Great World Texts is a collaboration between New York University's Gallatin Writing Program faculty and students and New York City public high school teachers and students. Each year we choose a canonical work or "contemporary classic," and develop complementary multimedia classroom resources.

Through a special tutorial, undergraduate students become mentors in the high schools, assisting in the reading, discussing and writing about the text. Over the course of the semester, the mentors assist the high school students in developing a creative project based on the book, such as adapting and performing a dramatic scene, transforming a chapter into a serial comic book, inventing a spoken word performance based on the book's themes, and crafting a traditional research paper.

For our second year, we will be reading Nectar in a Sieve by Kamala Markandaya, published in 1954. A moving story by one of India's foremost female writers, it follows one woman and her family as they confront changes and challenges in rural India. The novel wrestles with the legacies of colonialism, changing gender roles, the consequences of urbanization, along with other themes. For our inaugural year, we read the novel Weep Not, Child by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, a Kenyan writer who is a founder of post-colonial studies and was a professor at NYU from 1991-2002.

An exciting additional feature is an Internet writing exchange between some of the high school students in New York and students from two high schools in Kenya.