The Graduate Center’s Public Programs, together with The Writers’ Institute and the Leon Levy Center for Biography had the honor of hosting the event, “Exiles: A Conversation between Andre Aciman and Aleksander Hemon” at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Proshanksy Auditorium last night as part of the Public Programs series. Andre Aciman, originally Egyptian, and Italian, French, and New Yorker depending on the occasion, is the founder and director of The Writers’ Institute and Distinguished Professor and Chair at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Program in Comparative Literature. He is also the acclaimed writer of the memoir Out of Egypt and novels Read more…

Last night at The Writers’ Institute, students current, former, and prospective came together the CUNY Graduate Center’s Skylight room to enjoy the Institute’s end of year party and informal graduation ceremony. Founder and director Andre Aciman introduced the readers, opening the ceremony with stories of writers who went forward from the Institute to be featured in publications like Granta, to be quoted in the New York Times, and to sign publication contracts for novels. After getting to know each other over wine, soft drinks, cheese, fruit, and sushi, writers from various nationalities and cultural backgrounds took turns presenting work that Read more…

A piece by William Hood, a Writers’ Institute fellow, featured in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/04/opinion/my-dinner-with-martin-luther-king-jr.html

This week at The Writer’s Institute: A “Meet the Editors” event last night hoped to dispel the fear all writers have of editors, the almighty deciders who so often hold our fate in their hands. Generously speaking with us were an illustrious panel; Dorothy Wickendon, executive director of the New Yorker, Lorin Stein, editor at The Paris Review, Lucas Wittmann, editor of the book section at The Daily Beast, and Adam Moss, editor-in-chief at New York Magazine – undoubtedly New York’s top editors. Program director Andre Aciman introduced them by asking, “What is an editor’s life? Who are these terrifying Read more…

An authority on Marcel Proust, the literature of seventeenth-century France, and a host of other subjects, André Aciman believes in the importance of teaching and has always enjoyed his work as a professor in The Graduate Center’s Comparative Literature and French Programs. Yet in the course of this work, he noticed something. While his students could write in a manner appropriate to a scholarly journal, most seemed at a loss when trying to communicate with a mainstream audience that did not share their particular expertise. And the problem was not limited to budding scholars, but rather seemed commonplace among aspiring Read more…