Authors to discuss the 2012 presidential election

The New York State Summer Writers Institute at Skidmore College will host a special concluding event this year. Four American writers will discuss and debate the 2012 presidential election beginning at 8 p.m. Friday, July 27. Free and open to the public, the discussion will take place in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall.

Robert Boyers, editor of Salmagundi magazine and director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute, will moderate the discussion, which will feature the following participants:

• Katha Pollitt, a regular columnist for The Nation magazine and the author of many books, including Reasonable Creatures.
• Orlando Patterson, winner of the National Book Award in non-fiction for his book Freedom and the author of many books, including Rituals of Blood and The Ordeal of Integration. He has taught for many years at Harvard University.
• James Miller, director of liberal studies at the New School for Social Research and author of many books, including Examined Lives and Democracy Is in the Streets.
• Jennifer Delton, columnist for the quarterly Salmagundi, professor of history at Skidmore, and author of Racial Integration and Corporate America and other books.

Boyers explained why the reason for the panel discussion. "We thought that writers and students, like the rest of us, ought to be thinking about the 2012 fall elections, simply because, as citizens, we cannot afford to think only about our own private work and ambition."

He continued, "The writers we selected for the discussion have long been associated with the summer writers institute and with Salmagundi magazine, and have had important ?and controversial ? things to say about politics and race in books and articles. Best of all, these writers are unpredictable in their sympathies, none of them noted for party-line commentary."

Boyers added, "We intend the discussion to be informative, educational in the best sense, to set out the issues and the differences as between the candidates and their parties. But we also plan to present a lively and sometimes contentious discussion, a discussion at the furthest possible remove from a merely academic meeting. Our speakers are, after all, writers, and will be speaking not as representatives of an institution or an academic discipline but as independent thinkers with a deep and appropriately personal interest in the election and the outcome."