Department website: http://writingseminars.jhu.edu/
The Writing Seminars exists to help students combine imaginative writing with scholarship in the general context of the humanities.
For current course information and registration go to https://sis.jhu.edu/classes/
Courses
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with 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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with 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), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with 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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
In this course, we’ll examine a variety of structures found in contemporary poetry, framing structure as strategy, a primary means by which a poet’s vision is expressed. We’ll review a range of structures including narrative, rhetorical, meditative, digressive, hybrid structures, and more. We’ll also consider structure’s relationship to both prescribed and discovered forms, discussing the possible temperamental differences between closed and open form poets, what Denise Levertov calls, “people who need a tight schedule to get anything done, and people who need to have a free hand.” We’ll analyze the effects of line and stanza, and experiment with the techniques of juxtaposition, fragment, and collage. We’ll also consider the challenges of managing poetic turns, beginnings and endings, as well as structure’s relationship to broader aesthetic issues such as poetic process, readership, and accessibility/difficulty.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with 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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with 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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (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
The United States incarcerates more people than any other democratic country in the world; Baltimore City has the highest incarceration rate in Maryland, with 1 in every 100 residents locked up in a state prison. In this publicly-engaged course, students will learn about mass incarceration in the United States—its history, its dysfunction, and its current impact on the Baltimore community. In addition to reading and reflecting on personal narratives from the American Prison Writing Archive (housed at the JHU Sheridan Libraries), we will interact with organizers, activists, educators, and writers working with and on behalf of currently and formerly incarcerated people. In partnership with a Baltimore reentry program serving formerly incarcerated women, students will perform interviews and assist individual memoir projects.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Stories entertain us, but we can also receive guidance from them, and we can tell them to impart guidance to others, to exercise influence, to make a point. This course will explore the ways that stories make their points in the genre sometimes called “fable,” in works by authors ranging from Aesop to George Saunders, from the 4th century to the present. We’ll debate what fables actually are – Short morality tales about animals? Portraits of exemplary figures that demonstrate how to live? - in part by reading many examples of the form and some theories of it, in part by writing fables of our own.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with 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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with 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.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with 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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with 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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with 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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
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 multi-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 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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
In this course we will read work by Toni Morrison, Dorothy West, Nella Larsen, Jesse Redmon Fauset, Suzan-Lori Parks, Deesha Philyaw, Shannon Sanders, Dawnie Walton and others. We will consider how to read Black women behaving “badly”, or resisting respectability politics, in a historical and contemporary context. How have writers balanced a desire for complexity, agency, and artistic freedom with practical and ethical questions about representation and stereotypes? Students will write one midterm paper on the assigned reading and complete one creative writing project. Students may choose the subject of their creative assignment, but it should engage the broad questions of the course: what makes protagonists behaving badly interesting, and what ethical or structural questions are relevant to how we portray them?
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.105 OR AS.362.112
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with 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), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This is a workshop course with readings and writing assignments that emphasize the artistic value of the outward gaze. I will ask you to keep a daily journal of observations, and over the semester you will develop those observations into new poems, which we will discuss in class. We will also study a broad range of published poetry. Welcome! I look forward to spending time with you and your work.
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)
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
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
The capstone course in poetry writing. Consideration of various poetic models in discussion, some assigned writing, primarily workshop of student poems. Students will usually complete a "collection" poems.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
In this Community-Based Learning course, students will read and write fiction and creative nonfiction, in partnership with high-school writers from Baltimore public schools. Based on classroom discussion, 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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
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), Ethics and Foundations (FA5), Projects and Methods (FA6)
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), Ethics and Foundations (FA5), Projects and Methods (FA6)
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with 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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with 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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
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
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
Individual, guided study under the direction of a faculty member in the department. Undergraduates only. 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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities
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)
Writing Intensive
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)
Writing Intensive
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
The classes will be divided into two parts. In the first we’ll look at significant British and Irish poets of the post-war period, paying particular attention to the ways in which an idea of ‘the centre’ has eroded, and given way to a markedly more diverse literary culture. In the second half, we’ll look at poems written by members of the class - two per session.
