From Writing Centres to Writers’ Centres

 

When Yale-NUS opened its doors to its first students in 2013, the administration hired a creative writer, Robin Hemley to direct its Writing Centre. With no experience running a traditional writing center, he instead created a Writers’ Centre, part literary center, part hub for traditional academic writing. Inadvertently, this combination created a space on campus that students actually wanted to be seen in rather than a space with the stigma of remediation. In the second year, Hemley brought on Heidi Stalla, Associate Director of the Writers’ Centre, who had previously been the director of the writing program at NYU Abu Dhabi. Together, they’ve created a hybrid centre for writing in which all writing is celebrated and taught and treated in a non-hierarchal manner. Along with a team of emerging writers-in-residence and tutors, they not only conduct a series of readings and workshops in the Writers’ Centre proper, but bring the practice of writing into the residential colleges and in study abroad courses.

 

In this presentation, Hemley will retrace the steps of building a writers center from the ground up in Singapore’s first experiment with the liberal arts.