Writing Seminars

An introduction to basic strategies in the writing of poetry and fiction, with readings by Baldwin, Joyce, Lahiri, Garcia Marquez, Munro, Woolf, Donne, Bishop, Brooks, Komunyakaa, Tretheway, and others. Students will learn the elements of the short story and try their hand at a variety of forms: realist, fantastical, experimental. They’ll also study the basic poetic forms and meters, from the ballad to the sonnet, iambic pentameter to free verse. Students will compose short stories and poems and workshop them in class. This course is a prerequisite for most upper-level courses. This course is part one of the year-long Introduction to Fiction and Poetry and must be taken before AS.220.106

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

The second half of IFP, this course delves deeper into the finer points of fiction writing, including tone, description, and point of view; students will also enrich their knowledge of poetic forms and devices, such as figurative language, verse rhythm, and the poetic line. Readings include work by Achebe, Atwood, Calvino, Ishiguro, Maria Machado, Zadie Smith, Auden, Keats, Ada Limón, Li-Young Lee, Rankine, and others. Students will write and workshop their own stories and poems, and they will complete a final portfolio. This course is a prerequisite for most upper-level courses.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.105 or AS.220.108

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

In this introductory course, students will ultimately create their own short podcasts around stories that are meaningful to them and their intended audiences. Students will enact principles of listener-centered design, they’ll work to find stories worth telling, and they’ll learn to tell those stories powerfully. This course will build competency in recording and editing techniques, interviewing skills, creating story structure, and understanding the potential social impact of documentary work. Students will also study current monetization strategies in the booming podcast market and learn how to find, keep, and grow an audience.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

This course introduces the foundational strategies for writing literary fiction and nonfiction. Drawing on a diverse selection of literary models, students will engage in “creative experiments,” eventually submitting a short story or literary essay for class discussion and feedback. AS.220.105 can be substituted for AS.220.108.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Enjoy the opportunity to develop your creative writing skills. You will work in both fiction and poetry. Through a combination of robust discussion, writing exercises, and substantial feedback, you will learn about imagery, voice, narrative structure, and other aspects of the writer’s craft. The reading list will include a diverse range of contemporary authors. There will be a strong emphasis on collaborative workshopping, during which you will discuss one another’s works in progress.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

Study in the reading and writing of short fiction with focus on basic technique: subject, narrative voice, character, sense of an ending, etc. The analysis and discussion of published stories, both classic and modern, will be paired with weekly fiction exercises. In the second half of the semester, students will write and workshop one finished story.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.106 can be taken prior to enrolling in or at the same time as AS.220.200.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

A study of the fundamentals and strategies of poetry writing. This course combines analysis and discussion of traditional models of poetry with workshop critiques of student poems and student conferences with the instructor.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.106 can be taken prior to or at the same time as AS.220.201.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

In this class, we'll explore various strategies that poets have used when writing longer verse narratives. Readings will include contemporary work by Anne Carson, Christopher Logue, and Claudia Rankine, as well as historical epics such as Gilgamesh, Beowulf, and Gawain and the Green Knight. Although this class is a readings course, not a workshop, students will have the opportunity to develop narrative poems of their own.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.201

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

The aim of the course is twofold: to give a sketch of the history of English-language autobiographical writing, and to encourage students to work on their own autobiographical projects. To this end, the weekly meetings will be divided into two parts: in the first part, I’ll be allocating three extracts from existing autobiographies for discussion (some relatively ancient, some modern), and in the second part we'll discuss extracts from the on-going work of two class members. In other words, applicants to the course should expect to read and comment on several pieces of existing work each week, as well as undertaking a semester-long autobiographical project of their own devising.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.105 OR AS.220.108