Distribution Area: Humanities
This course will use the sonnet form as a through line to consider both aesthetic shifts and the enduring lyric impulse across centuries of poetry in English, with a particular focus on how contemporary poets are working with the form through individual poems, sequences, and book-length works. Coursework will include reading, critical writing and presentation, discussion, and completion of an original lyric sequence.
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
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
In this course, we’ll read, analyze, and discuss debut works of fiction from the last three decades that have had an impact on the contemporary landscape. What makes these particular books so noteworthy? What do they demonstrate in terms of artistry and vision, craft and technique, and what can we learn from how they approach their particular subjects and themes? To further our discussions, we’ll also read critical reviews, author interviews, and welcome an author or two for a class visit. Students should also be prepared to lead discussion on at least one course text.
Distribution Area: Humanities
In 2011 Guardian columnist Zoe Williams published "Should We Ditch Fiction in Times of Crisis?" Williams' subtitle summarized her argument: "When our daily news is apocalyptic, it's irresponsible to read made-up stories.” Fourteen years later the world is as mired in crisis as ever and Williams’ question is no less provoking to consider, as are the other questions it raises. What business does the novel have tackling politics? What business does the novel have not tackling politics? What do we even mean by ‘politics’? In this course we’ll think about the relationship of the novel to politics, and the category of the ‘political novel:’ is it a novel about the political process? A novel with a discernible political or ideological posture? A novel about the impact of politics on personal lives? All of the above and more? We’ll read approximately 6 novels, some of which will be imposed autocratically, and some of which will be chosen democratically. Readings may include such novels as:JamesThe Plot Against AmericaHome FireThe Handmaid’s TaleThe Line of BeautyFlight Behavior1984All the King’s MenRagtimeThe SelloutThe Book of Laughter and ForgettingThe Reluctant FundamentalistLost Children ArchiveThe Abbess of CreweEat the Document
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
In this MFA workshop, we will read and write long poems, longish poems, sequences, and series, giving students expansive space to pursue their driving interests as we explore a variety of approaches to sustaining longer poems and series. There will be regular reading and writing assignments, and students will share drafts for class discussion.
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.
Cross Listed Courses
Comparative Thought and Literature
William Shakespeare and Henrik Ibsen are the two most frequently performed playwrights in history, and both have been credited with reinventing drama: Shakespeare for the Elizabethan stage and Ibsen for the modern. In this course we will pair plays by each author – those that stand in an explicit relation of influence as well as those that share a significant set of concerns – in order to investigate how each takes up and transform key problems in Updated description: the literary, political, and philosophical tradition for their own historical moment. Plays to be studied by Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, Coriolanus, The Tempest; by Ibsen: Hedda Gabler, The Wild Duck, An Enemy of the People, The Master Builder. As part of the course, we will try to organize at least one excursion to a Shakespeare or Ibsen performance in the Baltimore-D.C. area. This class counts towards the requirement of text-based courses for the minor in comparative thought and literature.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
This course offers a broad survey of tragic drama in the Western tradition, from its origins in ancient Greece to the twentieth century. In lectures and discussion sections, we will study the specific literary features and historical contexts of a range of different works, and trace the continuities and transformations that shape them into a unified tradition. Key questions and themes throughout the semester will include what counts as tragic, the tragedy of social and political conflict, the bearing of tragedy on the meaning and value of life, the antagonistic relation between world and humans, the promises and dangers of tragedy for contemporary culture. Authors to be studied: Sophocles, Euripides, Seneca, Shakespeare, de la Barca, Racine, Goethe, Strindberg, Lorca, and Beckett.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Film and Media Studies
This primer to screenwriting will emphasize the power of the image to deliver character, situation, and theme, and to advance even complex plots. Students will analyze narrative films, compose their own still and moving images with cellphone cameras, and write several short dramatic pieces to be read and workshopped by the group. They'll learn the basics of scene design and of screenplay format. For FMS majors in the screenwriting track, this course fulfills the Media and Narrative requirement . $50 lab fee.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
In this course we will explore the principles of visual storytelling in narrative film as they apply to the design, creation, and revision of the short-form screenplay. Specifically, we will focus on learning the craft of screenwriting — strategies, processes, and philosophies that writers can develop, practice, and rely upon as they progress through a series of screenwriting exercises and write a 12-page screenplay, which will be critiqued in-class during weekly table reads and with the Instructor (one-on-one) during office hours. Select produced feature screenplays will be read and analyzed — and clips from select films viewed — to further explore what works well on the page, and how it translates to working well onscreen. (Scripts and clips often selected from American films from the '70s, '80s, and '90s.) A free 18-week trial of Final Draft software will be made available for all students who don’t wish to purchase it outright for $99.)
