Thursday, November 30, 7:30pm
Hal Niedzviecki and Nelly Reifler
Plus: 'The Most Special Person Ever' Contest
Saint Joseph Hall Auditorium | 985 Madison Avenue | Albany, NY

Hal Niedzviecki is a writer, culture commentator and editor whose work challenges preconceptions and confronts readers with the offenses of everyday life. He is most recently the author of Hello, I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity (City Lights Books, 2006), which offers up a barrage of facts, observations, and arguments that point to the extinction of the non-conformist and the rise of individuality as the new conformity. Niedzviecki is co-founder of Broken Pencil, the magazine of zine culture and the independent arts and edited the magazine from 1995 to 2002. He is author of several other books, including We Want Some Too: Underground Desire and the Reinvention of Mass Culture (Penguin Canada 2000), and the novel Ditch. His writing has appeared in newspapers, periodicals and journals across North America, including Adbusters, Utne Reader, Globe and Mail, National Post, Toronto Life, Geist, Azure, and This Magazine.

Nelly Reifler is the author of See Through (Simon & Schuster 2006), her debut short story collection. Publisher’s Weekly calls Reifler "a writer to watch." She was born in Poughkeepsie, New York and grew up in WestBeth, the low-income artists' housing building in the far New York City’s West Village. In 1986 she dropped out of Harvard. She got her B.A. from Hampshire College in 1991. She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College in 1996. She lives in Brooklyn. Reifler's stories have been published in journals and magazines including The Florida Review, BOMB, The Land-Grant College Review, Swivel, Swink, Post Road, McSweeney's, jubilat, and others. Her work has appeared internationally in Taxi (Great Britain), Speak Up (Italy) and Paper Sky (Japan). Her stories have been anthologized in 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11 and Lost Tribe: Jewish Fiction From the Edge, as well as Before and After, an anthology about pregnancy and parenting forthcoming from The Overlook Press. She was assistant editor on the anthology I Thought My Father was God, edited by Paul Auster. Nelly received a Henfield Prize in 1996 and a Rotunda Gallery Visiting Curator grant in 2001. She was a MacDowell Fellow in 2005. She is co-curator, with Jonathan Dixon, of Readings and Screenings at The Field. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Following this reading, there will be a "Most Special Person Ever" contest. Audience members present themselves to a local celebrity panel of judges and assert their nonconformist individuality according to "overall uniqueness, specialness individuality and greatness."

Labels: Albany, Saint Rose