News release for February 13, 2003

Dreaming of Timbuctoo Event Set

Acclaimed novelist Russell Banks will join social historian Amy
Godine at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 19, for a reading and discussion
related to Dreaming of Timbuctoo, an exhibition on view at the Tang
Teaching Museum and Art Gallery through March 9. The event is free
and open to the public.

Banks will read from his 1999 novel Cloudsplitter, which is told in
the voice of Owen Brown, son of the famed abolitionist John Brown.
Banks is the author of 13 works of fiction, including Continental Drift,
The Sweet Hereafter, and Affliction. He has received numerous prizes
and awards for his work, including the O. Henry and Best American
Short Story awards, the John Dos Passos Prize, and the literature
award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Godine, a Saratoga Springs writer with an interest in Adirondack
social history, is the curator of Dreaming of Timbuctoo,  which
documents the little-known story of a community of African-American
homesteaders established in the Adirondacks 15 years before the
Civil War. After its summer 2001 premiere at the Adirondack Museum
in Blue Mountain Lake, Dreaming of Timbuctoo is now on a three-year
tour to museums, college campuses, and historical societies
throughout New York State.

The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery is open
from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and from noon to 5
p.m. Saturday and Sunday, and is closed Mondays and major holidays.
Suggested donation is $5 for adults, $3 for children over 12, $2 for
senior citizens, and free to children under 12. For more information
on exhibitions and events, call 518-580-8080, or go to
www.skidmore.edu/tang.