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Flipping the Script on the College Essay With Help From The New York Times

How one teacher uses personal narratives to help high school seniors write application essays that are “powerful, meaningful and clear”

By Sharon Murchie

As we kick off a third year of our student narrative writing contest , we bring you an idea from Sharon Murchie, a 10th and 12th grade English teacher at Okemos High School in Okemos, Mich. , for how to use personal essays from The Times to help students write meaningful and authentic college application essays.

Year after year, Ms. Murchie, who was also a member of the 2020-21 cohort of The New York Times Teaching Project , watched her high school seniors freeze in the “proverbial headlights of the college essay.” So she decided to “flip the script” by having them write their essays first, before ever seeing the application prompts. Below, she tells us about her “Common App Essay Boot Camp,” featuring Times mentor texts and The Learning Network’s personal narrative writing unit .

If you have a teaching idea to share, tell us about it here , or browse our full collection of Reader Ideas .

— The Learning Network

Writing the college application essay is both a rite of passage for high school seniors and a stumbling block for many of them.

Every year, my incoming seniors are panicked about the essay that they have to submit for the Common App, the nation’s most used application. For some reason, their 17- and 18-year-old brains have suddenly decided that everything they have ever learned about writing with voice and “show, don’t tell” and addressing their audience should fly out the window when faced with the terrifying unknown: The College Entrance Committee. They often try to sound like anyone other than themselves, resorting to the thesaurus and picking the biggest word instead of believing in their own voices. They can’t envision an audience that is shrouded in mystery out there, somewhere, the panel of judgment, the gatekeepers to the rest of their lives.

The resulting essays that they panic-write are often dull, formulaic, filled with clichés, and attempting to sound wise beyond their 18 years of life. They write tortured sentences like “I look back, now cognizant of the piteous ineptitude of my 13-year-old self” and “I try to remember what life was once like before the new normal, the unprecedented time of Covid.”

I’ve tried to stress to them for years that the Common App essay is just a short personal narrative written to a fairly open-ended prompt, but so many students feel they have nothing meaningful to write about. I needed to flip this experience upside down for them, and have students write their stories first, before they looked at the actual prompts and started to sweat.

Thus, the Common App Essay Boot Camp, featuring The New York Times, was born.

I started with the Learning Network’s unit on narrative writing , which is rich with prompts and mentor texts. The resources provide scaffolding for students to draft short but vivid personal essays about seemingly insignificant moments in their lives: a grudge they held, a lie they told, a risk they took, a sunrise they saw. Each mentor text lesson teaches a different key element of narrative writing, provides examples of the skill in Times narrative essays, and then challenges students to use it in their own writing. Students are encouraged to write what they know, honor their own voices, and tell their unique stories.

I wanted to use a similar approach, but adapt it for high school seniors who are writing their college application essays. So I created a unit where students would write personal narratives, inspired by Times mentor texts that would be applicable to the Common App prompts. Then, I would reveal the prompts and they would already have drafts that they could work with and modify for their college application.

Finding Inspiration in Times Narrative Essays

To find personal narratives for students to emulate, I combed through the Lives column , which ran in The Times for over 20 years and invited writers to tell short, powerful stories about meaningful life experiences. I also searched through the college application essays on money, work and social class that The Times publishes every year.

From those, I chose just four essays to use as mentor texts that could easily align with the Common App prompts.

Each week, we read a New York Times essay as a mentor text, annotated it for specific “writer’s moves,” discussed it, and then wrote our own essays, mirroring some of the craft moves that the authors had made in the mentor texts. Then, we worked through a writing workshop feedback and revision process, where students noted evidence in each other’s essays of the specific writing moves that had been the focus that week. Finally, students submitted their polished essays for a grade or class credit.

Week 1: Sensory Description

We started with sensory description, using the mentor text “ This Cold House ” by Elizabeth Gilbert. The author’s moves we focused on this week were word choice and use of sensory details in order to engage the reader in the moment. Students then wrote about a favorite memory from their lives with as much of this kind of detail as possible.

Week 2: Identity

We moved into personal reflection using the mentor text “ I Live on the Edge ” by Tillena Trebon. The author’s moves we focused on were word choice, syntax and voice. I invited students to discuss how the author organizes her writing and all of the different “edges” she lives on. Then, they wrote about two worlds that they balance between.