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

"We left what we felt at what we saw,” the poet Wallace Stevens once wrote, suggesting writing involves a direct response to our experiences of reality. In this class, we’ll look exclusively at writing which takes on what hasn’t been seen, and hasn’t been felt. Through reading works of science fiction, magical realism, gothic literature, and speculative fiction, students will investigate how the unreal can still speak to our experiences and perceptions of the real. Additionally, students will get the chance to craft their own fantastical worlds through regular writing assignments. Tales of time travelers, haunted houses, unreal languages, and reimagined cities will be covered. Readings will include selections from Paul Beatty, Octavia Butler, Italo Calvino, Ursula K. Le Guin, Yoko Ogawa, and Mary Shelley.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

Writing Intensive

This course will be a chronological exploration of English-language poetry. We will examine not only the literature of the past, but also the ways in which a diverse range of contemporary writers have extended, challenged, and reimagined literary tradition. Throughout the semester we will pay especially close attention to the question of how a writer’s management of the poetic line can shape a poem's structure, context, and meaning. Although this is a lecture-based class, not a workshop, participants will have many opportunities to respond artistically to the course readings.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.106

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Writing and selling engaging children’s literature is not child’s play. In this intensive writing workshop, students will continue to work on the time-tested principles of storytelling and apply them to the practice of describing the world from a young person’s perspective. Weekly assignments will include the analysis of a wide range of contemporary books, writing exercises in a variety of genres (board books, picture books, early readers, and novels for middle grade students and young adults), and peer-review critique sessions. In the final weeks of class, students will also learn how to pitch their writing to an agent and/or publisher who specializes in Childrens/YA literature.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.106

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

“The intellect of man is forced to choose / perfection of the life, or of the work,” wrote W. B. Yeats. This course examines important intersections between the lives and works of three major 20th-century American poets. The course will consider how a poet's life story might provide a crucial context for their poems, and what their poems might reveal about their life.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.201

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

An introduction for students unfamiliar with the Korean language but interested in Korean culture / literature. Students will read a variety of translated texts, especially of works written in the 20th and early 21st centuries by authors including Kim Tong-in, Hwang Sun-won, Pak Wanso, Hwang Sok-yong and Han Kang; there will also be classes on traditional sijo poetry. Students will become familiar with Korean literary genres and formal features, and develop a broad understanding of the historical and sociocultural context of Korean literature.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.105

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course explores the art and craft of the personal essay. Deriving from the French essayer, to attempt, students bring a sense of investigation to the characteristics, presence, and quality of ideas, cultural zeitgeist, and the human experience. Through personal narrative exploration, essayists write toward universal themes (family, loss, belonging, social justice) and experiment with modes and forms of creative nonfiction. Students will employ research, explore personal experience, and develop their own voice, style, and storytelling craft. Students will interrogate the self and the self in the world, shaping the “I” on the page. The course builds on material covered in Introduction to Fiction & Poetry and/or Introduction to Fiction & Nonfiction and will prepare students for advanced study. This readings-based course is also writing-intensive, including in-class exercises, brief creative posts, essay drafts, revisions, and workshop. Readings/models for the course include authors Seneca, Sei Shonagon, Michel de Montaigne, James Baldwin, Melissa Febos, Vivian Gornick, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, JoAnn Beard, Zadie Smith, Jia Tolentino, Mark Twain, and more.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.105 OR AS.220.108

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

This creative writing workshop offers both new and experienced writers a chance to spend five weeks in Rome, making an artistic exploration of the Eternal City that inspired Keats, Shelley, Goethe, and, more recently, Jhumpa Lahiri. Students are welcome to work in prose, poetry, or both. Though the emphasis of the program will be the creation of new work, students will participate in a mult-genre workshop where they will receive feedback from classmates and the instructor.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course will look at the way poets are responding to the climate crisis; it will concentrate on contemporary work, but set this in context by comparing it to ‘nature poetry’ written since the Romantic period. There will also be a chance for students to write and discuss their own poems on this subject.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.106 and AS.220.201

