A Visiting Fellowship at the Library

The American Library in Paris Visiting Fellowship was created in 2013 to nurture and sustain a heritage as old as the Library itself – deepening French-American understanding. 

The Visiting Fellowship offer writers and researchers an opportunity to pursue a creative project in Paris for a month or longer while participating actively in the life of the American Library. The project may be a book (fiction or non-fiction), long-form journalism, film or music.

The Fellowship award, a stipend of $5,000 is intended to cover travel and housing costs for the Visiting Fellow. He or she will be expected to present the work-in-progress to the public in a weekday evening talk at the Library, and to conduct one or two workshops for Library members on a subject of common interest. 

The American Library in Paris has attracted and celebrated writers for all of its ninety-three years. The Library was created in part as a memorial to a young American poet, Alan Seeger, who wrote the well-known poem “I have a rendezvous with death” not long before he died in action in France in 1916. One of the Library’s founding trustees was Edith Wharton. Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, among many other writers of note, contributed reviews to the Library’s literary magazine, Ex Libris. Stephen Vincent Benet composed John Brown’s Body at the Library.

Authors of every generation have worked and spoken at the Library: Ford Madox Ford, Archibald MacLeish, Colette, Henry Miller, André Gide, Anaïs Nin, James Baldwin, Irwin Shaw, James Jones, and Mary McCarthy, to name a few. The tradition continues with distinguished contemporary authors and other public figures who speak at the Library on more than sixty occasions a year. Recent speakers have included Michael Chabon, Ayelet Waldman, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Ford, Reza Aslan, Mo Willems, Dave Barry, Ridley Pearson, Joshua Ferris, Ben Watt, Andrew Nagorski, Justice Anthony Kennedy, Alice Kaplan, Jean-Marc Barr, Ben Fountain, and Jerome Charyn.

The Fellowship is made possible through the generous support of The de Groot Foundation.

The first American Library in Paris Fellow (fall 2013) was Anthony Flint, whose work-in-progress is a biography of Le Corbusier entitled The Raven: The Story of Le Corbusier, Maker of the Modern. His reflections on his fellowship can be read here.

Fellowship applicants should be working on a project which resonates with the Library’s Franco-American traditions and interests and which might benefit from an extended presence in Paris. The Library’s collections and research resources, its reading rooms, and its community of book-minded people may also be an asset to the Visiting Fellow. 

There are no specific time periods for the fellowship, except that they may not take place in July or August and are occasionally subject to constraints in the annual calendar. The Library expects to award one or two such Fellowship grants every year.

The fellows for the 2014-2015 academic year have been selected, with new applications being considered for fall 2015 and beyond. The deadline for applications is January 1, 2015.

Applicants are asked to submit a one-page letter of interest describing their work-in-progress four to six months (or more) before the intended period in Paris – and to attach a curriculum vitae. The Library may ask for supporting materials. Promising applicants will be interviewed by telephone.

For further information, or to apply, please write to: fellowship@americanlibraryinparis.org.