I want students to see that they have a story, no matter how “normal” or “uneventful” they think their lives might be. Every student straddles multiple identities, and most college applications ask students to write about some aspect of their identities.

Week 3: Memorable Moments

I followed The Learning Network Writing Curriculum’s suggestion to write narratives that tell a short, memorable story , using the mentor text “ My Secret Pepsi Plot ” by Boris Fishmann. We discussed how the author moves back and forth between a “little kid understanding” and an “adult understanding” throughout the text, and how he reveals significant things about himself through this insignificant moment of taking returnables back to the store.

Students wrote about an insignificant moment in their own lives that said something significant about them or their background. I challenged them to try to stay in the moment, at the age that moment occurred, to make it really come to life.

Week 4: Direct and Indirect Explanation

We ended with “ A Slacker of Jakarta ” by Eka Kurniawan and discussed the concepts of author’s context, implicit and explicit evidence, and the different lenses through which we view ourselves. Mr. Kurniawan discusses his relationship with his mother throughout the piece, but sometimes that relationship is revealed through an action, instead of a direct explanation. Mr. Kurniawan also calls himself a “slacker,” and this led to rich discussions in the classroom about lenses and whose eyes he was judging himself through.

For their final personal narrative, students wrote about a piece of advice they had been given that they may or may not have followed. I’ve found that everyone has a “piece of advice story.” (When I was 18, for example, my mom earnestly insisted when I got my nose pierced that I’d never get a real job.) I reminded my students to tell the story, including the context, of that piece of advice, and to reveal the relationship between themselves and the advice-giver in both explicit and implicit ways.

Writing to the Common App Essay Prompts

After completing this cycle for four weeks (and promising students that we really were working on their college essays this whole time), I introduced students to the Common App essay prompts . Here they are for the 2021-22 school year:

Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.

The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?

Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?

Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happy or thankful in a surprising way. How has this gratitude affected or motivated you?

Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.

Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?

Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you’ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.

Instead of trying to write a new essay to specifically address one of the prompts, students could use one of the personal narratives they’d already written and turn it into an amazing application essay.

First, I had them identify key words in each prompt, and then consider which of their four essays might fit each prompt. Next, working with their writing groups, they chose their favorite essay and prompt combination and discussed what, if anything, would need to be altered. Finally, students revised their pieces to ensure that the key words they had identified from the prompt appeared somewhere within their essays, and that their essays were within the recommended 650-word limit .

Three Student Essays, One Generative Exercise

To show you how this works, here are three essays written by students. They all chose the narratives they wrote in response to Tillena Trebon’s mentor text “ I Live on the Edge ” about balancing between two worlds. But they revised their essays to respond to three different Common App essay prompts.

Naseeb Oluwafisiayomi Bello chose the first Common App prompt: Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.

Naseeb writes about how growing up straddling two cultures shaped his identity as someone who is Black, African and American. Naseeb’s essay begins:

I was made in one country and born in another. I am the end of an original generation and still the start of a new one. My parents left with history and my life begins with mystery. It was planned that I would become the nexus of both. I live in a home mostly dominated by one culture and leave the home exposed to a new one. I ask my mom “What’s for dinner?” expecting the same flavors. I suggest dinner ideas hoping to taste the melting pot. The distinct aroma of my home reminds me of the scent in the home of my parents in Nigeria. When we cook, we open the doors and windows, initiating the invasion of the air outside. The aroma of my house melts into the outside.

Read the rest of Naseeb’s essay .

Harshil Chidura decided to respond to the fifth prompt: Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.

Harshil’s essay tackles that phase between childhood and adulthood, and how treasuring his younger self has helped him confront a daunting future. Harshil writes:

I still feel like someone who watches Minecraft “Let’s Play” episodes in his free time, who plays football in his backyard, and whose greatest source of excitement is a GameStop gift card on his birthday. I still feel like I should be nervous about starting the fifth grade, eating Popsicles after a long day of playing outside with super soakers, and celebrating my half birthday. And yet, it has been years since I have done any one of those things, nor am I particularly interested in them now. My interests and hobbies have matured along with me and the rest of my peers. But still, I feel like no time has passed at all.

