AU’s Writer as Witness is the first opportunity for incoming students to turn the page on high school and prepare themselves for the intellectual and emotional rigors of the next chapter. 
 
Now in its 25th year, the program convenes all first-year students around a “community” text that they read over the summer, before meeting with the author at the beginning of the fall semester. Writer as Witness is about more than getting lost in a good book—although this year’s selection, Laila Lalami’s Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America, is a great one. It’s about learning to craft a researched argument, pose tough questions, initiate difficult conversations, and disagree respectfully.
 
“I have a sense that the typical high school experience of reading and engaging with a book amounts to a report about symbolism and imagery. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s very superficial,” says Daisy Levy, chair of the selection committee and a senior professorial lecturer in the Department of Literature. “But here, we’re giving students something to really sink their teeth into. They’re going to read the book and grapple with it and talk about it in complicated ways—not only in the classroom, but in the residence halls and on the quad. Those are the kinds of conversations that they’re going to be preoccupied with, not only for the next four years, but perhaps for the rest of their lives.
 
“That’s the thing about AU students: they are ready to read and think and engage with big ideas. They’re just itching to have those conversations.”
 
The book—always a work of nonfiction, selected within five years of publication—explores challenging and sometimes controversial themes, including corrections, climate change, White supremacy, and genocide. A diversity of voices and perspectives is also important.
 
“The idea of witness is so compelling to me because it suggests the idea that we are all seeing something important,” Levy says. “Who are these writers and what have they seen? And how do they fit in a larger conversation?”
 
Levy says the selection process is both excruciating and invigorating. Among the dozens of titles nominated by faculty, staff, and students, “we have an incredible embarrassment of riches from which to choose.” This year’s book is no exception.
 
A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to US citizen, using her own story as a springboard for exploring the rights, liberties, and protections that are traditionally associated with American citizenship. She will join students (in person, for the first time since 2019) on September 7.
 
“That, too, is a highlight of the program for students,” Levy says. “It’s always a revelation for them to listen to and talk with a writer and find out, ‘Hey, they’re a lot like me.’ That not only normalizes the process of publishing but underscores that writing—trying to articulate something and work through it—is a very human exercise.”