New York City has long existed as both a place and an idea, shaped by the writers who describe it as much as by those who live in it. Deborah Paredez, Ph.D., is associate professor and chair of the Writing Program at Columbia University School of the Arts. Her work explores the relationship between culture, identity, and place. She is also affiliated with the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University and is a co-founder of CantoMundo.
This summer, Paredez will teach Writing New York City, a course that invites students to engage the city through reading, writing, and direct experience.
Can you tell us a bit about your background as a writer and how you came to focus on writing about culture and place?
I’m trained as both a poet and a critic, and I have a Ph.D. in theater and performance studies. Across both fields, New York City often looms large as a kind of mythological place. It is also, of course, a real place where poets and performers have come for centuries. My interest in performance and in thinking about the self in relation to the city has shaped both my work and my teaching. I saw this as an opportunity to think in new ways about what it is about New York City, and how writers have imagined it and created representations that continue to shape how we live in it today.
New York has been written about endlessly. What keeps drawing writers back to it?
I think part of that is because there are so many different New Yorks. Even as writers have written about the city over time, the representations we often get can center on the same ideas or come from a particular perspective. Writers keep coming back because there is still so much about the city, and about one’s life in it or relationship to it, that has yet to be told. New York has long housed an extraordinary variety of people, and its demographics are constantly shifting. It remains a place of endless possibilities.
What will students actually be doing in the course in terms of engaging with the city?
Students will engage the city through shared experiences such as riding the subway or a ferry, or walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, and then writing about what it means to be on the move in New York—whether on foot or through public transportation. We also plan to attend a Broadway musical and visit places such as the Museum of the City of New York, where students can write in response to the city’s documented histories. In addition, the course will include neighborhood walks.
You frame New York not just as a setting, but almost as a style. What do you mean by that?
I think about the poet Frank O’Hara, who was part of what we call the New York School of poets. His poems are often written as he is walking down the street, thinking in real time, with ideas moving quickly. The wry voice and short lines of his poems have a briskness and energy and verve that we very much associate with a kind of New York. The writing of the Harlem Renaissance, for instance, captures the energy, struggle, excitement, and sense of possibility in Harlem during the 1920s.
What do you hope students walk away with—both as writers and as observers of New York?
I want students to come away understanding that the possibilities for writing about New York City are endless, and that what we cover in the course is only a small sample. Even as we read writers from a wide range of historical moments, neighborhoods, and racial, ethnic, or gendered positions, it remains just a small part of what exists. I hope that range gives students a sense of permission to write about their own experiences.
Is there a New York writer or moment in the city that’s really stayed with you?
I think about the writer Ntozake Shange, who was a student at Barnard and whose papers are held there. I think about her being in New York when she began developing her choreopoems, work that defied genres, and how she came into her own as a writer and as a Black feminist in the city. In the 1970s, she was able to workshop what became her award-winning play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, at The Public Theater, at a time when New York offered artists the space and resources to incubate their work and cultivate their voices. Her story, and her connection to Barnard and Columbia, has been deeply compelling to me.
At the same time, I do think about how much more expensive the city is now, and how that may make it more challenging for writers. But I also see writers continuing to do this work. For example, Angie Cruz, a faculty member in the School of the Arts, whose novel How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water reflects her experience growing up in Washington Heights. She now teaches here and shares her experiences and how to write about them, particularly as a Dominican American writer in the city.
