ADMISSIONS FOR NYU SUMMER IN PARIS IS NOW CLOSED.

Please check out our list of programs for Summer 2008.

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Writers in Paris

June 28 — July 26, 2008

Why Writers in Paris? | Academics | Housing | Faculty

Director of the Program: Deborah Landau, Director, NYU Creative Writing Program

Why Writers in Paris?

NYU Writers in Paris offers poets and fiction writers an opportunity to experience the writer's life in Paris. Students participate in daily workshops and craft classes, are mentored by accomplished professional writers, and attend readings and special seminars led by Paris-based writers and editors. Writing and reading assignments are designed to encourage immersion in the city. For example, poets might visit the Louvre to write ekphrastic poems or create Parisian street sonnets by taking a 14-block walk of the St. Denis area where Francois Villon lived and generating a line of poetry per block. Fiction writers might study dialogue by listening for overheard speech at a sidewalk café or learn about description and setting by writing a story set in the neighborhood where Hemingway lived and worked. Students in the program work intensively to generate new writing and also attend a lively series of readings, lectures, literary walking tours, and special events.

Because Paris is so rich in history, almost every step outside of the classroom will reveal a tidbit of art, architecture, or historical fact hiding around the corner, waiting for discovery. Literary walking tours of Paris and field-trips—including visits to the homes, parks, restaurants, and cafes frequented by Hemingway, Proust, Zola, Balzac, Hugo, Stein, Fitzgerald, Wilde, Voltaire, Diderot, Verlaine, Sartre, Kerouac, Joyce and other writers—will provide a sense of the literary history of the city. In addition, students may decide to take advantage of subsidized tickets to opera, ballet or concerts in Paris's famous theatres. Students may also visit museums with special guided tours to learn more about current exhibitions.

Academics

Classes are held at the American University of Paris, an urban institution centrally located in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, very near the Eiffel Tower and the Seine. Like the campuses of most European colleges and universities (and NYU), the AUP campus is open to the city, its buildings located within close walking distance. Everyday life involves classes, museums and monuments, cafes and croissants, a walk along the Seine, dinner in the Latin Quarter, a picnic near the Eiffel Tower.

Students who participate in Writers in Paris choose to focus on either poetry or fiction and attend daily writing workshops and craft sessions. Classes are supplemented by readings and lectures by Paris-based writers and publishing professionals. Field trips, cultural activities, readings, and guest lectures constitute an integral component of the program; students are expected to attend and actively participate in all of them. Classes meet in the afternoons, Monday-Thursday. Special programs are held in the evenings. Students are free to write in the mornings and to write or travel Friday-Sunday. This is a four-week undergraduate program carrying 8 points of credit. Enrollment in the entire program is required.

Housing

Student are housed in private studios with private kitchenettes and bathrooms in the residence hall, Residence Republique, operated by Les Estudines and located in the 11th arrondissement. The site is staffed with a resident assistant (RA), in addition to the building staff. The residence includes a cafeteria, which serves continental breakfast. There are on-site laundry facilities and an on-site mini-gym.

Like the East and West Village in New York, the 11th arrondissement of Paris (called "le Onzieme" by locals) is home to a bustling cosmopolitan community of artists, musicians, filmmakers, craftspeople, students, and writers. It is stocked with plenty of hip cafes, quirky neighborhood restaurants, and trendy music venues. Originally a working-class community of artisans and laborers, the 11th now houses vibrant Chinese and North African populations alongside the art and student community. More and more, as gentrification has shaped the neighborhood, local chats revolve around recent art installations, novels, or music, over coffee at the local bistro.

In Residence Republique, students are situated near the Place de la Bastille, site of the legendary storming of the Bastille prison by masses of workers at the outset of the French Revolution. Though no trace of the Bastille prison remains, the Place de la Bastille is now the site of the Opera Bastille, home of the Paris National Opera. The residence is also just a short, 15-minute walk to Notre Dame and quick ride on the metro to all sites within Paris.

Faculty

George Foy (Fiction Craft Seminar) is the author of eleven novels and one nonfiction book. His most recent novel, The Art and Practice of Explosion, won honorary mention in Foreword's Best Novel of the Year competition, and his novel Shift was finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award in literary science fiction.

Matthew Rohrer (Poetry Workshop) is the author of A Green Light, for which he was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin International Poetry Prize. He is also the author of A Hummock in the Malookas, a winner of the National Poetry Series, Rise Up, Satellite, and Nice Hat. Thanks (with Joshua Beckman). He is a recipient of the Hopwood Award for Poetry.

Helen Schulman (Fiction Workshop) is the author of the short story collection, Not a Free Show, and four novels, most recently A Day at the Beach. She has been a Sundance Fellow, a New York Foundation for the Arts recipient and a Pushcart-Prize-winner. She has taught most recently in the MFA program at Columbia University and at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference.

Matthew Zapruder (Poetry Craft Seminar) is the founder and Editor in Chief of the acclaimed poetry publishing house Verse Press (now Wave Books). He is the author of American Linden, winner of the Tupelo Press Editors' Prize, and The Pajamaist. His book of translations from the Romanian, Secret Weapon: The Late Poems of Eugen Jebeleanu, will be published in 2008.