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

Writing Intensive

Why write in a non-realist mode? What is involved in building a convincing altered reality? This course will examine fantastical writing's formal inventiveness, its capacious metaphorical qualities, and its explorations of complicated, unsettling truths. Students will write short critical and creative responses throughout the semester, as well as a final longer creative piece. Authors may include Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ling Ma, Toni Morrison, Jenny Offill, George Saunders, and Coleson Whitehead.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

This intermediate workshop will explore questions of form in fiction. Students will read classically structured stories, as well as stories that are written as inventories, how-to manuals, and excruciatingly personal resumés. Readings from writers including Kathleen Collins, Annie Ernaux, Gwen Kirby, Deesha Philyaw, and Weike Wang will inform our discussions of form and inspire writing exercises in and out of class. Students will write, workshop, and revise stories of their own. This course builds upon the ideas and themes covered in Introduction to Fiction and Poetry I, IFP II, and Craft of Fiction, and will prepare students for advanced fiction courses.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.106 AND AS.220.200

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

This intermediate fiction workshop will explore the use of point of view in the short story, considering the narrative reasons we might choose a particular perspective (and consciousness) when writing. We'll take a close look at published short fiction, examining the ways specific points of view impact our experience as readers, and we'll analyze the various strategies we can learn from these works. Students will share their work throughout the semester, both in small groups and in a larger workshop.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.106 and AS.220.200

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

This course is primarily a workshop; students will each write and workshop two short stories. Additional shorter writing assignments will focus on character development and characterization. We will consider how writers create characters capable of surprise and contradiction, how we balance writing a person’s interior life with writing their external presentation, how characters’ competing desires can fuel plot or narrative tension, and how we might think about characterization as a way of exploring power dynamics between the people in a story. We’ll also read and discuss published work that succeeds in creating layered and memorable characters, including writing by Dawnie Walton, Jennifer Egan, James Baldwin, James Joyce, Nam Le, Ling Ma, Lauren Groff, Asali Solomon, and Alice Munro.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

First of all, what’s the difference? We’ll begin by discussing these labels and the various works these labels might illuminate. Ian McEwan writes of ‘the novella’: Let’s take, as an arbitrary measure, something that is between twenty and forty thousand words, long enough for a reader to inhabit a world or a consciousness and be kept there, short enough to be read in a sitting or two." McEwan promptly goes on to name “The Dead” – 15,000 words – as “the great novella.” Clearly, rules are made to be broken. In this class we’ll read approximately one novella/short novel per week. Students should expect to write a brief critical response every week, and to give two presentations, one on a selection from the syllabus, and one on a selection of their own choosing that they feel exemplifies the label ‘novella.’

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.106 AND AS.220.200

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

In this class we will experiment in genre bending, reading and writing hybrid works that thoughtfully push past the boundaries of genre toward new ways of writing, thinking, knowing, and creating. Readings may include Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay,” Jean Toomer’s Cane, and Justin Torres’s Blackouts, among others, and will consider influences reaching as far back as Basho’s 17th-century Narrow Road to the Deep North. We will nurture verse that appears amidst prose; prose that arrives as poetry; fiction that incorporates images, documents, and poetic interventions; and writing that shapeshifts across genres and sometimes mediums, defying easy classification. As writers and as readers, we will bring our training within genres to work across, between, and beyond genres.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.106 AND (AS.220.200 OR AS.220.201)

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

This course is primarily a workshop; students will each write and workshop two short stories. Additional shorter writing assignments will focus on the management of time in fiction. We will consider how and when writers make use of time shifts within a story, how choosing the point in time from which a story is being told shapes its tone and structure, and how to move through time frames without creating confusion. We’ll also read and discuss published work that uses time in interesting ways, including writing by Alice Munro, Lauren Groff, Ling Ma, Edward P. Jones, Yiyun Li, David Means, Jamel Brinkley, Alice Sola Kim, Jennine Capó Crucet, and Virginia Woolf.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.106 AND AS.220.200

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

Topic changes by term.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.106 AND AS.220.200

