Indigenous knowledge, and art to argue for a much longer and richer human presence in the Adirondacks.
This is a particularly good Capital Region Curated listing because it connects regional history, Indigenous presence, science, art, and place. It is also early enough Friday evening to work before some later events — though travel time will matter.
🚗 Regional Extension Picks
Worth the drive if the subject speaks to you
Kelly Akashi gives the Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art at Williams on Thursday, September 17.
Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art: Kelly Akashi
Williams College Museum of Art
📅 Thursday 9/17, 6:00–7:30 PM; reception 5:00 PM
📍 Where: The Williams Inn, Williamstown, MA
🎟️ Cost: Free; reservations requested
🔗 Links: Map | Details / reservations
Internationally exhibited artist Kelly Akashi gives the Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art at Williams College Museum of Art.
Akashi’s talk focuses on her new commission for the new WCMA building: a multipart sculpture to be installed in the east meadows, facing toward campus. WCMA describes this as the first opportunity to learn details of the project, which brings together botanical and ecological references with a scale and placement designed to change how visitors relate to the surrounding landscape.
This clears the Williams regional-extension threshold because it is not routine campus programming. It combines an internationally shown contemporary artist, an established Williams lecture, and a major commission tied to the future of the museum itself.
Leon Botstein conducts The Orchestra Now in Gernsheim and Brahms at Bard’s Fisher Center, September 18–19.
🚗 Regional Extension Pick — Gernsheim Festival Weekend at Bard
“Public program; check Fisher Center listing for reservation details.”
Bard College / Fisher Center / The Orchestra Now
📍 Where: Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson
🔗 Links: Map | Festival / Tickets
Bard has built a substantial weekend around the rediscovery of composer Friedrich Gernsheim, not simply two concerts.
This is exactly the kind of Bard programming that justifies the roughly one-hour drive: a U.S. premiere, a New York revival after more than a century, Leon Botstein, Orion Weiss, scholarship, chamber music, and orchestral performance. Readers can make this a serious Saturday trip — or turn it into an entire weekend.
The festival centers on Gernsheim, a German Jewish composer, pianist, and conductor whose music was later suppressed in Nazi Germany. Bard and The Orchestra Now are treating him not as a footnote, but as a composer worth hearing, studying, and placing back into the larger Romantic tradition.
Saturday 9/19, 11:00 AM — The Life and Legacy of Friedrich Gernsheim
🎟️ Cost: Free; reservations required
🔗 Details: Fisher Center calendar
The day begins with a discussion of Gernsheim’s life, career, historical context, and musical legacy.
This is the scholarship layer of the weekend — the part that helps listeners understand why Gernsheim disappeared from standard concert life and why Bard is making a case for his return. For readers who like music history, Jewish cultural history, recovered composers, or Bard’s distinctive style of contextual programming, this is the place to start.
Saturday 9/19, 1:00 PM — Gernsheim at the Piano
🎟️ Cost: Free; reservations required
🔗 Details / Reservations: Gernsheim at the Piano
The afternoon chamber program features The TŌN Chamber Players and pianist Francis Chung-Yang Huang in music Gernsheim himself premiered in the late 1800s.
The program includes Piano Quartet No. 3 and Piano Quintet No. 2, giving listeners a more intimate way into Gernsheim’s musical language before the evening orchestral concert.
This is what makes the weekend more than a one-off performance: readers can hear the composer in conversation, in chamber scale, and then in full orchestral form.
Saturday 9/19, 7:00 PM — Epic Narratives: Gernsheim and Brahms
Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater
🎟️ Cost: In-person tickets start at $15; free for Bard students; livestream pay what you wish
🔗 Details / Tickets: Epic Narratives: Gernsheim and Brahms
The Orchestra Now performs Gernsheim and Brahms under conductor Leon Botstein, with pianist Orion Weiss.
The program includes:
Friedrich Gernsheim — Zu einem Drama, first New York performance since 1913
Friedrich Gernsheim — Symphony No. 3, “Song of Miriam”, U.S. premiere
Brahms — Piano Concerto No. 1
This is the flagship event of the weekend. The pairing with Brahms matters because Gernsheim and Brahms were contemporaries, and Bard is asking listeners to hear Gernsheim inside that larger Romantic world rather than as an isolated rediscovery.
The same orchestral program is also offered Friday 9/18 at 7:00 PM, but Saturday is the better newsletter recommendation for readers who want the full festival arc.
Sunday 9/20, 11:00 AM — The Romantic Arc
🎟️ Cost: Free; reservations required
🔗 Details: Fisher Center calendar
The weekend concludes with a chamber program continuing the exploration of Gernsheim and his musical world.