Read Harshil’s full essay.

Zachary Flink responded to the last prompt: Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you’ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.

Zachary writes about feeling like there are two versions of himself. His essay begins:

I live each day as two different people. The daily swallowing of a pill takes out my brain and replaces it with another. This statement seems so ridiculous. A tiny 50 milligram pill doesn’t seem like it has the power to change who you are for seven hours. From 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., I live life as an overly determined robot.

Read the rest of Zachary’s essay.

For the summative unit assessment, I had students follow the model of The Learning Network’s Annotated by the Author series, in which student writers reveal their writing process through annotations and a short video interview. I asked students to create their own videos in Flipgrid , explaining which essay they chose for their Common App and why, and outlining the author choices and moves they made.

Here are videos from three students:

Seoah An talks about how she used word choice and sentence structure to highlight her feelings of alienation and cultural difference in her essay “The Name Game.”

Teagan Hemmerly discusses how she deployed sensory details to show the pressure she feels to be perfect.

Shreya Ravipati tells viewers why she chose a “nonsensical topic” — everything bagels — to show her personal growth.

Rising seniors are often trapped in the quicksand of thinking they know it all, and yet knowing they know nothing. Giving them personal essay mentor texts from The Times, and using the Learning Network’s narrative-writing framework, helps them see that they really do have a story worth telling, and that their own voices can be powerful, meaningful and clear.

NY Times Rebrands ‘Op-Eds’ as ‘Guest Essays’: ‘We Are Striving to Be Far More Inclusive’

“It is a relic of an older age and an older print newspaper design,” the Times’ opinion editor says of the term “op-ed”

The New York Times is retiring the term “op-ed” and renaming opinion pieces written by outside writers as “guest essays,” the paper’s opinion editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, said on Monday.

“It’s time to change the name. The reason is simple: In the digital world, in which millions of Times subscribers absorb the paper’s journalism online, there is no geographical ‘Op-Ed,’ just as there is no geographical ‘Ed’ for Op-Ed to be opposite to,” Kingsbury wrote in a piece announcing the changes . “It is a relic of an older age and an older print newspaper design.”

Editorials will still be called the same, but former “op-eds” will now be called “guest essays” — a label that will also appear “prominently above the headline,” Kingsbury said.

The change comes 50 years after the first op-ed was published in the Times and is an effort to be “more inclusive,” according to Kingsbury.

“It may seem strange to link changes in our design to the quality of the conversation we are having today. Terms like Op-Ed are, by their nature, clubby newspaper jargon; we are striving to be far more inclusive in explaining how and why we do our work,” Kingsbury wrote. “In an era of distrust in the media and confusion over what journalism is, I believe institutions — even ones with a lot of esteemed traditions — better serve their audiences with direct, clear language. We don’t like jargon in our articles; we don’t want it above them, either.”

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Introducing Opinion’s Contributing Writers and Design Changes

Meet the 16 voices who complement our columnists and staff writers, along with a new presentation for Opinion journalism. Read more in this note from Kathleen Kingsbury.

Times Opinion announced an update to our roster of contributing opinion writers. These 16 voices are meant to complement Opinion’s columnists and staff writers with important expertise and perspective, and to reflect on some expected lines of coverage.

For example: Daniela J. Lamas, a critical-care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, who will continue writing regularly as she treats Covid-19 patients and follows the pandemic’s next phase.

Many other names on the roster already contribute to The Times. And readers should expect to see these voices more frequently and in more places — as guests on Opinion’s podcasts, newsletters, as speakers at events and more. Readers can expect regular updates to this roster in the future, to help ensure Opinion coverage continuously explores “new insights and new ideas” as society changes.

Last year Opinion published guest essays from more than 2,000 individual writers. A smaller roster of regular contributors will allow space for even more outside views. Readers will continue to find vigorous ideas and arguments on climate change, foreign policy, economic policy and more throughout Opinion. No one writer can or should capture everything there is to say.