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

When we recall our favorite works of fiction, it is often their voice that first comes to mind. This course will explore how narrators enchant us with their voice, focusing on such matters as perspective, syntax, word choice and how even deceptively impartial omniscience takes on a unique and memorable voice. Fiction readings to include: Paul Bowles, Toni Cade Bambara and Ismail Kadare. Craft readings to include: Christopher Castellani and John Gardner. Writing assignments will be both expository and creative.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

This course explores the presence of Shakespeare as a source in modern poetry and as a potential resource for student writing. We will discuss the connections between King Lear, Hamlet, and The Tempest and poems by W. H. Auden, Langston Hughes, Hyam Plutzik, Emily Dickinson, Rita Dove, and others.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.201

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Typically, stories are easy to start and difficult to conclude. This course will look at various ways in which stories end rewardingly. Close attention will be paid to final paragraphs. We will ask questions like: Do satisfying endings fall into categories? Can we generalize about how stories ought to end? Do some writers have a gift for endings? Readings to include: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Muriel Spark, Alice Munro. Assignments will include both expository and creative writing.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

Epic journeys, domestic dramas, quiet meditations on the human condition—whatever the story is, our investment in a given narrative often depends on our attachment to its characters, those compelling and complex enough that we want to follow them, from first page to the last. But what makes a character compelling and complex? And how do we create these characters in our stories? In this intermediate fiction course, we’ll take a deep dive into the art of characterization, and study the various strategies and techniques used in developing fictional characters. We’ll read published fiction by contemporary writers such as Edward P. Jones, Annie Proulx, and Jhumpa Lahiri, and examine the ways they bring their characters to three-dimensional life, and in the process create stories that linger beyond the final page.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

In this course, students will write and workshop two original stories. Additional generative writing exercises will explore the ways a writer can develop subtext in their work. How can character details work in parallel with elements of setting? How can a setting be instrumental in advancing a plot? How can finely tuned, sentence-level details, parallel images, foreshadowing, and figurative language give a story a cohesive sensibility and rich subtext? We'll read stories by writers including Stephanie Vaughn, Laura van den Berg, Rickey Fayne, Haruki Murakami, and craft essays by Matthew Salesses, Charles Baxter, and more.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

In this writing workshop, we will study a variety of creative nonfiction essays by a diverse group of writers including James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Richard Rodriguez, Zadie Smith, John Jeremiah Sullivan, and more. Drawing on the narrative strategies of memoirists as well as the research practices and expository methods of journalists, students will explore new ways to enrich and deepen their own creative work.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

Only fairly recently has adolescence been recognized as a developmental period distinct from childhood or adulthood. In this course, we'll read a range of classic and contemporary literature that takes on the challenge of writing about this complicated and fraught stage of life. Readings may include work by Shakespeare, Louisa May Alcott, Colson Whitehead, Louise Erdrich, and others. Students will write and workshop their own stories or novel chapters.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

Poetic Forms I fulfills one of the Intermediate requirements for The Writing Seminars Major. It deals with rhyme, meter, traditional forms, and ad hoc forms of students' own making. Whether you are a poet, novelist, song writer, science writer, or dramatist, this course will help you master lines and sentences even better.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.106 AND AS.220.201

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

In Contemporary Poetic Forms, we will look at exciting, mostly younger poets writing in a wide array of metrical forms. From Anthony Hecht to Erica Dawson, you will read a book a week and write eleven poems, and the assignments will be keyed but not beholden to those challenging authors.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.106 AND AS.220.201[C]

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

This hands-on performance workshop, combining literary and theatrical practice, will look closely at what makes a performance or reading compelling, clear, and resonant. Through textual analysis, vocal technique, and group discussion, students will create a pliant and powerful reading style to best serve their work. The course includes regular writing assignments in poetry and fiction and weekly performance and group discussion.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.106 AND (AS.220.200 OR AS.220.201)

