NYU Alumni Day

NYU Alumni Day will take place tomorrow and I hope you are as excited about the events taking place as we are. Over 2,000 alumni and friends have signed up for Alumni Day and we look forward to welcoming everyone for an informative and fun day at NYU.

Registered guests should make their first stop on Saturday the Jeffrey S. Gould Welcome Center, located at 50 West Fourth Street (at the corner of Washington Square East). Alumni can check in, pick up an NYU Alumni Day pass, and receive a personalized agenda with times and locations for events. Early birds will also get one of our limited NYU Alumni Day tote bags.

Check-in will be open from 7:30 AM until 4:00 PM.



Here's another exciting event that is quickly approaching:




NYU at the Bronx Zoo | Sunday, June 22, 2008

Zoo Hours - 10:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Barbecue (Pepsi Pavilion)- 12:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m.

Sea Lion Feeding (Sea Lion Pool) - 11:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m.
Tiger Enrichment (Tiger Mountain) - 11:30 a.m., 1:30 p.m., 3:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m.
Bee-Eater Buffet (World of Birds) - 2:45 p.m.
Primate Training (Monkey House) - 3:30 p.m.
Penguin Feeding (Sea Bird Colony) - 3:30 p.m.

2300 Southern Boulevard
Bronx, NY 10460-1099
718-367-1010
Barbecue: Pepsi Pavilion


The College of Arts and Science Alumni Association and the Recent Alumni Network are pleased to offer NYU alumni, their families, and friends a day at the Bronx Zoo, a landmark venue featuring over 4,000 animals from around the world and a 265 acre lush green space to explore. It is the largest urban zoo in the USA and is consistently rated as a top New York area attraction.

As part of our exclusive event, guests will receive discounted parking and all-access passes to the zoo that include upgraded exhibits and attractions such as the Asia Monorail, Zoo Shuttle, Skyfari, Children's Zoo, Butterfly Garden, Bug Carousel, and the Gorilla Congo Exhibit. This event also includes a two hour reception that will give everyone a chance to reconnect, meet and greet alumni and friends, and enjoy a delicious, all-you-can-eat barbecue picnic. We hope to see you there!!!


Tickets are $15 per person and can be purchased online at https://www.nyu.edu/alumni/events/zoo.shtml prior to June 10.


Pre-registration is required.

For more information, contact the CAS Alumni Relations Office at 212-998-6880 or cas.alumni@nyu.edu. Tickets will be mailed one week prior to the event.

Congratulations NYU Class of 2008

This is an exciting week full of celebrations and graduations. Today is the 12th Annual Grad Alley, a Commencement Eve celebration marking the accomplishments of all NYU graduates from 5:00pm-8:00pm. A carnival type atmosphere is created along West Fourth Street, La Guardia Place, and the NYU plazas. Banners will serve as a guide while you stroll down Grad Alley enjoying the many entertainment opportunities including jugglers, mimes, Lady Liberty, arcade games and more. Food is available for a bite to eat while taking in the sights. The sounds of a live D.J. fill Gould Plaza encouraging graduates, their families and friends to dance and party the night away. The campus on the square is alive with an air of nostalgia and excitement. As the sun sets, a fireworks display off the rooftops from Gould Plaza announces the roar of Commencement to follow the next morning. Be sure to stick around for the fireworks at 8:00pm by Gould Plaza.

Be sure to stop by the Alumni Tent to pick up a bag of goodies.

NYU Commencement will take place tomorrow, May 14th at Yankee Stadium. You can watch a live webcast of the events here.

2008 GSAS Alumni/Alumnae Award

Congratulations to our two 2008 GSAS Alumni/Alumnae Achievement Award recipients, Toi Derricotte (GSAS '84) and Kate Medina (GSAS '92), who will be honored at the Dean’s Luncheon on May 17, 2008.





Toi Derricotte was born in Hamtramck, Michigan. She earned her B.A. in special education from Wayne State University and her M.A. in English literature from New York University.

Her books of poetry include Tender (1997) which won the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize; Captivity (1989); Natural Birth (1983); and The Empress of the Death House (1978). She is also the author of a literary memoir, The Black Notebooks (W.W. Norton, 1997), which won the 1998 Annisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction.

Together with Cornelius Eady, she co-founded Cave Canem, a workshop retreat for black poets, in 1996.

About her work, the poet Sharon Olds has said, "Toi Derricotte's poems show us our underlife, tender and dreadful. And they are vibrant poems, poems in the voice of the living creature, the one who escaped—and paused, and turned back, and saw, and cried out. This is one of the most beautiful and necessary voices in American poetry today."

Her honors include the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, two Pushcart Prizes, the Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award from the United Black Artists, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Guggenheim, and the Maryland State Arts Council.

She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.




Kate Medina, is Executive Vice President, Associate Publisher and Executive Editorial Director of Random House, the flagship imprint of the Random House Publishing Group. In her twenty-two years at Random House, Ms. Medina has been responsible for acquisition, editing, development, sales, marketing, and profitability of books for a wide readership.

Among the authors she has edited are Alan Alda, Peter Benchley, Elizabeth Berg, Amy Bloom, Bill Bradley, Tom Brokaw, Anita Brookner, Elisabeth Bumiller, Gail Caldwell, Ethan Canin, Michael Chabon, Robert Coles, E.L. Doctorow, Fannie Flagg, Jane Fonda, Charles Frazier, Alan Furst, Carlos Fuentes, Elizabeth Gaffney, Mavis Gallant, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Amitav Ghosh, Carol Gilligan, Kathryn Harrison, John Irving, Robert Kaplan, Tracy Kidder, Annie Leibovitz, Yiyun Li, Wynton Marsalis, Bobbie Ann Mason, Jon Meacham, James A. Michener, Nancy Milford, Azar Nafisi, Marsha Norman, Sandra Day O’Connor, Anna Quindlen, Nancy Reagan, William Safire, Maggie Scarf, Sally Bedell Smith, Hedrick Smith, Gloria Steinem, Christopher Tilghman, and Alice Walker. She has also recently acquired forthcoming books by Katherine Boo, Jonathan Darman, Adrien Nicole Leblanc, and has fostered new talent in debut fiction authors Ellen Baker, Alan Drew, and many others.

Kate Medina began her career in publishing at Doubleday & Co., Inc., rising to Executive Editor, Vice President before joining Random House in 1985. The recipient of the PEN/Roger Kline Award for Editorial Achievement and Creative Editing, she has been a Fellow at the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College. Ms. Medina is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has served on the Advisory Boards of the NYU Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Henry Street Settlement, and the Century Association.

Ms. Medina lives in New York City and has one son.

Register for NYU Alumni Day Today!

If you haven't already done so, be sure to visit the NYU Alumni Day website to register for the many wonderful events planned for Saturday, May 17th. We hope to see you at these events and hope that you will join your fellow alumni for a bite to eat and a refreshing beverage at the Dean's Luncheons.

New York University In Second Life

We are currently working on an exciting Arts and Science space on the New York University land in Second Life. You will be hearing more about this soon and above is an image of our space. We hope to create a virtual space where alumni, students and faculty can meet to have a conversation or watch some of the great lectures we have recently hosted.