📚 Albany Book Festival Author Watch — Week 1

The Albany Book Festival is Saturday, September 26, at UAlbany.

Over the next three weeks, Capital Region Curated will highlight a few of the writers coming to campus, not as a list of names, but as a way to help readers decide where they may want to spend their festival day.

This week: Elizabeth Kolbert, Namwali Serpell, Carol Gilligan, and Keith McNally.

Elizabeth Kolbert

Elizabeth Kolbert gives the festival immediate intellectual weight. A Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental writer, she is best known for The Sixth Extinction, a book that made mass extinction, climate disruption, and human-driven ecological change readable for a broad public audience without softening the seriousness of the subject.

Kolbert’s strength is that she writes about planetary-scale change through specific stories: species, landscapes, scientists, failed interventions, and unsettling evidence. Her work is science writing, but it also becomes a moral and cultural argument about what humans notice, what we ignore, and what kind of future we are willing to imagine.

At this year’s festival, she appears in connection with Life on a Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World, which continues her long-running attention to the wonders and fragility of life on Earth. For readers interested in climate, science, environmental policy, extinction, and the strange beauty of the natural world, Kolbert is one of the festival’s central draws.

Namwali Serpell’s festival appearance connects to Toni Morrison, whose UAlbany years are part of the campus’s literary history.

Namwali Serpell

Namwali Serpell brings a different kind of literary gravity. She is an award-winning novelist, critic, and Harvard professor whose work moves across fiction, criticism, race, form, memory, and literary inheritance. Her presence matters not only because she is a major contemporary writer, but because her festival appearance connects directly to Toni Morrison.

That connection gives her visit a special local resonance. Morrison taught in the UAlbany English Department from 1984 to 1989 and wrote Beloved while at UAlbany, so a conversation around Serpell’s On Morrison is not just another literary panel. It brings one of America’s defining novelists back into conversation with a campus that was part of her creative life.

Serpell is especially worth watching because she is both a novelist and a critic. That means she can talk not only about what Morrison wrote, but how Morrison’s fiction works: voice, structure, history, haunting, beauty, difficulty, and moral force. For readers who care about literature as art and as public memory, this is one of the most important festival threads.

Moderator: Janell Hobson

Janell Hobson, professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UAlbany, moderates Serpell’s Toni Morrison program. That matters: this is not simply an author appearance, but a campus conversation shaped by scholarship in race, gender, culture, and literary memory.

Carol Gilligan

Carol Gilligan is one of the major thinkers in the festival lineup. Her landmark book In a Different Voice reshaped public conversations about women, moral development, psychology, ethics, and the ways institutions hear — or fail to hear — different kinds of human experience.

Gilligan’s importance is not just that she wrote an influential academic book. It is that her work changed the terms of a wider cultural argument. She challenged assumptions about moral reasoning, care, gender, development, and authority, opening up questions that moved beyond psychology into education, feminism, law, family life, and public ethics.

At the festival, Gilligan appears in conversation with Gish Jen in the Bad Girls program. That pairing should be especially interesting because it brings together psychology, fiction, memoir, family, and cultural identity. Gilligan is appearing with Solstice, while Jen’s recent work includes Bad Bad Girl, an autobiographical portrait of her relationship with her mother.

Conversation partner: Gish Jen

Gish Jen is an acclaimed novelist and essayist whose work often explores family, immigration, American identity, generational conflict, and the complicated comedy of belonging. In conversation with Gilligan, she should help move the discussion beyond theory into story: how women’s lives, mothers and daughters, family memory, and cultural expectations become material for both fiction and moral reflection.

Moderator: Marion Roach Smith

Marion Roach Smith moderates the Gilligan/Jen conversation. Her own work as a memoir teacher and nonfiction writer makes her a useful match for a panel that sits at the border of psychology, fiction, autobiography, and family story.

Keith McNally

Keith McNally broadens the festival in a useful way. He is not simply a memoirist appearing with a new book; he is one of the people who helped shape the public theater of New York restaurant life. Through restaurants including Balthazar, Pastis, and The Odeon, McNally helped create places that became part dining room, part stage set, part social map of the city.

His memoir, I Regret Almost Everything, is not just a hospitality book. It is a New York book: about ambition, taste, reinvention, class, failure, illness, ego, recovery, and the strange emotional life behind public success. It won the 2026 Gotham Book Prize, which honors writing about New York City.

McNally’s appearance is valuable because it pulls the festival beyond a narrowly literary audience. Readers interested in restaurants, cities, design, downtown culture, memoir, and the mythology of New York will find something here. He is also likely to bring a different energy to the day: less academic, more theatrical, more worldly, and probably more unpredictable.

📅 By Day Calendar

Tuesday — September 8

Millennial Fiction with Andrew Martin — UAlbany / NYS Writers Institute, Campus Center Multipurpose Room (4:30 PM) — Free

Wednesday — September 9

Faculty Recital — SUNY Schenectady School of Music, Carl B. Taylor Auditorium (12:00 PM) — Free

Friday — September 11

Opalka Gallery Pop-Up Beer Garden / Gallery Opening Reception for Light and Transient Causes — Russell Sage / Opalka Gallery, Albany (6:00–9:00 PM; music 6:30–7:30 PM) — Free

Saturday — September 12

Family Saturday: Wonderful Wall Plaques — Skidmore / Tang Teaching Museum, Payne Room, Saratoga Springs (2:00–3:30 PM) — Free; no registration required; supplies first come, first served

Sunday — September 13

Tang Guide Tour — Skidmore / 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.

The Jewish World is a local source for Jewish community news, culture, events, and stories.

The 518 Newsletter highlights 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.

✉️ alankoslow@gmail.com

Fall is starting to arrive.