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

This course is primarily a workshop; students will each write and workshop two short stories. Additional shorter writing assignments will focus on writing about places, both real and imagined. We will think about the work of description at the sentence level, but also about the relationship between place, character and memory. We’ll read work by writers who are known for their ability to evoke or capture in detail a particular setting, potentially including work by Edward P. Jones, Zadie Smith, Eudora Welty, Annie Dillard, Grace Paley, Victor Lavalle, Viet Than Nguyen, and Joan Didion.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

How can a subplot inform a reader's understanding of a story's protagonist? How can a story with multiple protagonists and plotlines reveal theme? This intermediate fiction writing class will focus on student writing and on published stories that are interestingly or intricately plotted. Parallel texts by Andrea Barrett, Edward P. Jones, Alice Munro, Amy Hempel, Barret Swanson, Dantiel W. Moniz, and others will give students the opportunity to examine concrete examples of intricately plotted stories while also putting some plotting techniques to the test in their own short fiction.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

In this course we’ll explore poetic responses to myth and legend, looking at how poets from different cultures and eras have responded imaginatively to established stories about gods, heroes, and the supernatural, whether for the sake of aligning themselves with tradition, or for the sake of challenging it. Our discussions will take place in the context of a rigorous poetry workshop, where students will experiment with figurative language, management of the line, narrative organization, and the control of rhythm in both form and free verse. At the end of the semester students will turn in a final portfolio of revised poems, accompanied by a reflective letter that demonstrates a mature understanding of verse technique.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.106 and AS.220.201

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

Topics in Advanced Fiction

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.106 AND AS.220.200

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

This class is an advanced seminar on poetic technique, including the use of figurative language, management of the line, narrative organization, and the control of verse rhythm. By making an in-depth study of several poets' work, students will gain a fuller understanding of what it means to arrive at a distinct poetic style and to develop that style over from one book to the next. Students will write poems throughout the semester and eventually submit a portfolio of revised work, accompanied by an artist statement.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.106 AND AS.220.201

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

In this course, students will work alongside writing teachers from the non-profit organization Writers in Baltimore Schools (WBS) to lead creative writing workshops in local public elementary and middle schools. Students and WBS teachers will also meet as a group once a week to plan classes, discuss pedagogy, and share ideas. Students will write weekly responses to reading assignments, write reflections on the volunteer experience, and help to assemble a final project at their worksite. Upon completion of the class, students will have the opportunity to apply to become instructors with Writers in Baltimore Schools. Please note that the weekly writing group you will co-lead will occur outside of class. Groups meet either during the school day or after school. We will work with you to find a group that fits your schedule.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

Writing Intensive

Students who have completed the fall class "Teaching Creative Writing in Baltimore Schools" are eligible for this class in the spring semester. As Teaching Fellows, students continue to work alongside writing teachers from the non-profit organization Writers in Baltimore Schools (WBS) to plan and lead creative writing workshops in local public elementary and middle schools. Class discussions will move into deeper explorations of topics like student-centered pedagogy, community building, and educational equity. Teaching Fellows will have opportunities for greater leadership at their worksites and will create resources for benefit of their students and future generations of Teaching Fellows.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.415

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

Writing Intensive

This course will explore the context and craft of racial passing texts in the U.S, asking students to think critically about literal passing narratives and their persistence over time, and more broadly about how we write about cultural passing, codeswitching, and identity as conscious performance. We’ll start with texts that ground us in the genre—Chopin, Larsen, Fauset, Ellison, and Morrison—and read our way into contemporary texts, potentially including work by Danzy Senna, Mat Johnson, Brit Bennett, Min Jin Lee, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. Students will write a critical paper, a craft paper, and a short story or novella.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

Writing Intensive

Class reads the writings of scientists to explore what their words would have meant to them and their readers. Discussion will focus on the shifting scientific/cultural context throughout history. Authors include Aristotle, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Darwin, Freud, Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, Crick and Watson.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Students will build on previous work in the major by completing a project of sustained length, depth, and cohesion (15 - 25 pages). This capstone course is open by application.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.106 AND AS.220.201

