Monday was a reunion of sorts for Mary Gordon and Jean Valentine. Gordon, who was awarded the position of state author for two years, was a student in the Barnard College poetry-writing class of Jean Valentine, the new state poet. That was 38 years ago. The two women were in Albany to receive the state’s highest literary honors—the Edith Wharton Citation of Merit and the Walt Whitman Citation of Merit—and assume their resonsibilities as state author and state poet. Gov. Eliot Spitzer and First Lady Silda Wall Spitzer presented the awards.
  They will each serve a two-year term, during which they will promote fiction writing and poetry across New York through a series of public readings and talks. They each receive a $10,000 honorarium.
  Gordon, whose first novel was “Final Payments” in 1978, has said her models include Edith Wharton, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. Her memoir of her father, “Shadow Man,” was published in 1996. She learned that stories her father told her and family lore about his past and accomplishments fell a bit short. He was not a Harvard University dropout but a high-school dropout. He hailed from Lithuania, not Chicago.ÂÂ
  Gordon said everything important to her has happened in New York—her birth, schooling, meeting her husband, raising her children. “I hope to go on being a New Yorker writer until they carry me out on a slab,” she said.
  Donald Faulkner, director of the state Writers Institute, called Valentine “an intrepid explorer of ‘thin places,’ the spaces where dream and waking, life and beyond-life, all overlap, blend, and sometimes merge.” The Institute is based at the State University of New York at Albany.
  Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, “Dream Barker,” in 1965. Her most recent book is “Little Boat,” published in 2007.
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