This announcement joins other changes for Opinion journalism at The Times — including a new design meant to further differentiate and contextualize Opinion journalism. The anachronistic term “Op-Ed” is being retired and editors have introduced clearer labeling . Readers will see additional design changes, like the “conversation” module on recent Covid coverage that collects and packages the range of viewpoints on big debates more robustly.

Opinion also introduced a new process and guidance for submitting guest essays. Details on how to submit a guest essay along with the revised requirements and process is available here .

The full roster of Contributing Opinion Writers for 2021:

• Vanessa Barbara , who writes about Brazilian politics and culture, is the editor of the literary website A Hortaliça, and the author of two novels and two nonfiction books.
• Jennifer Finney Boylan is the author of 15 books, including the novel “Long Black Veil.” She is the Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University.
• Frank Bruni has been an Opinion columnist since 2011 and worked as a reporter, correspondent and critic for The Times since 1995. Starting in July, he’ll join the faculty of Duke University.
• Christopher Caldwell is the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West” and “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”
• Thomas B. Edsall analyzes strategic and demographic trends in American politics and teaches political journalism.
• Roxane Gay is the author of several books including “Bad Feminist” and “Hunger.”
• Linda Greenhouse writes about the Supreme Court and the law, which she covered as a reporter for The New York Times from 1978 to 2008. She teaches at Yale Law School and is the author of several books.
• Kaitlyn Greenidge is the author of the new novel “Libertie” and the features director at Harper’s Bazaar.
• Tammy Kim , who writes on labor issues and the Koreas, is a co-author and co-editor of “Punk Ethnography,” a book about the politics of contemporary world music.
• Daniela J. Lamas is a critical-care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, where she treats patients with Covid-19.
• Esau McCaulley is an assistant professor of New Testament at Wheaton College in Illinois.
• Sonia Nazario , a journalist and author of the book “Enrique’s Journey,” has covered some of this country’s most intractable problems, including hunger, drug addiction and immigration.
• Margaret Renkl lives in Nashville and covers the flora, fauna, politics and culture of the American South.
• Kara Swisher has fearlessly covered all things tech since the dawn of the internet age. She is the host of “Sway,” a Times interview podcast about power.
• Zeynep Tufekci , is a professor at UNC School of Information and Library Science and writes about the social impacts of technology.
• Peter Wehner , a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, served in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations.

Guide to The NY Times’ Five Best College Essays on Work, Money and Class

So, you might ask, “What can I learn from this year’s crop of college essays about money, work and class? And how can they help me craft my own memorable, standout essays?”  To help get to the bottom of what made the Times ‘ featured essays so exceptional, we made you a guide on  w hat worked, and what you can emulate in your own essays to make them just as memorable for admissions.