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

International voices will combine the workshopping of poems by students with a study of contemporary poems written by black British writers and British writers in dialect, African-American writers, Caribbean writers, and Indian and South African poets who are writing in English. The study of broad themes and subjects will be combined with a particular appreciation of linguistic and acoustic matters - which means among other things that time will be spent listening to and evaluating recordings of the poets concerned.Writing Seminars Majors Only

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.201

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

In this Community-Based Learning course, students will explore poetry of social and political concern in partnership with high-school age writers from Baltimore public schools. Students will put learning into practice by engaging in community conversation and collaboration. Participation in some events outside of class time will be required.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

Writing Intensive

In this course, we'll take a look at the increasingly obsolete notion of “genre fiction” and the way that many contemporary writers are borrowing the conventions of once-frowned-upon genres, from sci-fi to horror to crime, and imbuing them with the concerns of the “literary novel” (character, language, social critique, etc.). The course will pair classics of genre fiction with more contemporary works that take the genre in surprising directions. We'll also do a fair bit of writing ourselves, experimenting with various genres. Authors might include Mary Shelley, Colson Whitehead, Philip K. Dick, Kazuo Ishiguro, Edgar Allen Poe, Carmen Machado, Raymond Chandler, Joan Didion, Zane Grey, and Charles Portis.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

A course in the composition of a novella, short-story collection, or section of a novel. Students will build on previous work in the major by writing and revising a project of 50 to 60 pages of fiction. This capstone course is open by application.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.106 AND AS.220.200

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

With the 21st century 22 years old, it seems like a good time to ask ourselves what’s going on with the American short story. What can it tell us about our various identities, individual and collective? Is it reflecting our current reality, transforming it, or both? Is it undergoing formal changes to better engage with our transformative times, and if not, should it be? Is contemporary fiction as diverse as our nation itself, and if not, what might account for such shortfalls in representation, and what might be the effects? Our reading list is likely to include such authors as Carmen Maria Machado, Yoon Choi, Bennett Sims, Charles Yu, Jamel Brinkley, ZZ Packer, Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyeh, Dantiel W. Moniz, Claire Vaye Watkins, Kimberly King Parsons, Kirsten Valdez Quade, Ted Chiang, Danielle Evans, Karen Russell, George Saunders, and Bryan Washington. Students will write short critical and creative responses throughout the term, as well as a final longer creative piece.

Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

The course will workshop the original work of participants, while also looking at the major figures of immediately post-war British Poetry (Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes) and the diversification of writing that has appeared in more recent years. Among the writers to be discussed are : Simon Armitage, Mary Jean Chan, Imtiaz Dharker, Carol Ann Duffy, Sarah Howe, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Jackie Kay, Grace Nichols, Alice Oswald, Hannah Sullivan and Roger Robinson.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

In this Community-Based Learning course, students will read and write memoir and discuss issues of social concern with high-school age writers from Baltimore public schools in partnership with the organization Writers in Baltimore Schools Please note that this class is not a traditional workshop focusing on critique, but will instead explore how writing can build connection, foster conversation, and bring together writers from diverse communities.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

Writing Intensive

Ordinarily no more than one independent study course may be counted among the eight Writing Seminars courses presented for graduation.

Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Individual, guided study under the direction of a faculty member in the department. Undergraduates only.

Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

The Professional Internship is a one-credit independent course created to document internships in journalism, publishing, the arts, or other writing-related fields. Internships require a minimum of 120 work hours and a short final paper. Permission required. Satisfactory/ Unsatisfactory only.

Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Projects and Methods (FA6)

The Professional Internship is a one-credit independent course created to document internships in journalism, publishing, the arts, or other writing-related fields. Internships require a minimum of 120 work hours and a short final paper. Permission required. Satisfactory/ Unsatisfactory only.

Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Permission Required.

Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Projects and Methods (FA6)

The course explores the notion of one's own personal anthology--the books that mean the most to one over the decades, the books one keeps returning to. In addition to the assigned reading, each student will be asked to come up with a list of books (not read in this class) of great personal significance and to analyze in class the things one's personal touchstones have in common. Assigned readings will be drawn from two genres: the epic (Derek Walcott's Omeros, Halldor Laxness's Independent People) and the comic or light novel (Jane Austen's Persuasion, E. M. Forster's Room with a View, Laxness's The Fish Can Sing, Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Kingsley Amis's Ending Up, Mark O'Donnell's Getting Over Homer).

Distribution Area: Humanities

What even is a novella? Ian McEwan offers this starting point: Let’s take, as an arbitrary measure, something that is between twenty and forty thousand words, long enough for a reader to inhabit a world or a consciousness and be kept there, short enough to be read in a sitting or two and for the whole structure to be held in mind at first encounter.”McEwan promptly goes on to name “The Dead” – 15,000 words – as “the great novella,” so clearly rules are made to be broken. Whatever exactly we think the novella is, it offers unparalleled lessons for us in how to forge narrative structure that is lacking in superfluity and enormous of impact. Every week we will read at least one “novella;” sometimes we will read two; we will write weekly brief critical responses to our reading which will focus on craft; and each student will present on one of the assigned works in the course of the semester. Our reading list may include works by such authors as James Joyce, Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, Alice Munro, Toni Morrison, Katherine Anne Porter, Philip Roth, Shirley Jackson, Muriel Spark, Jean Rhys, Jane Smiley, George Saunders, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Jenny Erpenbeck.

Distribution Area: Humanities

In this class we’ll focus on issues of poetic voice, the at times slippery formal element that binds the reader and the poem’s speaker together. We’ll discuss the cultivation of intimacy (or lack thereof), registers of speech, use of vernacular, foregrounding of person and/or place, and more. Ultimately, we’ll use voice as an essential tool to understand a poet’s aesthetic vision. Possible poets of interest include Audre Lorde, Walt Whitman, Carl Philips, Emily Dickenson, James Schuyler, CD Wright, Li Young Lee, Martin Espada, Elizabeth Bishop, Philip Levine, Sylvia Plath, Joy Harjo, Marianne Moore, and others.

Distribution Area: Humanities

How is our experience of a novel's story affected by its form? We'll discuss some traditional structures, including mystery plots and the three-act structure, before moving on to works whose forms bend or break various storytelling conventions. Authors may include Vladimir Nabokov, Susan Choi, Zadie Smith, Tommy Orange, Lorrie Moore, Edward P. Jones, Carol Shields and others.

Distribution Area: Humanities

This course will be an artistic exploration of the long poem. Throughout the semester we’ll read a diverse range of work by both contemporary and non-contemporary writers, paying particular attention to the question of how a poem’s dramatic intensity or lyric charge can be maintained when a poet is writing at length. Instead of submitting individual poems to a weekly workshop, students in this class will submit successive drafts of a long poem, which they will continue developing over the course of the entire semester.

Distribution Area: Humanities

This graduate Readings course will focus on the 2018 anthology Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing, which we will read alongside books by some of the individual poets whose work it celebrates. We will explore a variety of possibilities of form, theme, and conceptions of poetry, of language, of Blackness, of gender, of what and how it means to write radically, to write to the future, to write out of the past. While acknowledging how historical and contemporary contexts inform both the creation and the collection of works by Black women poets, students of all backgrounds will have the opportunity to engage creatively and critically with a wide range of practices, forms, styles, and concerns—and to write toward their own future imaginings.

Distribution Area: Humanities

In this course we will consider the role of fiction in relation to significant historical and current events. What are the distinctive goals of a novel or story about an event or action that is well-documented in nonfictional accounts? What are the responsibilities of fictional works in the absence of clear records? Do our expectations toward these genres shift as time passes? We will read work by writers including Edward P Jones, William Wells Brown, Jean Rhys, EL Doctorow, Valeria Luiselli, and VV Ganeshananthan. Students will also complete and present an independent creative project on a subject of interest.