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
A workshop devoted to creating compelling short scripts and stories based on personal experience. Analysis of films, memoir, and short fiction, along with collaborative development of student work, will emphasize how unique worlds and world views can reflect a larger shared humanity. All writers welcome. Tell your story!
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
A workshop devoted to the art and science of a funny story well told. Students will analyze comic fiction, film, and classic television, and create their own short, comic works, drawing on personal experience and real-world observation. They'll learn the basics of screenplay format and scene design, and hone close observation and critical thinking skills. This course satisfies the Film and Media Studies screenwriting requirement. 220.105 OR 225.06 recommended but not required. Both majors and non-majors welcome.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course explores film adaptation by considering how words, images, and sounds offer different affordances and constraints for creative expression. A central goal is to conceive of adaptation outside of typical discussions of fidelity to a source work and instead consider how different artistic media open up unique opportunities for storytelling. To this end, we will draw on a number of different intermedial translations, which may include from novel to film (The Night of the Hunter, from Davis Grubb’s book to James Agee’s screenplay to Charles Laughton’s film), from short story to film (The Turin Horse), from graphic novel to film (Ghost World) or television series (HBO’s Watchmen), from personal essay to documentary film (James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work and I Am Not Your Negro), from poetry to film (O Brother, Where Art Thou), from play to film (A Raisin in the Sun and My Own Private Idaho), from radio drama to film (Sorry, Wrong Number), and film-to-film homage (Far From Heaven and All That Heaven Allows). We will also delve into the vagaries of film-to-book novelizations and the curious case of concurrently writing film and book, as in Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clark’s collaboration on the film and novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (both adapted from a short story).
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Combining approaches to audio storytelling and multimedia production, this course offers a wide-ranging introduction to the art of podcasting. Students will learn techniques from the innovators of the golden age of radio, read culturally significant radio plays, develop tools for critically listening to and analyzing today’s podcasts, and learn how to research, write for, and produce their own podcasts. Examples will come from a broad sample of narrative, documentary, interview, and discussion-based podcasts. While no formal training in audio production is necessary to take the course, students will be expected to learn the necessary skills to create their own podcasts. In-class demonstrations of microphones, editing software, and approaches to sound design will be offered. The full suite of podcast materials—written copy, cover image, and audio file—will be posted to the JHU FMS Podcasting channel at https://jhufilmandmedia.podbean.com/. Subscribe to the feed on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. $50 lab fee.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
A workshop devoted to creating complex characters in challenging moral landscapes. Students will view and discuss a wide range of films; and creative assignments may include profiles, short fiction, monologues, and dramatic scenes for the screen. Short critical and creative written exercises, and a longer, creative final project.
Prerequisite(s): AS.061.148 OR AS.061.205 OR AS.061.315 OR AS.061.316 OR Instructor Permission
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
A workshop devoted to creating compelling short scripts based on personal experience. Analysis of screened films and collaborative development of student work will emphasize how unique worlds and world views can reflect a larger shared humanity. Short critical and creative written exercises, and a longer, creative final project.
Prerequisite(s): AS.061.148 OR AS.061.205 OR AS.061.315 OR AS.061.316 or Instructor permission.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
Story design for the screenplay with special attention to the genres of comedy, horror, melodrama, and adventure. Regular workshops, short written exercises, and a longer final project.