• Contradictions are the stuff of great literature . “I belong to the place where opposites merge in a…heap of beautiful contradictions,” muses Tillena Treborn in her lyrical essay on straddling rural and urban life in Flagstaff, AZ, one of the five pieces selected by t he Times this year. Each of the highlighted essays mined contradictions: immigrant versus citizen; service worker versus client; insider versus outsider; urban versus rural; poverty versus wealth; acceptance versus rebellion; individual versus family. Every day, we navigate opposing forces in our lives. These struggles—often rich, and full of tension—make for excellent essay topics. Ask yourself this: Do you straddle the line between ethnicities, religions, generations, languages, or locales? If so, how? In what ways do you feel like you are stuck between two worlds, or like you are an outsider? Examining the essential contradictions in your own life will provide you with fodder for a fascinating, insightful college essay.  
• The magic is in the details — especially the sensory ones. Sensory details bring writing to life by allowing readers to experience how something looks, sounds, smells, tastes, or feels. In his American dream-themed essay about his immigrant mother cleaning the apartment of two professors, Jonathan Ababiy describes “the whir,” “suction,” and “squeal” of her “blue Hoover vacuum” as it leaps across “miles of carpet.” These descriptions allow us to both hear and see the symbolic vacuum in action. The slice-of-life familial essay by Idalia Felipe–the only essay to be published in The Times’ Snapchat Discover feature–opens with a scene: “As I sit facing our thirteen-year old refrigerator, my stomach growls at the scent of handmade tortillas and meat sizzling on the stove.” Immediately, we are brought inside Felipe’s home with its distinctive smells and sounds; our stomach seems to growl alongside hers. Use descriptive, sensory language to engage your reader, bring them into your world, and make your writing shine.
• One-sentence paragraphs are catchy . A one-sentence paragraph, as I’m sure you’ve gleaned, is a paragraph that is only one sentence long. The form has been employed by everyone from Tim O’Brien to Charles Dickens and, now, the writers of this year’s featured Times college essays. “I live on the edge,” Ms. Treborn declares at the beginning of her poetic essay on the differences between her mother and father’s worlds. “The most exciting part was the laptop,” asserts Zoe Sottile, the recipient of the Tang Scholarship at Phillips Academy in her essay about the mutability and complexity of class identity. Starting your essay with a one-sentence paragraph—a line of description, a scene, or a question, for example—is a great way to hook the reader. You could also use a one-sentence paragraph mid-essay to emphasize a point, as Ms. Treborn does, or in your conclusion. A one-sentence paragraph is one of many tricks that you have in your writing toolkit to make your reader pause and take notice.
• The Familiar Can Be Fascinating. The most daring essay this year, a rant on the imbalances of power embedded in the service industry by Caitlin McCormick, delivers us into the world of a family bed and breakfast with its clinking silverware and cantankerous guests demanding twice-a-day room cleanings. In Ms. Felipe’s more atmospheric piece, we enter her home before dinnertime where we see her attempting to study while her sisters giggle and watch Youtube cat videos. These are the environments these students grew up in, and they inspired everything from frustration at glaring class inequalities to gratitude for the dream of a better life. Rather than feeling like you have to write about something monumental, focus on the familiar, and consider how your environment has shaped you. How did you grow up—in the restaurant business, on a farm, in a house full of artists, construction workers, or judges? Bring us into your world, describing it meticulously and thoughtfully. Tease out the connection between your environment and who you are/what you strive for today and you will be embarking on the path of meaningful self-discovery, which is the key to college essay success.

About Nina Bailey

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Written by Nina Bailey

Category: advice , Essay Tips , Essay Writing , New York Times , Uncategorized

Tags: advice , college admissions , college admissions essay , college essay , college essay advisors , common application , tips , writing

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Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times Paperback – May 1, 2002

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Now in paperback, today's most celebrated writers explore literature and the literary life in an inspirational collection of original essays. By turns poignant, hilarious, and practical, Writers on Writing brings together more than forty of contemporary literature's finest voices. Pieces range from reflections on the daily craft of writing to the intersection of art's and life's consequential moments. Authors discuss what impels them to write: creating a sense of control in a turbulent universe; bearing witness to events that would otherwise be lost in history or within the writer's soul; recapturing a fragment of time. Others praise mentors and lessons, whether from the classroom, daily circumstances, or the pages of a favorite writer. For anyone interested in the art and rewards of writing, Writers on Writing offers an uncommon and revealing view of a writer's world. Contributors include Russell Banks, Saul Bellow, E. L. Doctorow, Richard Ford, Kent Haruf, Carl Hiaasen, Alice Hoffman, Jamaica Kincaid, Barbara Kingsolver, Sue Miller, Walter Mosley, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx, Carol Shields, Jane Smiley, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Alice Walker, and Elie Wiesel.

• Print length 288 pages
• Language English
• Publication date May 1, 2002
• Dimensions 5.5 x 0.64 x 8.5 inches
• ISBN-10 0805070850
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“The essays . . . are all unified by an overwhelming sense of generosity of spirit, of writers offering encouragement, reflection, and introspection . . .” ― Kirkus Reviews “In a time when everything around me seemed completely out of control, when lives were being cut short and fate seemed especially cruel, I had the need to get to an ending of something. I was desperate to know how things turned out, in fiction if not in life. More than ever, more than anything, I was a writer.” ― Alice Hoffman, from Writers on Writing “The trial lawyer's job and the novelist's were, in some aspects, shockingly similar. Both involved the reconstruction of experience, usually through many voices. . . . But there the paths deviated. In this arena the universal trumped; there were no prizes for being rarefied or ahead of the times. The trial lawyer who lost the audience also inevitably lost the case.” ― Scott Turow, from Writers on Writing

