English professors receive 2020 NY Foundation for the Arts fellowships 


 
City College English professor Emily Raboteau is the recipient of a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). The fellowship recognizes Raboteau, award-winning writer, climate activist and professor in CCNY’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, in the Nonfiction Literature discipline. She was also a NYFA Fiction Fellow in 2004.

Raboteau is the author of “The Professor’s Daughter” and “Searching for Zion,” winner of a 2014 American Book Award in nonfiction. Her feature essays about the intersection of climate change and environmental injustice have recently appeared in the “New York Review of Books,” “New York Magazine,” “Zora Magazine,” “Best American Travel Essays” and Greenpeace’s website. 

“I’ll be spending the grant money on childcare so that I can get writing done during the pandemic,” said Raboteau, mother of two. “It’s much appreciated.”

Earlier this year, Raboteau was announced as the 2020-21 Stuart Z. Katz Professor in the Humanities & the Arts in May. She will be installed on November 11. 

The NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship program, administered with leadership support from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), awarded a total of $588,000 to 85 artists across 15 disciplines. The program makes unrestricted cash grants of $7,000 to artists and is highly competitive – this year’s recipients and finalists were selected by discipline-specific peer panels from an applicant pool of 3,536 artists.

Guest faculty member Nicole Sealey, who teaches in CCNY’s MFA program, also received a NYFA fellowship, in Poetry. Sealey, who is the author of “Ordinary Beast” and “The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named,” was the winner last year of the Rome Prize for Literature by the American Academy in Rome.

About the City College of New York

Since 1847, The City College of New York has provided a high-quality and affordable education to generations of New Yorkers in a wide variety of disciplines. CCNY embraces its position at the forefront of social change. It is ranked #1 by the Harvard-based Opportunity Insights out of 369 selective public colleges in the United States on the overall mobility index. This measure reflects both access and outcomes, representing the likelihood that a student at CCNY can move up two or more income quintiles. In addition, the Center for World University Rankings places CCNY in the top 1.8% of universities worldwide in terms of academic excellence. Labor analytics firm Emsi puts at $1.9 billion CCNY’s annual economic impact on the regional economy (5 boroughs and 5 adjacent counties) and quantifies the “for dollar” return on investment to students, taxpayers and society. At City College, more than 16,000 students pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees in eight schools and divisions, driven by significant funded research, creativity and scholarship. CCNY is as diverse, dynamic and visionary as New York City itself. View CCNY Media Kit.

Susan Konig
p: (212) 650-8437
e:   skonig@ccny.cuny.edu