Prerequisite(s): AS.061.148 OR AS.061.205 OR AS.061.270 OR permission of the instructor.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course will explore strategy and process for developing a short screenplay from pre-existing literary or journalistic source material (short story, news/feature article, etc.). By exploring several “case studies” — feature films and the source material that inspired them — students will identify the practical strategies employed by professional screenwriters with the goal of employing such strategies with their own screenplay adaptations. Bulk of class will focus on designing, writing, and rewriting a 20-30 page screenplay, and sharing multiple drafts with the class (and with the professor one-on-one) for critique over the course of the semester. Each student should have 2-3 pieces of material under consideration for possible adaptation by the start of class. Discussions from time to time will also touch on the business of screenwriting. (Scripts and clips often selected from American films spanning the 60s through the 2000s.) Students will be required to purchase a license for Final Draft screenwriting software for $99. Students are expected to have previously completed AS.061.205 or another lower level screenwriting class.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Intensive workshop course where students will write a first draft of a feature-length screenplay. Classes will focus on the specific challenges of the students’ works-in-progress, with an emphasis on developing a story idea that is suitable for a feature, and the craft to see it through to completion. Particular emphasis will be placed on the feature screenwriter’s central challenge: creating enough of a structure in the early writing stages to keep the screenplay on track, while remaining open to new ideas for scenes and sequences that inevitably arise as the characters, story, and themes come to life. Select produced feature screenplays will be read and analyzed — and clips from select films viewed—to explore what works well on the page, and how it translates to working well onscreen. Throughout the course, Instructor will also devote a portion of class time to discuss the business of screenwriting. Students will be required to purchase a license for Final Draft screenwriting software for $99 by Week 2 (if they have not already done so for a prior screenwriting course).
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
First Year Seminars
In this First-Year Seminar we will examine the poetic artistry of American song, from Tin-Pan Alley and Broadway tunes to Folk songs, Billboard’s Top 40, and Hip Hop. Our focus will be on the linguistic art of song – the meaning(s), rhythm, timbre, and pitch found in words alone. Taught in a workshop format, the course will encourage students to read lyrics as poetry and then write their own.
Distribution Area: Humanities
In this seminar we’ll explore the many ways that contemporary poets tell stories, make music, and create meaning. We’ll read a wide range of contemporary lyric poems, and every week you’ll have the opportunity to apply what you’ve learned in fun, low-pressure writing exercises. (No previous poetry-writing experience required!) Planned activities include classroom visits by contemporary poets as well as off-campus trips to poetry readings around town.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Using literature as our primary lens, in this First-Year Seminar we will explore our complex relationships with food, considering it as both material fact and literary symbol. We will read prose and poetry by writers such as Chang Rae Lee, Kevin Young, Mary Oliver, Naomi Shihab Nye, Gary Soto, and Joy Harjo, engaging issues of food and community, food labor and production, climate change, and more. As part of our explorations, we’ll spotlight aspects of Baltimore food culture and history, and students will be asked to examine and share their own personal and cultural relationships with food. Assignments will include creative writing exercises that draw on both research and personal experience.
A picture is worth 1000 words, or so goes the old saying. This hands-on writing workshop, explores the often-overlooked importance of TEXT in award-winning graphic novels and children's picture books. Over the course of the semester, we will delve into a wide range of topics, from understanding the relationship between image and text and thinking cinematically, to effective techniques for storyboarding and creating forceful dialogue. And like all good writers, we will work on developing the kind of rich characters, strong dialogue, and compelling themes that captivate readers. To enrich our writing efforts, we will embark on various outings during the semester. These will include visits to an illustrator's studio and an independent bookstore specializing in graphic novels. We will also interact with an array of professional writers and editors both in class and at extra-curricular events. The central goal of this course is to build a community through writing. No prior experience in creative writing or visual art is necessary. All that is required is enthusiasm for the topic and a willingness to share your work with others.
Unlike Disney's talking teapots and candlesticks, ""real life"" objects can't tell their own stories. Through research and writing, however, we can ""animate"" and contextualize art and artifacts with our words, illuminating the people who made and used those objects, particularly those whose own voices have been historically marginalized. How can creative writing bring the past to life both imaginatively and responsibly? How do writers choose and use literary techniques to reckon with history? Poems we will examine and discuss include ""Ode on a Grecian Urn"" by John Keats, ""Voyage of the Sable Venus"" by Robin Coste Lewis, ""The Museum of Obsolescence"" by Tracy K. Smith, ""In the British Museum"" by Thomas Hardy, ""mulberry fields"" by Lucille Clifton, and ""How to Look at Pictures"" by Rebecca Morgan Frank. This course is an experiential collaboration between the Writing Seminars* and the Homewood Museum*, where students will explore the museum's collection and curate a public exhibition featuring their writing. *By way of introduction, The Writing Seminars is Johns Hopkins University’s creative writing department, offering both a major and a minor to undergraduate students, as well as a Master of Fine Arts graduate degree; Johns Hopkins University’s Homewood Museum is an early nineteenth-century National Historic Landmark site focusing on the enslaved families who lived and labored on the land that would later become the university’s main campus. With a focus on early American decorative arts, Homewood’s collection provides students with the opportunity to have hands-on experience with museum objects and to consider the role of museums and antiques in a new and creative light.
