Writers in Paris
Academic level: Undergraduate
Program dates: June 23 – July 21, 2012
Priority application deadline: March 1st
General application deadline: April 2nd
Please note: The application for Writers in Paris is now closed. However, Writers in Florence is still accepting applications on a rolling basis.
Total credits: 8 points required
Program focus: Creative Writing, Fiction, Poetry
“I went to classes taught by absolutely brilliant people with peers who were just as excited about this program as I was. The entire environment was one of a fascination with learning and love for what we were here to do.” – Summer 2011 student
Click here to view the program flyer.
Program Director:
Deborah Landau, Director, Creative Writing Program.
Program Summary
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 to sites 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
Students who participate in Writers in Paris choose to focus on either poetry or fiction and attend daily writing workshops and craft seminars. Students are mentored by accomplished professional writers and attend readings and special seminars led by visiting 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 François 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.
Classes are held at the NYU in Paris Center, which is located in a beautiful residential area of the 16th arrondissement. The center is near both the Passy and La Muette metro stops as well as the Eiffel Tower and the Trocadéro. NYU in Paris at Passy is only a short ride away from the center of Paris.
Housing
All students participating in the program are required to live in NYU-provided housing. Students are housed in single studios with kitchenettes in the Résidence République, operated by Les Estudines and located in the 11th arrondissement. There are laundry facilities and a small gym on-site. In Résidence République, 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 a quick Metro ride to all sites within Paris. The 11th arrondissement of Paris (called “le Onzième” by locals) is home to a bustling cosmopolitan community of artists, musicians, filmmakers, craftspeople, students, and writers; it is stocked with plenty of hip cafés, quirky neighborhood restaurants, and trendy music venues.
Excursions
Program activities include literary walking tours of Paris as well as visits to parks, restaurants, cafés, and historic neighborhoods where famous writers have lived and worked.
Faculty
Deborah Landau (Director) is the author of Orchidelirium, which won the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and The Last Usable Hour, a Lannan Literary Selection published by Copper Canyon Press. Her poems, essays, and reviews appear in The Paris Review, Tin House, American Literature, The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, The Best American Erotic Poems, Poetry Daily, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and The Harvard Review, among other publications. She was educated at Stanford, Columbia, and Brown, where she was a Javits Fellow and received a Ph.D. in English and American Literature. For many years she co-directed the KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Series. She co-hosts the video interview program Open Book on Slate.com and is the Director of the NYU Creative Writing Program.
Chris Adrian (Fiction) is the author of a short story collection, A Better Angel, and three novels, Gob's Grief, The Children's Hospital, and The Great Night. He has received an NEA grant for fiction writing and a Guggenheim Fellowship, was selected as one of the New Yorker's 20 writers under 40, and recently completed training as a Fellow in Pediatric Hematology Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco.
Catherine Barnett (Poetry) is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and a Pushcart. Her book, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, won the 2003 Beatrice Hawley Award and was published in spring 2004 by Alice James Books. Barnett has taught at Barnard, the New School, and NYU, where she was honored with an Outstanding Service Award.
Nathan Englander (Fiction) is the author of the internationally bestselling story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, the novel The Ministry of Special Cases, and the forthcoming collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (Knopf, Spring 2012). His short fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Washington Post, as well as The O. Henry Prize Stories and numerous editions of The Best American Short Stories. Translated into more than a dozen languages, Englander was selected as one of “20 Writers for the 21st Century” by The New Yorker, received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. He’s been a fellow at the Dorothy & Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and at The American Academy of Berlin. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Meghan O'Rourke (Poetry) is the author of The Long Goodbye (Riverhead), a memoir about grief, and the poetry collections Once and Halflife (W.W. Norton). A former poetry editor for The Paris Review, she is also a culture critic for Slate magazine and a founding editor of the web site Double X. She is the recipient of the 2008 May Sarton Poetry Prize. Her essays and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Best American Poetry, 32 Poems, and more. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, where she grew up.
Matthew Rohrer (Poetry) the author of A Hummock in the Malookas, Satellite, A Green Light, Rise Up, A Plate of Chicken, and Destroyer and Preserver. With Joshua Beckman he wrote Nice Hat. Thanks. and recorded the audio CD Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. Octopus Books published his action/adventure chapbook-length poem They All Seemed Asleep in 2008. His poems have been widely anthologized and have appeared in many journals. He’s received the Hopwood Award for poetry and a Pushcart prize, and was selected as a National Poetry Series winner, and was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. Recently he has participated in residencies/ performances at the Museum of Modern Art (New York City) and the Henry Art Gallery (Seattle). Matthew teaches in the Creative Writing Program at NYU and lives in Brooklyn.
Helen Schulman (Fiction) is the author of the novels This Beautiful Life, A Day At The Beach, P.S., The Revisionist and Out Of Time, and the short story collection Not A Free Show. P.S. was also made into a feature film starring Laura Linney and was written by Helen Schulman & Dylan Kidd. She co-edited, along with Jill Bialosky, the anthology Wanting A Child. Her fiction and non-fiction have appeared in such places as Vanity Fair, Time, Vogue, GQ, The New York Times Book Review and The Paris Review. She is presently the Fiction Coordinator at The Writing Program at The New School where she is a tenured Associate Professor.
Darin Strauss (Fiction) is the author of the international bestseller Chang and Eng, and the New York Times Notable Book The Real McCoy, one of the New York Public Library's "25 Books to Remember of 2002," the novel More Than it Hurts You and most recently a memoir Half a Life, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. His work has been translated into fourteen languages, and he teaches writing at New York University, for which he won a 2005 "Outstanding Dozen" teaching award. Also a screenwriter, Darin sold the rights to Chang and Eng to Disney, and is currently adapting the novel for the screen with the actor Gary Oldman. Another screenplay on which he collaborated is in pre-production at Paramount Studios. Darin was awarded a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction writing.
Dinaw Mengestu is the author of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, a New York Times Notable Book, and How to Read the Air. He is the recipient of a Guardian First Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, a fiction fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, a Lannan Literary Award, and a "5 under 35" Award from the National Book Foundation. The New Yorker recently named him as one of 20 best writers under 40. He lives with his wife and son in Paris.
CONTACT INFO
NYU Office of Global Programs
110 East 14th Street, LOWER LEVEL
New York, NY 10003
t: 212-998-4433
f: 212-995-4103
writers.in.paris@nyu.edu