Distribution Area: Humanities

Fiction graduate students in the MFA program of The Writing Seminars will meet weekly to discuss the work of their fellow graduate students. Each student can expect to share their work three times in the course of the term, and for the work of two students to be discussed every week. Students can also expect to share their response to the works under discussion on the class Canvas page in advance of each week’s meeting.

Distribution Area: Humanities

Discussion and critique of fiction manuscripts by students enrolled in the MFA program. Some assignments possible.

Distribution Area: Humanities

Discussion and critique of poetry manuscripts by students enrolled in the M.F.A. program. Some assignments possible.

Distribution Area: Humanities

Discussion and critique of poetry drafts by students enrolled in the MFA program. Some reading and writing assignments possible.

Distribution Area: Humanities

A graduate course designed to develop both close reading and genre study, and to support the teaching of Introduction to Fiction and Poetry (IFP) I and II. Readings in selected works of American, English, and European poetry and short fiction. Course required by all graduate students in fiction and poetry.

Distribution Area: Humanities

Which books do writers often foist on other writers, telling them "You have to read this"? In this course, we'll look at books that have yet to find much popular appeal, but which writers often speak about in reverential tones. Authors may include James Salter, Paula Fox, Dezso Kosztolanyi, J.L. Carr, Juan Rulfo, Tom Drury, Christina Stead, Evan S. Connell, Leonard Gardner, Joy Williams, and Penelope Fitzgerald.

Distribution Area: Humanities

A study of the interplay of the line and the sentence in poetry, with an emphasis on syntax. Some prose works will also be used for context. Poets employing syntax with great verve and precision, whether they obey or disrupt the rules, will be read in order to inform students’ own stylistic choices.

Distribution Area: Humanities

This course will examine the ways in which the “music” of poetry—rhythm, sound, and affective connotation—may be effectively conveyed to an audience through vocal performance.

Distribution Area: Humanities

The course will begin by looking at theories of translation, and thereafter spend half of each class looking at examples of poems in translation before moving on in the second half to look at poems by members of the group - translated poems where people have been able to write them, otherwise at original pieces. I’ll be providing texts for study each week.

Distribution Area: Humanities

Some of the most interesting moments in fiction are those when characters experience the same event or situation in profoundly different ways. In this course we will look at writing that explores those moments of intersection and collision and think about how point of view can work to achieve both strong characterization and an illuminating sense of larger context. We'll consider what makes a story where the narrative lens or voice can shift feel cohesive and intentional. The reading list will include work by Colson Whitehead, Theodore Dreiser, Virginia Woolf, Gwendolyn Brooks, E.L Doctorow, Mieko Kawakami, Caitlin Horrocks, Dawnie Walton, Zadie Smith, and Rebecca Makkai.

Distribution Area: Humanities

Who are the poets who made us who we are? Over years of practice, poets become increasingly aware of their special debts to predecessors whose music compels them and whose themes seem both urgent and enduring. Readings will include some of the instructor's own touchstones, including Herbert, Milton, Dickinson, Auden, Larkin, Bishop, Walcott. Students will write poems inspired by certain models, and also present orally and in a final written project a personal anthology of poets who mean the most to them.

Distribution Area: Humanities

The goal of this course is to develop our skills and hone our instincts as writing “strategists,” and to recognize and consider the options available to us, particularly in the process of drafting, experimentation, and revision. We’ll examine the various elements of craft by discussing critical essays by writers such as Janet Burroway, John Barth, and Charles Baxter. To deepen our discussion, we’ll look at published fiction to see how different authors utilize, or perhaps defy, these techniques, and to understand why they make the technical choices they do, and how they serve the overall goals of the narrative.

Distribution Area: Humanities

This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.

Summer independent research for graduate students.

For Writing Seminars MFA students. This indicates they are actively participating as a TA as required by the program.

For Writing Seminars MFA students. This indicates that they are actively participating as a managing editor for The Hopkins Review.