AS.220 (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)

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.;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

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.;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 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.

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

Introduction to Literary Translation explores various approaches to translating literature, ranging from Cicero to Lawrence Venuti via John Dryden and Friedrich Schleiermacher. Along with this survey of translation theories relevant to literary study, the course offers readings of extant literary translations from different languages into English, in order to examine issues in translation-methodologies. Students will have opportunities to work on their own translation projects with commentary.

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 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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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 builds on introductory podcasting skills and challenges students to create ambitious, professional-quality audio work. Students will experiment with advanced sound design, multi-voice narrative structure, and serialized formats. The class emphasizes collaboration, ethical storytelling, and preparing projects for public audiences. By semester’s end, students will produce a portfolio-ready longform podcast or pilot mini-series.

Prerequisite(s): 220.107 OR 061.152 OR 061.145 OR By Permission of Instructor

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

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.

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.

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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with 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

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.

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

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.

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 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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

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.

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

The writer Bharati Mukherjee once said, "My literary agenda begins by acknowledging that America has transformed me. It does not end until I show that I (along with the hundreds of thousands of immigrants like me) am minute by minute transforming America."  Transformation is inherent to the immigrant narrative, a source of both drama and tension.  In this class, we'll read fiction focusing on the immigrant experience in America and examine how different writers approach the idea of transformation.  Students will write both critical and creative pieces in response to these works.  Texts might include work by Colm Toibin, Chang-rae Lee, Jhumpa Lahiri, NoViolet Bulawayo, and others.

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 poetry workshop, students will be required to write poems based on class readings/assignments and submit them for group discussion and critique. While the primary focus of each class will be your own poetry, analysis and discussion of poetry by contemporary poets will serve to establish models of craft as well as guidelines for effective criticism. Special attention will be paid to 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.

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 study literature and writing 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

This is the first course for students accepted into the Teaching Fellows Project, a yearlong program that offers twelve undergraduate students the chance to lead writing groups in Baltimore City elementary and middle schools. A collaboration between the JHU Writing Seminars and the nonprofit organization Writers in Baltimore Schools, the Teaching Fellows Project consists of a three-credit class in the fall and another in the spring to study current best-teaching practices as well as historical and sociological context for teaching in Baltimore. Starting in late September or early October, WBS pairs students with local public elementary and middle schools where they co-lead weekly writing groups. Please note that cohort members don’t need to be Writing Seminars students: the program is open to any undergraduate interested in writing, teaching, arts integration, educational equity, or social justice. More information on applying to the Teaching Fellows Project can be found on the Writing Seminars website.

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.

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

This course is half reading seminar, half writing workshop. The two halves build on one underlying principle: Both the scientific method and the traditional literary narrative follow the same storytelling structure: What do you know? What do you want to know? What do you learn? Now what do you know? Etc. In the seminar half of the class, we read and discuss samples of the writings of scientists throughout history—focusing especially on what those works would have meant to the authors and to their readers. Primary sources include Plato, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg, plus many more. In the workshop half of the class, students will write—in a step-by-step, week-by-week process, in close collaboration with their peers—a midterm paper and a final paper on any science topic and in any form of their choosing, while applying storytelling lessons from the seminar half of the course.

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

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.

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. Not strictly limited to poetry, readings may include Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red, Jean Toomer’s Cane, and Justin Torres’s Blackouts, among others, and will consider influences reaching as far back as Matsuo 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.220.201

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

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 Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning 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 Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

Permission Required.

Prerequisite(s): You must request Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

Writing Intensive

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 course we will consider the project of contemporary adaptation. Why are writers drawn to retellings? What makes something true enough to its source text(s) to be considered an adaptation but original enough to be more than a copy? When is adaptation an homage and when is it critique? How does a writer interested in contemporary questions of representation and identity approach a text with problematic or dated framing? How does an adapted text work with or against readers’ expectations for plot and structure? Works discussed may include selections by Percival Everett, Jennine Capo Crucet, Isabella Hammad, Mat Johnson, Carmen Maria Machado, Helen Oyeyemi, and Julian Barnes, in conversation with complete or excerpted source texts by Shakespeare, Melville, Flaubert, Poe, and Mark Twain. Alongside the reading and seminar discussion, students will work on a proposed adaptation of their own and workshop both the concept and an excerpt of their projects.

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 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 first novels and story collections from established and new writers, and discuss what distinguishes these books, and how they establish a singular vision and voice. What makes these debuts so noteworthy? What do these first-time authors demonstrate in terms of artistry and vision, craft and technique? And how do they, as novelist Ayana Mathis says, “articulate the inarticulable” and demonstrate a “distinct singularity of the mind?” As writers working on your own first books, our discussions will hopefully raise questions and concerns relevant to your material, vision, and process.

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

In this course, students will submit original poems for class critique. On average, a new poem will be due every other week for comment and discussion the following week.  Students should read each other’s work carefully, provide written response, and arrive prepared to discuss the poems in class. At the end of the semester, a final portfolio of revised poetry, along with a brief articulation of revision strategies, will be due. Since I assume all of you are at work on book-length manuscripts, we will also read and discuss several recent books, comparing subjects, themes, styles, and structures as we consider the broader issues posed by a larger poetic project.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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.

Distribution Area: Humanities

Documentary poetics arises from the idea that poetry is not a museum-object to be observed from afar but a dynamic medium that informs and is informed by history,” the poet Philip Metres writes. How have poets used their craft to document, to memorialize, to ask hard questions, to recenter marginalized voices, to uncover secrets and buried histories, to reclaim narratives, and to demand justice? What challenges arise in the course of research-based poetic projects, and what are the ethical implications of making poetry from appropriated documents and real events? In this course, we will explore poetry as a social practice “that informs and is informed by history,” drawing on works of documentary and investigative poetics written over the last hundred years. In addition to reading, discussion, and critical writing, students will have the opportunity to pursue their own documentary and investigative poetics projects.

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

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.