Welcome to New York: A Literary Introduc

What makes New York City both impossible and irresistible? This course explores how writers have captured the city’s contradictions, its energy, diversity, and constant reinvention across more than a century of literature. From Walt Whitman and Emma Lazarus to Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, June Jordan, and Colson Whitehead, students will encounter New York as both subject and muse. Through close reading, discussion, and creative writing, you will develop your own voice in dialogue with the city’s literary past and present. Visits to the Museum of the City of New York, the Tenement Museum, literary Harlem, and the Nuyorican Poets Café will bring these works off the page and into the streets of the city they celebrate.