This final program gives readers another entry point into the composer beyond the big orchestral evening. For those making a weekend of it, this is the quieter concluding chapter: smaller forces, closer listening, and a final chance to hear why Bard is arguing that Gernsheim deserves renewed attention.
Why this clears the Regional Extension threshold: This is not routine Bard programming. The actual signals are the American premiere, the revival of music unheard in New York for more than a century, Leon Botstein, internationally established pianist Orion Weiss, a full weekend of scholarship and performance, and Bard’s serious institutional commitment to the rediscovery of Friedrich Gernsheim. “Public program; check Fisher Center listing for reservation details.”
For readers who follow classical music, Jewish cultural history, recovered composers, or Bard’s deep-context festival model, this is one of the strongest regional-extension opportunities of the month.
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🔥 Plan Ahead: September 20–October 11
These are the events worth knowing about before their week arrives — because they require planning, offer unusual public value, or may be the sort of event you regret discovering too late.
The 9th Annual Albany Book Festival fills UAlbany’s Campus Center on Saturday, September 26.
📚 9th Annual Albany Book Festival
A full Saturday of writers, panels, books, and public conversation
NYS Writers Institute / UAlbany
📅 Saturday 9/26, 10:30 AM–5:00 PM
📍 Where: UAlbany Campus Center, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free and open to the public
The Albany Book Festival should be on the calendar now.
This is the NYS Writers Institute’s major annual all-day public literary event: authors, panels, conversations, booksellers, signings, open-mic activities, literary organizations, and more than 60 local authors and publishers throughout the Campus Center.
The key point is the time commitment. This is 10:30 AM–5:00 PM, not a single author appearance. Readers who want to get real value from the festival should look at the schedule in advance and protect a substantial part of Saturday.
The festival’s strength is its range. You can build a day around environmental writing, fiction, memoir, international politics, food and restaurant culture, psychological thrillers, young-adult literature, literary criticism, local authors, or simply wander from session to session and discover writers you did not know you needed.
That is why this belongs at the top of Plan Ahead. It is not ticket urgency. It is calendar urgency.
📚 Albany Book Festival Author Watch — Week 2
Capital Region Curated is highlighting a few writers each week so readers can think ahead about which conversations they may want to prioritize during the festival day.
This week: Gish Jen, Porochista Khakpour, and Arash Azizi.
Gish Jen is one of the major fiction writers in this year’s festival lineup, with a career that repeatedly explores immigration, family, American identity, cultural inheritance, and the friction between individual desire and communal expectation.
Her work often has a comic surface, but the comedy is not lightweight. Jen is interested in how people try to belong — to a country, a family, a class, a generation, a story about themselves — and how awkward, painful, and funny that process can be.
At the festival, Jen’s presence is especially interesting because she appears in conversation with Carol Gilligan in the Bad Girls program. Jen’s recent Bad Bad Girl turns toward memoir and family, making the conversation a bridge between fiction, psychology, autobiography, mothers and daughters, and the moral language used to judge women’s lives.
For readers who like fiction that is intelligent, socially observant, emotionally complicated, and often funny in ways that cut deeper than expected, Jen is a festival priority.
Porochista Khakpour brings a different kind of force to the festival: novelist, essayist, memoirist, Iranian American writer, and public voice on illness, exile, identity, politics, and the messy realities of literary life.
Khakpour’s work is personal without being narrow. She writes about the body, migration, addiction, fear, family, literary culture, and dislocation in ways that resist tidy categories. Her public voice is frank, sharp, and unwilling to flatten difficult experience into a comforting lesson.
That makes her a particularly good festival presence. Some authors are best encountered quietly on the page. Others bring an energy to public conversation that changes the room. Khakpour belongs in that second category.
For readers interested in contemporary memoir, Iranian American writing, illness narratives, identity, exile, and the emotional cost of making a literary life, she is one of the festival’s most distinctive figures.
Arash Azizi gives the festival an important international-affairs and political-history dimension.
Azizi writes about Iran, revolution, dictatorship, democracy, left politics, and the long struggle over the future of Iranian society. His work helps readers understand Iran beyond the usual headlines — not simply as a geopolitical problem, but as a country shaped by competing histories, ideologies, movements, exiles, state violence, and acts of resistance.
For Capital Region readers, Azizi’s appearance also connects well to this week’s Siena screening of the Woman, Life, Freedom Film Festival. Both point toward Iranian and global struggles over gender, rights, dissent, and public memory.
If your festival interests include history, international politics, democracy movements, Iran, journalism, or the relationship between political events and human lives, Azizi should be on your schedule.