About the Author

John Darnton , winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the George Polk Award for his journalism, is culture editor for The New York Times and the author of two novels, The Experiment and Neanderthal . He lives in New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

"The trial lawyer's job and the novelist's were, in some aspects, shockingly similar. Both involved the reconstruction of experience, usually through many voices. . . . But there the paths deviated. In this arena the universal trumped; there were no prizes for being rarefied or ahead of the times. The trial lawyer who lost the audience also inevitably lost the case." --Scott Turow, from Writers on Writing

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NYT Modern Love essayist navigates her grief with support from Walpole writing group

Writing can be a lonely activity, and you could say the same thing about processing grief. But Tina Hedin of Keene found community in a local writing group. It’s there that she started working on an essay about her grief after her daughter’s death. That essay recently appeared in the New York Times’ Modern Love section.

NHPR's Morning Edition host Rick Ganley spoke with Hedin about how writing can connect people who are grieving.

Your essay's called "We Didn't Know It Was the Last Time." Can you tell us about the essay for listeners who have not read that yet?

I think of it as an essay where the past and the present are happening at the same time. In my own experience of grief, that's a state that I find myself in a lot – where I'm in the present, but memories of the past are triggered by some little event and come rushing back.

And that's what happened the day that I'm describing in the story. I was at the gym. I saw a young woman there who reminded me of my daughter. It was Christmas season. I saw a picture on my phone that day taken of my daughter, and it took me back so vividly to the last days that we were together with her, and I describe that in my story.

And the experience of writing about that made me reflect on a more universal experience. Often we don't get a chance to know when something is the last time, when it's the last time we're with our loved one. Or we do something that we think is ordinary, and then in retrospect, it's incredibly precious and special because it will never happen again.

Writing isn't your job professionally, but you belong to a Walpole writing group. How did that help you navigate your grief after your daughter Kiki died?

I didn't expect to share the things that I was writing initially, but I did have a place to share them with my group. And as the months went by and I did get feedback from others, I realized that sharing my writing with other people who have experienced grief could give others what I got from reading.

Initially, after Kiki died, I was just desperate to find writing by others who had gone through the loss of a child, who were experiencing that kind of grief, and I was in hopes of feeling a connection, feeling not alone in this terrible experience.

What's been the response from readers to your essay? The New York Times obviously has a huge reach.

It's been pretty mind blowing for me. I woke up at 3 a.m. in the morning that it came out, too excited to sleep. And I went online, and I saw that I already had emails from Switzerland, and Dubai and the Netherlands – people around the world that had read it. At this point, I'm still trying to work my way through them.

Many of them are from parents who have lost a child. Many of them are from people experiencing grief and loss. Our grief is universal. Each loss is unique and precious to that person. And I really do feel honored that so many people have taken the time to reach out, especially considering that that was my hope in writing in the first place – was to connect with other people.

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Illume/Warwicks: In Conversation with Amy Tan

The USD College of Arts and Sciences and Humanities Center , along with Warwick’s bookstore, will host best-selling author Amy Tan as she discusses her new book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles. She will be in conversation with Noelle Norton, PhD, Dean, College of Arts and Sciences.

Tracking the natural beauty that surrounds us, The Backyard Bird Chronicles maps the passage of time through daily entries, thoughtful questions, and beautiful original sketches. With boundless charm and wit, author Amy Tan charts her foray into birding and the natural wonders of the world.

Amy Tan is the New York Times bestselling author of several novels, including The Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God’s Wife and The Bonesetter’s Daughter. Her essays and stories have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s Bazaar, National Geographic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. She is a co-producer and co-screenwriter of the film version of The Joy Luck Club and is on the board of American Bird Conservancy. She is the recipient of many honors, including the Commonwealth Gold Award, the Carl Sandburg Award. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in 2022, and in 2023, President Biden presented her with the National Humanities Medal.

Free admission for USD students and staff by registering with your USD email and promo code. The code will be announced in the Humanities Center newsletter or you may contact us directly at [email protected] . Free tickets do not include a copy of the book, which will be for sale by Warwick's bookstore.

Parking and Campus information here

For more information visit: warwicks.com

Event Supported By

University of san diego humanities center.

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