Michael Meyer (China 1995-97) Selected As New York Public Library Fellow For 2010

The New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers this month selected its twelfth class of Fellows: fourteen exceptional creative writers, independent scholars, and academics. The Fellows, will have full access to the unparalleled research collections and online resources of The New York Public Library’s landmark Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. They will be in residence at the Center from September 2010 through May 2011, pursuing a wide range of book projects that will make extensive use of the Library’s holdings. One of the Fellows is our own Mike Meyer (China 1995-97) winner of the Paul Cowan Non-Fiction Award in 2009 for his first book The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed which depicts the capital’s oldest neighborhood as the city remade itself for the 2008 Olympics. Also a Lowell Thomas Award winner for travel writing, Meyer has published pieces in Sports Illustrated, The New York Times Book Review, Time, Smithsonian, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The Los Angeles Times. In 2009 he received the Whiting Writers’ Award. At the Cullman Center he will work on a nonfiction book combining history and reporting about a family’s organic rice farm in China’s far northeast.