🌍 2026 Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy
A public program on what diplomats actually do
International Center of the Capital Region / UAlbany
📅 Tuesday 10/6, 7:00–9:00 PM; doors open 6:30 PM
📍 Where: UAlbany Performing Arts Center Recital Hall, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free; registration available
🔗 Links: Map | Details/Register
Engage America: A Century of American Diplomacy is one of the strongest civic and international-affairs programs currently announced for early fall.
The featured presentation, Portraits of American Diplomacy, is by recently retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer Tom Selinger. Drawing on oral histories from the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, the program looks at what diplomats actually do: helping Americans during international crises, opening markets, strengthening alliances, and advancing democratic values.
That practical frame is what makes the event stronger than a routine foreign-policy lecture. Diplomacy is often discussed in abstractions — alliances, strategy, treaties, national interest. This program brings it back to people: the diplomats sent overseas, the Americans they assist, the crises they manage, the local relationships they build, and the human judgment required when policy meets real events.
Readers interested in government service, foreign affairs, history, national security, international relations, public service, or America’s role in the world should mark this now. It is the sort of civic program that can draw well beyond a campus audience.
🎶 David Alan Miller in Conversation with Celka Ojakangas
A conductor, a composer, and live Albany Symphony musicians inside Opalka Gallery
David Alan Miller joins composer Celka Ojakangas at Opalka Gallery on Saturday, October 3.
Opalka Gallery / Albany Symphony
📅 Saturday 10/3, 1:00–2:30 PM
📍 Where: Opalka Gallery, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Free; advance registration encouraged
🔗 Links: Map | Details/Register
Albany Symphony Music Director David Alan Miller joins composer Celka Ojakangas for an afternoon conversation at Opalka Gallery, followed by a live performance by Albany Symphony musicians.
The combination is what makes this strong: a major regional conductor, a working contemporary composer, and a performance component that lets audiences hear the music after hearing about it.
For a reader who has ever wondered how new music actually comes into being — how a composer thinks, how performers interpret, how a conductor frames a work for an audience — this is a unusually good opportunity. It makes contemporary music less remote and more immediate.
It is also a smart Saturday event: compact, free, early afternoon, and easy to pair with dinner or another evening plan. Register ahead and put it on the calendar before October fills up.
Skidmore introduces some of its strongest new young musicians
Skidmore College / Arthur Zankel Music Center
📅 Friday 10/2, 7:00–9:00 PM
📍 Where: Helen Filene Ladd Concert Hall, Arthur Zankel Music Center, Saratoga Springs
🎟️ Cost: Free; no ticket required; RSVP encouraged
🔗 Links: Map | Skidmore Music
The Filene Celebration Concert showcases the winners of Skidmore’s 45th Annual Filene Scholarship Competition alongside current Filene Scholars and faculty artists.
The newly selected Class of 2030 scholars include Gina LeBeau and Lily Maynard, voice; Jacob Miller, cello; and Oliver Wyman, French horn. The Filene Scholarship is Skidmore’s prestigious merit award for exceptional young musicians, and this concert introduces some of the strongest incoming musical talent at the beginning of their Skidmore careers.
This is not just another student recital. It is a first look at young musicians whom Skidmore has chosen to support and feature. For readers who follow classical music, student performance, or Zankel programming, it is a useful early-season marker.
The value is also practical: free admission, a strong venue, and a program likely to introduce performers worth following over the next several years.
📖 Literature to Life:The Giver by Lois Lowry
A familiar book becomes live theater
UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute / Performing Arts Center
📅 Monday 10/5, 7:00 PM
📍 Where: UAlbany Performing Arts Center Main Theatre, Albany
🎟️ Cost: Ticketed event; check event page for price
🔗 Links: Map | NYS Writers Institute
The Giver is one of the most widely read and discussed works of young-adult literature in the United States.
The stage presentation gives audiences a new way into Lois Lowry’s story of memory, conformity, control, choice, and the hidden costs of a supposedly perfect society. It should appeal to readers, teachers, librarians, families, and anyone interested in how a familiar book changes when it becomes live performance.
This is worth noting early because it has broader community appeal than the average campus arts event. Many readers will know the novel from school, parenting, teaching, library programs, or banned-book discussions. Seeing it performed live can reopen the story for adults as well as younger audiences.
The themes are still sharp: Who controls memory? What does a peaceful society hide? What is lost when choice is traded for safety? That makes this a strong Plan Ahead listing, especially for families, educators, and readers who want a literary event that is accessible without being simplistic.
EMPAC’s INTERFACE series explores immersive audio with Felix Deufel and Matthew Goodheart on October 8.
EMPAC opens a door into spatial sound and experimental listening
📅 Thursday 10/8, 6:00–7:00 PM
📍 Where: EMPAC Studio 1—Goodman, Troy
🎟️ Cost: Free
EMPAC’s INTERFACE series brings artists and researchers together around the places where technology and artistic practice meet.
This installment features Felix Deufel, director of the Center for Media Art, Music, and Technology in Leipzig, and RPI composer/technologist Matthew Goodheart, in conversation about spatial sound, acoustics, composition, and immersive audio.
The October 8 talk is part of a broader cluster: Deufel leads a Grapes 3D audio-software workshop on October 9, and his work can be heard October 10 on EMPAC Studio 1’s 39-speaker ambisonic system.
This is specialized, but that is the point. EMPAC exists partly to give Capital Region audiences access to experimental work they would otherwise need to travel to a major research or contemporary-art center to experience. For readers interested in sound, music, technology, immersive environments, acoustics, or the future of performance spaces, this is worth planning around.
📅 By Day Calendar
Monday — September 14
• The Life & Times of General William North — UAlbany Emeritus Center, UAB 134 (1:30–3:00 PM) — Free
• New Tech, Old Biases: AI’s Impact on Gender, Race, and the Classroom — UAlbany, Humanities 354 (3:00 PM) — Free
• American Scoundrel: Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark — UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute, Page Hall (7:30 PM) — Free
Tuesday — September 15
• Banned Books Read-Out — UAlbany Libraries, Minerva / Reading Room (11:30 AM–1:00 PM) — Free
Wednesday — September 16
• Measure for Measure — HVCC / Will Kempe’s Players, Maureen Stapleton Theatre (7:00–9:30 PM) — Free
Thursday — September 17
• Constitution Day Live Marathon Reading — UAlbany Libraries, University Library Main Entrance (1:00–2:30 PM) — Free
• Suketu Mehta — UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute, PAC Recital Hall (4:30–5:30 PM) — Free
• Woman, Life, Freedom Film Festival — Siena University, The Key Auditorium, Roger Bacon 202 (5:15–7:45 PM) — Free
• Plonsker Family Lecture in Contemporary Art: Kelly Akashi — Williams College Museum of Art / Williams Inn (reception 5:00 PM; lecture 6:00 PM) — Free; reservations requested
• Suketu Mehta — Opalka Gallery (7:30–8:30 PM) — Free; registration encouraged
Friday — September 18
• Curator’s Tour of Elevator Music 55: Chaia—Yiddishland on the Move — Tang Teaching Museum, Atrium (12:00 PM) — Free
• The First Adirondackers — Union College / Kelly Adirondack Center, Old Chapel (5:30 PM) — Free
• Opalka Gallery Pop-Up Beer Garden — Student Appreciation / Art Market — Opalka Gallery (6:00–9:00 PM) — Free admission; food and drink available for purchase
• Pilc Moutin Hoenig Trio — SUNY Schenectady / A Place for Jazz, Carl B. Taylor Auditorium (7:00 PM) — $25 at door; $26.95 online
• Brownsville Bred — UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute, Page Hall (7:00 PM) — Free
• Epic Narratives: Gernsheim and Brahms — Bard / Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater (7:00 PM) — Tickets start at $15; livestream pay what you wish
Saturday — September 19
• Kids’ Art Workshop — Light and Transient Causes — Opalka Gallery (1:00–2:30 PM) — Free; registration required
• Hell in a Handbag — RPI / EMPAC Theater (7:00–8:15 PM) — $5 general; free with RPI ID
• Epic Narratives: Gernsheim and Brahms — Bard / Fisher Center, Sosnoff Theater (7:00 PM) — Tickets start at $15; livestream pay what you wish
Sunday — September 20
• Tang Guide Tour — Tang Teaching Museum, Saratoga Springs (2:00 PM) — Free
🤝 Community Newsletter Partners
Capital Region Curated is pleased to cross-promote with two local publications that help readers stay connected to the larger community.
A local source for Jewish community news, culture, events, and stories.
A guide to the best events, arts & culture, food, and curated music throughout the Capital Region.
This only works if people share it—feel free to forward to anyone who attends campus events.
I’m building this into a comprehensive weekly guide—recommendations are always welcome.
Fall is here.
Originally published at
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Designed and Developed by Ta-Da Studios
© 2026 The Jewish World · Since 1965 - The Capital Region's gateway to Jewish life
Designed and Developed by Ta-Da Studios