Writer and activist Emily Raboteau is Stuart Z. Katz Professor at CCNY

Emily Raboteau, award-winning writer, climate activist and professor of English in The City College of New York’s MFA Program in Creative Writing, is the 2020-21 Stuart Z. Katz Professor in the Humanities & the Arts. The endowed professorship is supported by a $1 million gift to City College by distinguished alumnus Stuart Z. Katz, Esq., a 1964 graduate. 

Raboteau is the author of “The Professor’s Daughter” and “Searching for Zion,” winner of a 2014 American Book Award in nonfiction. She has been writing about the climate crisis since the publication of the fall 2018 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. 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,” Greenpeace’s website and elsewhere. 

The professorship will support work on Raboteau’s next book, “CAUTION: Lessons in Survival,” a collection of these essays, combining her talents as writer and photographer. She will also complete another feature article with photos for “Orion Magazine” documenting and critiquing the Audubon Mural Project around City College. 

“This appointment will help me complete work on my book of creative nonfiction focusing on the climate emergency, a subject I have been writing, lecturing and teaching about and acting on in league with activists at campus, community, and city levels since 2018,” said Raboteau. “Specifically, I will be writing about the striking Audubon bird murals around City College, representing birds endangered by climate change, painted in a pocket of Manhattan plagued by environmental injustice.”

She will be installed as Katz Professor this fall, when she will also be piloting a graduate course on climate storytelling.  Past recipients include internationally renowned jazz pianist, composer and arranger Mike Holober; art historian Anna Indych-López; and renowned scholar and documentary filmmaker Andrea Weiss.

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 1.2% 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.