The de Groot Visiting Fellowship
The de Groot Visiting Fellowship Program at the American Library in Paris supports writers, thinkers, and scholars across disciplines who advance dialogue, creativity, and cross-cultural understanding.
Established in 2013, the Fellowship extends the Library’s long tradition of fostering transatlantic exchange and creative expression. Each year, two Visiting Fellows and three Scholars of Note pursue their projects in Paris while contributing to the Library’s cultural life through public talks and workshops. Over the past decade, Fellows have enriched the Library’s century-old legacy and, in turn, joined the generations of writers who have found a home in Paris.
In addition to working on their own project, Fellows present a public program during their residency that engages our audience and members around a central theme. The theme for 2025-2026 is Ways of Seeing, in line with the Library’s eponymous series exploring how literature and visual art inspire one another.
For more than a decade, the de Groot family and the American Library in Paris have supported forty-four writers through a residency in the heart of literary Paris. Fellows include journalists, novelists, poets, and librarians whose work and influence have only grown since their time with us. Many describe their residency as a turning point in their creative lives and careers.
A New Chapter
Beginning in 2025, the Fellowship enters a new phase. Named in recognition of the de Groot family’s extraordinary support, this next chapter strengthens the program’s foundation and helps ensure that future generations of writers will continue to find inspiration, community, and creative freedom in Paris.
The 2026–27 Visiting Fellows
Madhuri Vijay is the author of The Far Field, which won India’s JCB Prize for Literature, and was nominated for numerous other honors, including the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, and her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Best American Short Stories. Her second novel, The Festival, will be published in 2028.
At the Library, Vijay will work on a novel about a young Indian woman stranded in Paris in the late ‘60s, who falls in with a group of struggling South Asian artists and becomes an unlikely witness to their lives and the turbulent decade.
Ricardo Nuila is a writer and internal medicine doctor at Houston’s largest public hospital. His first book, The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine, was selected as one of the Best Books of 2023 by Amazon, Kirkus Review, and Washington Post, and was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross. His essays and stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Texas Monthly, VQR, the New England Journal of Medicine and Best American Short Stories. He directs the Humanities Expression and Arts Lab (HEAL) at Baylor College of Medicine.
At the Library, Nuila will research public hospitals and the historical innovations made by French physicians.
“It’s difficult for me to imagine my in-progress novel without the time I’ve had as a Visiting Fellow at the American Library in Paris. The Library opened wide so many doors—research doors, experiential doors—that I don’t think I could have begun to crack open on my own. The fellowship has been indispensable, a great blessing. There’s nothing quite like it. I’m deeply, intensely grateful to every single person who helped make this fellowship possible.”
The 2025–26 Scholars of Note
In recognition of the many outstanding candidates who apply each year to the Library’s Visiting Fellowship program, the Selection Committee created the Scholar of Note distinction to honor individuals whose applications stand out for their exceptional merit.
Established in 2022, the distinction is generously supported by The de Groot Foundation.
Julie Carrick Dalton is the Boston-based author of The Forest Becomes Her, The Last Beekeeper, and Waiting for the Night Song. She is the winner of the New Hampshire Book Awards’ People’s Choice for Best Novel, and was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award, the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature, and the ASLE Environmental Book Award. Her novels have been named to Most Anticipated lists from CNN, Newsweek, USA Today, Parade, and others, and were selected as an Amazon Editor’s Pick for Best Book of the Month. She currently serves on the teaching faculty of Drexel University’s Creative Writing MFA program, was the University of Delaware’s 2025 Writer in Residence, and is a frequent guest lecturer at Harvard.
At the Library, Dalton will work on a novel that explores cultural grief related to specific foods we are losing as a result of climate change.
Adam Leith Gollner is the author of The Fruit Hunters (a New York Times Editors’ Choice) and The Book of Immortality (recipient of The Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction), as well as several collaborative books on nature, art, and literature. A contributing editor at Vanity Fair, his work has been published by The Paris Review, The New Yorker, GQ, and The New York Times. His forthcoming non-fiction book, is provisionally titled The Art Sleuth (Atria Books / Simon & Schuster). He lives in Montreal.
At the Library, Gollner will work on the story of an amateur art sleuth who tracks down lost masterpieces, and who cracked one of the most confounding art heists in American history.
Molly Peacock is a distinguished American-Canadian poet and biographer, author of eight volumes of poetry, recently The Widow’s Crayon Box (W.W. Norton) and two notable biographies, The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 (A Globe and Mail, Economist, Irish Times, London Evening Standard, and Sunday Telegraph book of the year) and Flower Diary. A Leon Levy Biography Fellow, co-founder of Poetry in Motion on New York’s subways, and originator of The Best Canadian Poetry series, Peacock’s poetry appears in A Century of Poetry from the New Yorker and The Oxford Book of American Poetry.
At the Library, Peacock will work on The Poet in the Herbarium, a nonfiction journey through four plant libraries in Paris, Kyoto, New York, and Toronto, exploring the intersection of poetry and botany through historical specimens and contemporary research.
Past Visiting Fellows
“The American Library was kind enough to award me a Visiting Fellowship in January of 2015 where I was able to work out part of the story in my book focusing on France, and Paris specifically. It’s no exaggeration to say that this book began at the American Library in Paris and was finished at the American Library in Paris, which I first visited in 2013 to give a talk. The Library was an invaluable resource to me and I hope that people of good will continue to support it so that it may remain a valuable resource to other writers and readers.”
Past Scholars of Note
“I have spent a lot of my career, a lot of my life, in collecting institutions—and there is nothing that compares to having a room of one’s own in a library, to live, casually, abundantly, in the stacks, to really watch what happens, who is there, what it means, passing the spines of old friends, discovery, waiting, discovery again.”