An NYU education begins, in part, with writing. This practice reflects the University’s longstanding commitment to the centrality of written inquiry to undergraduate education. To that end, Mercer Street is an annual online anthology collecting the very best student essays written for NYU’s Expository Writing Program over the course of the previous academic year.

We receive hundreds of submissions each year from students in our many required and elective courses, and these final selections published here serve as vibrant examples of the rigorous and wide-ranging work being done in our classrooms. The pieces of writing collected here are frequently assigned to first-year students as exemplary models of our values as a program in courses taught by poets, fiction writers, playwrights, theater artists, and journalists, as well as scholars in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

EWP courses challenge students to develop ideas and arguments through the careful and rigorous reading of complex texts, and the program offers the required courses for students in the College of Arts and Science, Tisch School of the Arts, Steinhardt School of Education, Culture, and Human Development, Silver School of Social Work, the College of Nursing, and the Tandon School of Engineering, as well as many of the students in the Stern School of Business. The work published in Mercer Street thus ranges across genres and encompasses prose that is creative, technical, reflective, and persuasive. It’s writing that seeks to make an impact on its readers, that seeks not only to make audiences see the questions and challenges that face us today in new ways but also to help them imagine new possibilities and perspectives.

The editors of Mercer Street and the faculty of EWP hope that you will both enjoy and learn from these essays, which we hope open up questions, problems, and puzzles that are not entirely solvable, but that are worth exploring and interrogating nonetheless.

Click here for submissions information, and here for an archive of previous editions from before we moved to our new format.