Interdepartmental
Students attend lectures by an interdepartmental group of Hopkins faculty and meet for discussion in smaller seminar groups; each of these seminars is led by one of the course faculty. In lectures, panels, multimedia presentations, and curatorial sessions among the University's rare book holdings, we will explore some of the greatest works of the literary and philosophical traditions in Europe and the Americas. Close reading and intensive writing instruction are hallmarks of this course; authors for Fall 2020 include Homer, Plato, Dante, John Donne, George Herbert, Christina Rosetti, Mary Shelley, Friederick Nietzsche, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Frederick Douglass.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
Modern Languages and Literatures
This course is grounded in the double conviction that translation is the most intimate form of reading and that literary translation is a form of literary writing. The goals of this course are to better understand the potential and challenge of translation as we learn to practice it ourselves. We will study what translators say about their craft and work closely with a wide range of translations. There will be two parts to each seminar: --discussion of assigned readings and analysis of published translations --workshopping of our translations. Students are free to translate from any language into English. Reading knowledge of a language other than English is required.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
“Everything which we loved is lost! We are in a desert” – this emotional assertion was the reaction to Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 painting The Black Square, as the artist himself recalled it. This sentiment of fearing, warning and even witnessing the end of the world as we know it, will stand at the center of the course. We will study the literary and cinematic representations of this apocalyptic notion and investigate its theoretical, theological, physiological and aesthetic aspects. We will seek to trace the narrative dynamics as well as literary and cinematic means of apocalyptic representations in works from various periods, languages, cultures and religions. Among the issues to be discussed: what is the apocalypse, biblical apocalypse, dystopia and nostalgia, trauma and post trauma, war and the apocalypse, the Holocaust as the end of civilization, the atomic bomb, realism and anti-realism, political changes and the apocalypse in popular culture.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
This course examines the role of the Holocaust in Israeli society and culture. We will study the emergence of the discourse on the Holocaust in Israel and its development throughout the years. Through focusing on scholarly, literary, artistic, and cinematic responses to the Holocaust, we will analyze the impact of its memory on the nation, its society, politics, and collective self. The course is divided to three general categories: Historical and Sociological Perspective, Literary Perspective, and Cinematic Perspective. However, we will study the crossroad between these three categories, and will explore them in relation to one another.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Theatre Arts & Studies
This is a writing intensive class exploring the current wealth of women playwrights, including Pulitzer Prize winners: Wendy Wasserstein, Paula Vogel, Lynn Nottage, and Jackie Sibblies Drury (2019 Prize for FAIRVIEW). We will discuss Script Analysis and read (and see) plays by numerous writers including Claire Barron, Kia Corthron, Theresa Rebeck, Sarah Ruhl, Danai Gurira, Caleen Sinnette Jennings, and Hansol Jung. This class will include a mid-term and a Final Paper.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
For aspiring playwrights, dramaturgs, and literary translators, this course is a workshop opportunity in learning to adapt both dramatic and non-dramatic works into fresh versions for the stage. Students with ability in foreign languages and literatures are encouraged to explore translation of drama as well as adaptation of foreign language fiction in English. Fiction, classical dramas, folk and fairy tales, independent interviews, or versions of plays from foreign languages are covered.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
A workshop in playwriting, designed for both experienced playmakers and those first exploring the art. Students will investigate the creative process, from the initial imaginative impetus, to drafts and revisions, to presentation of the work. The course will explore fundamental playwriting techniques, such as writing effective dialogue, attending to story, and delineating character.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive