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Since 1968, Literary Arts at Brown University has been a creative and intellectual center for the U.S. literary avant-garde. Along with a handful of other writing programs nationwide, Brown provides a home for innovative writers of fiction, poetry, digital language arts and cross-disciplinary. Established in the mid-1960s by poet, translator and critic Edwin Honig, Literary Arts at Brown continues its tradition of hiring and retaining a faculty comprised of nationally and internationally known authors. Each year, the program offers 60 – 70 classes, awards the M.F.A. degree to approximately 12 graduate student writers, and confers Honors on about 35 talented seniors who will have completed the undergraduate concentration in Literary Arts.

For additional information, please visit the department's website: http://brown.edu/academics/literary-arts/home/literary-arts

LITR 0100A. Introduction to Fiction .

A workshop for first year students, introducing them to the art of writing fiction. This course is reading and writing intensive. Enrollment limited to 17. S/NC required.

LITR 0100B. Introduction to Poetry .

A workshop for first year students, introducing them to the art of writing poetry. This course is reading and writing intensive. Enrollment limited to 17. S/NC required.

LITR 0110A. Fiction I .

A workshop for students who have little or no previous experience in writing fiction. Enrollment limited to 17 per section. This course is limited to undergraduates. S/NC.

LITR 0110B. Poetry I .

A workshop for students who have little or no previous experience in writing poetry. Enrollment limited to 17 per section. This course is limited to undergraduates. S/NC.

LITR 0110C. Playwriting I (TAPS 0100) .

Interested students must register for TAPS 0100 .

LITR 0110D. Digital Language Art I .

Project-oriented workshop for writers, visual/sound artists, filmmakers and programmers who wish to explore digital media techniques. No experience working in this field (or with computer programming) required. You'll learn through doing, reading, talking and collaborating on works in various traditions. Enrollment limited to 17. S/NC.

LITR 0110E. Screenwriting I .

Screenwriting I introduces the fundamentals of short-form screenwriting through viewings, readings, exercises and assignments. Areas of particular focus include the short as a fully developed and distinctive work of art; visual storytelling, pacing and flow; effective screenwriting techniques, optimizing every word; articulating your personal voice and vision; creating structures that best suit your content and intentions. In class, we will review your writing, lookbooks and group presentations; view and discuss short films; discuss readings; and do writing exercises. Assigned readings include theory, essays, treatments and screenplays. Films will also be assigned for viewing outside of class. This course is limited to undergraduates. S/NC. Enrollment limited to 17.

LITR 0110H. Digital & Cross-Disciplinary Language Arts 1 .

Project-oriented workshop for writers and language artists who want to integrate practices from other disciplines as they devise, compose, and make their work. Those with little or no prior interdisciplinary or digital media experience are welcome. Learning is through making, reading, discussion, group projects, collaboration, and research presentations Enrollment limited to 17. S/NC.

LITR 0200Z. Faking It: Literature in the Age of the Hoax .

How is society simultaneously constructed and undermined by the persistence of fakes? With its cousins the hoax and the forgery, the fake plays the straw man in much of political, religious, and philosophical discourse, but the fake’s insistence on re-conceiving notions of originality and purity is more substantial. Pursuing a definition of the fake, we will consider its many forms in contemporary society alongside novels that parody and complicate the history of these particular deceptions. Authors include: Borges, Bolano, Ishiguro, Byatt, and McCarthy. Enrollment limited to 17.

LITR 0210A. Fiction Writing II .

Topics often include stylistic matters related to tone and point of view, and structural matters like controlling switches in time. See general course description above for course entry procedures for all intermediate workshops. Enrollment limited to 17. Instructor permission required. S/NC.

LITR 0210B. Poetry Writing II .

Emphasis is placed on verse strategies, meter, rhythm, imagery and rhyme. Writing includes frequent exercises in various poetic traditions. See general course description above for course entry procedures for all intermediate workshops. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 0210C. Playwriting II (TAPS 0200) .

Interested students must register for TAPS 0200 .

LITR 0210D. Digital Language Art II .

Project-oriented workshop for writers, visual/sound artists, filmmakers, and programmers wishing to explore techniques for effective and innovative use of text in digital media. Topics include hypertext narrative, kinetic poetry, and recombinant and computer-generated texts. Collaboration encouraged. Work sample (writing, programming, website) due on first day of semester. Enrollment limited to 17. Instructor permission required. S/NC.

LITR 0210E. Screenwriting II .

Emphasis is placed on filmic devices, such as dialogue, voice-over, montage and time. Writing includes frequent exercises. See general course description above for course entry procedures for all intermediate workshops. This course is limited to undergraduates. Enrollment limited to 17. Instructor permission required. S/NC.

LITR 0310A. Poetry in Service to Schools and the Community .

We shall be reading, writing and talking about poetry and letting this medium reflect back on other artistic practices -- what it means to live, work & think (in) this way; another key component will be an engagement with community practice through bringing poetry to local schools, a direct personal and enlightening exchange of enlightening ideas and experience. Participants will work independently, in groups, in classes (including this one); you produce, and work with others to produce, art individually as well as communally; you are the gaffer, you are also, and simply, a member of the guild. This feels more like a teacher's enterprise, though I call it, simply, community practice-- what happens when people just put themselves in the position to give their gifts, while allowing, at the same time, others to give equally of themselves. Limited to 17. S/NC. Permission will be granted by the instructor after the first class session.

LITR 0310B. City/Spaces: An Introduction to Psychogeography .

Psychogeography is an artistic discipline concerned with the subconscious ways in which we respond to and interact with the physical environment of the city. This course will focus on the intersection of psychogeography and text-both narrative and non-narrative- and the possibilities for walking to inform text and narrative.

LITR 0310C. Ethnic Writing (ETHN 0300) .

Interested students must register for ETHN 0300 .

LITR 0310D. Imagining the City: Visions from Film and Literature .

This course will look at representations of urban space both in films and fiction, and through the lens of critical writings on the intersections between city space, architecture, film, and narrative. How do cities affect us aesthetically and emotionally? How have film and fiction examined, reinvented and revolutionized urban space in the twentieth century? What is the future of cities? These are some of the questions we'll address through readings, screenings, and discussion. As a class we will do weekly creative writing exercises inspired by the films and designed to explore the ways in which poetic space might be evoked through text.

LITR 0310E. Making the Written Word .

While our primary focus will be on language, we shall explore its relationship to sound, video, and performance. Although no prerequisites are required, students should be competent in visual and language arts — we shall work with equal sensitivity in both. Works created shall interrogate the space between image and text as a single composite medium, therefore illuminating advantages and pitfalls of each. We'll consider works by Linda Montano, Jenny Holzer, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Sontag. Required lab sessions in new technologies (Final Cut Pro, Audacity, Logic, Processing) will provide skills necessary to produce conceptually driven works of digital language art. Enrollment limited to 17.

LITR 0310F. Visual Poetry .

This interdisciplinary workshop explores the visual possibilities of language. Considering the page as a starting point, we'll create new works between writing and visual art. Through researching early writing systems, concrete poetry, asemic writing and contemporary works, students will gain a deeper understanding of their own practices. We'll examine the works of Dieter Roth, Carl Andre, Sol Lewitt, Aram Saroyan, Kenneth Goldsmith, Rosmarie Waldrop and more. All visual media welcome. "[Blank space on a page means] freedom. The possibility of anything happening. Every mark on that paper is an interruption, an insertion into a kind of peace." -Susan Howe

LITR 0310G. COMIX: Words + Image .

In this course we will be exploring the expansive genre of comics. You will learn how to read, analyze, compare, and create/write sequential art. This will be done through a variety of readings, in class exercises, discussions, and assignments. We will apply these reading and writing forms to the digital.

LITR 0310H. Art of Film: An Introduction to Filmmaking .

This is a course in the art of film writing, directing, editing picture and sound, and producing, be it narrative or avant-garde. Students will engage the theory and practice of the art of filmmaking via readings, viewings, writings, and making their own films. S/NC required.

LITR 0310I. Exploding the Book: An Introduction to Hybrid + Cross-Disciplinary Poetry .

How might poetry exist in three dimensions? In four? How might it interact with images? With sound? With performance? This course invites students to reimagine the ways in which human beings experience text. Exploding The Book is both an introduction to hybrid/cross-disciplinary poetry—poetry intersected with other media including image, sound, video, etc.—as well as a writing workshop. Students will be introduced to hybrid poets and text-based visual artists challenging the possibilities for where and how text exists. Additionally, students will develop a hybrid and experimental writing practice of their own.

LITR 0310J. The Voice of Text .

The Voice of Text will explore the voice as mediator among text, sound and performance. The vocal instrument will be thoughtfully investigated with examination of extreme and unorthodox iterations of voice/text/sound, including: castrati repertoire, extended technique ranging from Diamanda Galas to black metal, coded shortwave radio transmissions, electronic vocal synthesis and the ecstatic speech of glossolalia. Additionally, voiced text will be given historical context through fiction and poetry, film, theater and music. Through individual and collaborative projects, students will explore a variety of techniques and technologies, harnessing the expressive potential of the voice across a wide variety of disciplines.

LITR 0310K. The Web Video: Narrative Installed in the Screen .

Godard once joked, “I have a secret ambition…to be put in charge of the French newsreel.” He imagined a digestible form of consumption that blended text with pictures, documentation with advertisement, intimacy with objectification. And now we have it. The computer allows access to thousands of newspapers, also television shows, social media sites, email, reddit, first person shooting games, everything really. Looking at artists like Hito Steyerl, Jenny Holzer, Harun Farocki, Young Hae Chang Heavy Industries, Trinh Minh Ha, Sondra Perry, Angela Washko, Douglas Kearney, Xu Bing and others, we’ll explore narrative in the on screen video format.

LITR 0310L. Coding for Language: An Introduction .

In a time when almost every word and sentence will become digitized by computers, language becomes programmable. In this project centered workshop we are going to explore what possibilities, questions and challenges programming bring to language, especially in reading and writing practices. For students who are interested in language, coding, poetics, and creative writing, you’ll learn through doing, reading, discussing and collaborating on works in programmable media. Some previous experience with programming is desirable. If you have a basic understanding of programming and are willing to spend more time to code for language, this course is for you.

LITR 0310M. Refusing Objecthood: Web-Based Language Art as Site .

This studio course addresses the history and practice of web-based language art, or literature/art made for and inseparable from the web. Web-based language art is space/place/landscape/setting/site; it is not held or beheld, but filled and inhabited. We focus on what this means for web-based language artists, especially those who occupy bodies that have not historically tended to own or control physical sites. Supplementary readings consider other site-building or site-altering language art practices and the materiality of the internet. Final projects will be web-based language artworks, for which participants are encouraged but not required to learn to code for the web.

LITR 0310N. Machine Learning and Language Arts: Approaches to AI Art Practice .

We'll consider the question: what does the rise of so-called artificial intelligence mean for the language and for arts practice in general? Contemporary artists in fields as diverse as music, architecture, cinema, poetry and painting use machine learning tools to support their work. Through technical workshops, project critiques and critical discussions, we'll grapple with the anxiety and catharsis AI tools can bring to the arts. Students will be expected to work on projects using multiple machine learning tools. No coding experience is required for this course. A writing sample will be due in the front hall of the Literary Arts building (located at 68 1/2 Brown Street) by 4 pm on the first day of classes. Interested students should also complete the survey here: https://www.brown.edu/academics/literary-arts/survey-litr-0210-310-and-1010-workshops.

LITR 0310O. Narrative Nonfiction .

This is a class in crafting engrossing and essential stories. True stories need to be told, and deserve to be told well. What’s the difference between story and subject? How can narrative and careful structuring maximize the impact of investigative reporting? How do you properly pace a longform story? How do you pitch, report, outline, and edit one? And, most importantly, why do you write it in the first place? Class meetings will include a magazine-style editorial meeting, discussing weekly pitches and, later, story drafts followed by a discussion of reading that explores various approaches to structure, voice, and genre.

LITR 0310P. WIND in the CANE: Or, poetry in the “black outdoors” .

Are poems set on urban streets landscape poems? Can a poem shot through with mistrust of, and alienation from, the land and other natural bodies constitute a nature poem? How do our notions of dwelling in the body inform our notions of dwelling on land? In this cross-disciplinary workshop, we’ll consider what informs our prevailing views of the natural world; we’ll investigate the language we use to describe the spaces we inhabit, haunt, cross over, and take as refuge; and we’ll attune to the body and its material culture, which shapes our experience and enables our relationship to the land.

LITR 0310Q. Speculative Digital Utopias in a Time of Planetary Crisis .

'Social distancing' has driven us to spend more of our waking life in the virtual world than ever before. In class, we will confront the “reality of the virtual” in our present moment and make active steps to decolonize our imaginations and cultivate new ways of relating to reality, technology and the future. How do our avatars and virtual ecosystems reflect / parallel / interact with our physical reality? How can critical fabulation open portals to possible futures? What roles can language, imagination and art play as guiding forces toward a decolonized utopian future? Students will explore these questions through readings, conversation, experimentation and play. Over the semester, students will create several works of language driven digital art using sound, video, installation + networked media.

LITR 0310R. The Earned First Person .

Writing in the first person is a familiar mode for many of us. But when does it add to a reported, longform story and when does it detract from it? This is emphatically not a memoir class. In fact, at every turn, we will interrogate whether the first-person is merited. The first person can be used to bear witness or take us on a quest or build an argument. Other times, it’s navel-gazing and gratuitous. We’ll focus on how to use the first-person to create engrossing, well-structured narratives with unique perspectives.

LITR 0310S. The Earned First Person .

LITR 0310T. Metaforaging .

To forage is to explore and gather that which supports and sustains you, without depleting the nuanced systems that provide them. In this language art workshop, we will move through multi-disciplinary practices to understand how our worlds interrelate, how our senses extend and entangle each other. We will tune our attention to the abundance around us, drawing materials from personal and natural sources across disciplines into our language art practices. This course will stay within the poetic while moving from the literal – foraging for experiences and objects in our environment – to the speculative. Learning is through writing, noticing, sharing, making, reading, discussion, collaboration, and research presentations. Enrollment limited to 17. S/NC.

LITR 0310U. Hydropoetics: writing with and as water .

This poetry workshop takes its inspiration from the word hydrography. Etymologically, hydrography means water writing. As a science, hydrography concerns itself with surveying bodies of water especially for the purpose of safe navigation. We will consider ourselves as literary hydrographers, surveying a number of hydroscapes and returning the word to its parts. We will think, read, experience, and write about water in many dimensions and scales and we will attempt to write with and as water, as watery bodies. Together we will encounter the work of many theorists of water, including selections from poets, hydrofeminists, ecocritics, urbanists, sound artists and others. We will conduct written and auditory experiments grounded in oceans, rivers, lakes, pools, and ponds of our choosing.

LITR 0310V. Spaces and Places .

Project-oriented workshop for language artists who want to integrate practices from a variety of disciplines as they devise, compose, and make their work. Those with little or no prior interdisciplinary or digital media experience are welcome and encouraged to take this course. Learning may be through making, reading, discussion, group projects, collaboration, and research presentations. Enrollment limited to 17. Instructor permission required. S/NC.

LITR 0310W. Digital Utopias In A Dystopian Time Of Planetary Crisis .

What roles can language, imagination and art play as guiding forces toward a decolonized utopian future? In this class, we will confront the reality of our present moment and make steps to decolonize our imaginations and cultivate new ways of relating to technology and the future. How do our avatars and virtual ecosystems reflect / parallel / interact with our physical reality? How can critical fabulation open portals to possible futures? Students will explore these questions in depth, through readings, engaged conversation, experimentation and play. Over the semester, students will produce the digital artifacts of their own speculative utopias by creating language driven digital art using sound, video and new media. Students should expect weekly assignments and readings that will nourish a final project.

LITR 0310X. Experiments in Film and Poetry: An Interdisciplinary Workshop .

In this interdisciplinary creative workshop, we will explore the interplay of film and poetry. Students will gain insight into a variety of strategies and concerns of artists, writers and filmmakers who work with images and language (be it text or voiced) in tandem. Some topics of exploration will include montage theory and collage, essay films and essay poems, text- based images, image-based texts, experimental documentary poetics, neo-benshi works and collaborative processes. Each week, we will watch and read relevant work and discuss it together in class. Students will also have individual and collaborative creative prompts of their own, and a chance to receive feedback on their work. Students with existing creative practices and video editing skills are encouraged to apply, but no prior experience is required, only a desire to engage, experiment and create in community.

LITR 0310Z. Oblique Strategies: Process, Chance and Play in Cross-Disciplinary Literary Artmaking .

Building on the musician Brian Eno’s concept of “oblique strategies”, this course will introduce students to a variety of tactics to shift the burden of literary and artistic creation away from the conscious ego and towards a constraint and process-based approach. The first part of the course will focus on self-knowledge as a foundation for artistic practice, using generative writing exercises to generate raw material for subsequent projects. In the second part, we will introduce concepts of instructional, constraint and process-based art and experiment with a variety of strategies to decenter the creative ego with the goal of generating first drafts in a free and unselfconscious manner. The final part of the course will focus on constraint-based strategies for importing that same freedom into the editing process.

LITR 0311A. Juicy Carcasses, Abundant Futures: Detritus as Nourishment .

This course challenges students to listen to the wisdom of scavengers, and transform that which is discarded. It explores how those in the margins can reconstruct new worlds from the still active, reeking remains of (post)coloniality. It considers carefully Homi Bhabha’s idea of the Third Space, and Fred Moten’s idea of Noise and fugitive listening, that calls us to cease resisting dominant hegemonies with the tools of their making, and instead find each other outside of the binary of oppression/resistance, within a space of our own invention. This course explores what we can pick at from these juicy carcasses of colonialism and its many forms, and what dreams and futures we can imagine with them, all the while drawing inspiration from non-human detritivores.

LITR 0311B. Image Text Interval: Experiments in Film and Poetry .

Our explorations in this interdisciplinary creative workshop will center around the interplay of image and text in film and video. We will tend to the space between words, between images, the movements from one to another, what’s alive in the cracks. How might poetic devices be transposed to image sequences in film? How can film theory inspire our writing? What are the myriad ways text, voice and the moving image can layer and entwine? This project-based workshop is for students interested in interdisciplinary practices that live and migrate between poetry and the moving image. Together we will consider essay films, cinepoetry, video art, and neo-benshi performance. We will learn about filmmakers, artists and writers who engage creatively with poetics, text and voice in moving image works such as Sky Hopinka, Suneil Sanzgiri, Mona Hatoum, Trinh T Minh-ha, Jordan Lord, Wu Tsang, and Douglas Kearney.

LITR 0311C. Little Landscapes: A Workshop in Very Short Fiction .

Daily writing and weekly reading, to inform and inspire. We’ll practice and reflect on skills necessary to very short fiction, such as, but not limited to, compression, constraint, understatement, particulars over broad strokes. We’ll consider how a very short story can be a trickster: a whole meal dressed as a snack. Great focus will be placed on image, feeling, moments, titles, words, sentences, openings and endings, paragraphs, transitions, voice, style, rhythm, and breath, among other things. We’ll defamiliarize and decenter ourselves in relation to stories. We’ll test what a story can be, what it can hold. Experimentation, fun, and play will be foregrounded. Much of what we’ll practice and explore are necessary to all forms of writing. It’s all the same. It’s all paying attention.

LITR 0311D. Experiments in Storytelling: Essays, Art, and Games .

We tell stories everyday, we construct narratives for events, for our understandings of the people around us, for our own identities. Who are we and how do we fit into the world? Storytelling is at the heart of our human experience and it is unlimited in the forms it can take. This online seminar will explore a selection of storytelling traditions, both in and out of the creative writing space. Students will investigate the strategies employed by writers, artists, playwrights, game designers and will test these strategies out for themselves in their own storytelling. The aim is not for students to prioritize one style or strategy, but to approach the act of creation with a philosophy of radical play and discovery. No prerequisites required.

LITR 0311E. On Photographic Remembrance .

“On Photographic Remembrance” is an introductory course to mixed-media fiction writing. This course will delve into how archival photographs are a medium for experimental storytelling and lost personal histories. Students will develop their analytical skills of historical and “found” photographs from the Prelinger Archives, a public resource containing thousands of film footage and photographs featuring never-before released war documentation, 60’s televised films, and home videos. Students will use this resource as inspiration for their own speculative fiction: how can the interplay of photography and prose represent fragmented time and memory? We will explore how various contemporary authors, multimedia artists, and filmmakers use structural, visual, and literary devices to imbue their works with a sense of both realism and mystery.

LITR 0311F. Geopoetics: reading+writing rocks, geo-glyphs, tectonic gestures .

This workshop engages in cross-disciplinary language arts via geologic matter. How might reading, writing, and making with stone extend what Ursula K. LeGuin calls, “the meter of eternity”? How might fossil, tectonic plate, and planet show us new spatial and temporal scales of inscription, elegy, and literary possibility beyond the Anthropocene? In this course, we will create language art projects both on and off the page, with the options to work with digital media, artist books, and multi-sensory art works. Through reading, journaling, and projects, we will engage geologic and geopolitical themes, beginning with ecopoetics, moving through extractivism, and extending into the politics of territory markers and lines. Students with all amounts of writerly and artistic experience are welcome.

LITR 0311X. Other Ghosts .

From personal and national memory, we mourn, witness and become implicated in its retelling. Is it possible to mold language into the shape of usefulness, as Claudia Rankine attempted, and can we shape a memory, or life, into Albert Murray’s elegant form? We shall consider how genre and medium can augment personal and political stories through weekly reading discussions, workshops. We shall read and discuss interdisciplinary literature (which combines genres of poetry, fiction, criticism, memoir), visual arts (including cinema, sculpture, installation), music and short essays. We’ll make use of the workshop environment to build a practice of constructive feedback and revision as students develop their individual voice. Students will submit a piece for workshopping at least twice in the semester, and submit a final project on the last day of class. Students are encouraged to work in various mediums.

LITR 0311Y. Experiments in Storytelling: Essays, Art, and Games .

We tell stories everyday, we construct narratives for events, for our understandings of the people around us, for our own identities. Who are we and how do we fit into the world? Storytelling is at the heart of our human experience and it is unlimited in the forms it can take. This online seminar will explore a selection of storytelling traditions, both in and out of the creative writing space. Students will investigate the strategies employed by writers, artists, playwrights, game designers and will test these strategies out for themselves in their own storytelling. The aim is not for students to prioritize one style or strategy, but to approach the act of creation with a philosophy of radical play and discovery.

LITR 0510A. Masters and Servants .

We will consider the relationship between servants and masters as portrayed in fiction and films. We shall examine the basic relation of servitude to sovereignty, extrapolating to the broader power dynamics of two-person relationships. Beginning with the Hegelian dialect of the master and the servant, and building as well on a philosophical framework provided by Nietzche, Kojeve and Bataille, we shall look at the complexities of the relationship between masters and servants, exploring the psychological, social and ethical dimensions of two-person relationships that value each person differently. We shall focus on issues of class and power and look at literature and film in which there are explorations of several complicated manifestations of servitude and mastery: overlaps into gender power dynamics and fetishism, power dynamic reversals both to comic and tragic effect, and questions of boundaries and violation of social propriety and human communication. Core texts will include work from Ishiguru, Wodehouse, D.H. Lawrence, Miabeau, Richardson, Bronë, and Stanley Crawford, and film texts will include Joseph Losey's The Servant and Luis Bunuel's Diary of a Chambermaid .

LITR 0510B. Into the Machine .

Starting from Turing's work on artificial intelligence, we shall examine the cultural and artistic ramifications of the rise of the machine, using Marx and Walter Benjamin to provide a framework. We will look at how machines generate anxiety, with special emphasis on robots, puppets and automatons; and we shall also consider utopian and dystopian images of machines, and visions of near and distant futures. Finally we will look at authors who utilize machine models of operation to generate artistic work. Authors and filmmakers include: Capek, E.T.A. Hoffman, Asimov, Lem, Breton, Redonet, Fritz Lang, Chaplin, Tati. Enrollment limited to 20 first year students.

LITR 0510C. The Pleasures of the Text .

Enter the radiance of literature, music and film through devotional readings, viewings and listening experiences that will result in a series of weekly creative writing experiments. Dissolve into a narrative or sound or image the way a writer might and return from these experiences inspired and changed. Be prepared for the awe and wonder that only art can afford. Texts may include stories, poems and/or novels by Adler, Baldwin, the Bible, Coetzee, Cortazar, Gluck, Muller, Munro, Morrison, Pancake, Rankine, Schwartz, Wolf and others. Films by Akerman, Anderson, Kurosawa and Herzog. Music by classical, jazz and hip-hop artists.

LITR 0510D. Why Don’t We Fall In Love? .

How do we fall in love? Why? The title of our seminar was inspired by the 2002 summer pop-hit, written and produced by Rich Harrison, and famously performed by Amerie Rogers. Through poetry, film, and music, we will be critical, clinical, and sometimes implicated observers of the dynamics which structure erotic desire, the selfless (or selfish) ambition of love, and its representations.

LITR 0510E. Fiction v. Non-Fiction .

In bookstores, “Fiction” and “Non-Fiction” are separate, even antithetical, categories. In the minds of writers, though, they exist on a continuum. “Fiction” is heavily informed by fact; “Non-Fiction” applies the techniques of fiction. In this course, we will study authors who deftly employ both forms, in order to ask: when does a writer choose to shape his/her/their material as fiction or non-fiction? What are the benefits of each form? How are authors trying to break and merge these categories?

LITR 0610A. Unpublishable Writing .

This workshop explores writing projects which do not fit into conventional avenues of print publication (i.e. books). Through a series of prompted artistic projects we will explore how writing can interweave in new relationships with time, materials, sequence, procedural approaches, performance, and collaboration. Independent research will support your creative projects throughout the semester. Enrollment limited to 12. S/NC.

LITR 0610B. Fiction Through Poetry .

This course is designed for poets, fiction writers, and cross-genre enthusiasts interested in looking at narrative as it occurs at the level of the sentence, even the level of the word. We will use a variety of poetic texts as well as other fractured content as a means to think about fiction and the borderlands of storytelling. Students will be given weekly writing exercises. Enrollment limited to 12 first year students. S/NC.

LITR 0610C. Books By Hand .

We shall explore small press publishing and bookmaking from historical, contemporary and hands-on perspectives. Students will be asked to design and carry out small creative projects throughout the semester as well as research particular concerns in the field. Enrollment limited to 12 first year students. S/NC.

LITR 0610D. Four Performance Texts .

Performance studies is a capacious, interdisciplinary field that can traverse theater, visual art, music, literature, and dance, as well as aspects of lived life that are not necessarily considered art: ritual, sporting event, political protest. It is time-based, and thus for the most part, ephemeral. An artist may stage, orchestrate, or frame a set of behaviors, actions, events or even just intentions – they may or may not be the actual performer. Because of the embodied nature of performance, aspects of identity such as race, gender, and sexuality often play a visible role in the dynamics of the work. The documentation of performance can exist in a wide range of formats, and usually endure for much longer than the performance itself. In this course, we will engage a “deep dive” on four distinct books that document performance. We will consider them both as records of the past, as well as a vehicle loaded with possibility for future actions – and we will perform some of those actions ourselves. This course will be a combination of the study of texts, the activation of texts, and the creation of texts. Individual and group work is expected.

LITR 0610E. To Gather, To Sever, To Mix, To Turn .

This highly generative workshop’s goal is to stimulate and provide students with formal tools to develop a chapbook-length series of poems by the term’s end. Students will bring materials to be transformed through processes including but not limited to collage, erasure, and translation. Such materials could be self-generated or found, and may include journal entries, dream logs, letters, text messages, images, archival matter, and much else. As examples of procedural approaches we will read poets such as Jen Bervin, Caroline Bergvall, Lyn Hejinian, Christian Hawkey, Susan Howe, Tyehimba Jess, Tan Lin, Claudia Rankine, and Stacy Szymaszek.

LITR 0610F. Choose Your Own Adventure .

This game is lit. I mean this Lit is a game. How do the design elements of a novel resemble the design elements of a game? And to what extent have interactive [video] games been designed with novelistic conceits? Your adventure begins here, starting with what lies at the dark heart of the literary adventure genre (Defoe, Conrad, Behn). We’ll sojourn at contemporary indie video games (Undertale, Walking Dead, Broken Age, Gone Home), along the way analyzing how “choice” is utilized to build reciprocal fictions. We will also undertake semester-long projects—creating our own “Choose Your Own Adventure”s.

LITR 0710. Writers on Writing Seminar .

Offers students an introduction to the study of literature (including works from more than one genre) with special attention given to a writer's way of reading. This course will include visits to the course by contemporary writers who will read to the class and talk about their work. Enrollment limited to 19 first year students.

LITR 0710R. Poetry and Science (ENGL 0710R) .

Interested students must register for ENGL 0710R .

LITR 0900A. Classic Short Stories .

This course introduces you to a selection of works by important writers of the short story. We shall explore the richness and diversity of short fiction through close reading and discussion, affording you an appreciation of the short story in general and of our writers' countries and histories in particular. Our focus will be on authorial strategies and themes explored. Artistic and political movements will be introduced as they impact the works. Furthermore, you will learn the appropriate terminology as tools for textual and critical analysis. Finally, this course will to develop your capacity for self-expression.

LITR 0900B. How to Win the Nobel Prize in Literature .

The history of the world’s most famous literary prize, the Nobel Prize in Literature, is one of scandal, secrecy, and prestige. Does the Nobel Prize really reward writers who confer the "greatest benefit on mankind"? What might the Nobel Prize teach us about reading and writing in our contemporary moment? In this seminar we will read texts from the most recent Nobel laureates: Kazuo Ishiguro, Olga Tokarczuk, Peter Handke, Louise Glück, and Abdulrazak Gurnah. We will examine how these diverse authors engage in creative writing and world-making through topics like migration, history, myth, culture, and ethnicity. We will also think broadly about the politics and value of literary prizes, world literature, translation, and the global literary marketplace.

LITR 0999. Graphic Novels and Comic Masterworks .

Focused on the influence of graphic novels and comic art, this course examines graphic novels and comic art from seminal texts like Art Spiegleman's Maus through a range of mainstream and independent comics from Marjane Satrapi, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore, David B., Lynda Barry, Daniel Clowes, Frank Miller, and many others, including graphic memoir, reportage, and Indie and DIY zines. The course explores image and language in collaboration, seeking a better understanding of this influential genre. Assignments are critical and creative, both individual and collaborative, and will involve daily reading and writing assignments. Enrollment limited to 20.

LITR 1000. The Arts Workshop for Practice and Practice-Oriented Research .

This collaborative course will provide a forum for discussing in-progress creative research and practice. Offered jointly by the Brown Arts Initiative and Brown’s arts departments, the weekly workshop will host an interdisciplinary group of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. Each participant will apply with a specific creative practice/research project to be workshopped and developed during the course of the semester. In the semester following the seminar, participants will have access to production assistance from the BAI for further project development. The course requires an online application process, and successful applicants with be provided with instructor permission to enroll.

LITR 1010A. Advanced Fiction .

The writing of short stories or longer works in progress in regular installments, along with appropriate exercises and reading assignments. See general course description above for course entry procedures for all advanced workshops. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1010B. Advanced Poetry .

Course work includes a body of exercises, close reading of poetry, workshop conversations and conferences. See general course description above for course entry procedures for all advanced workshops. Instructor permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1010C. Advanced Playwriting (TAPS 1500H) .

Interested students must register for TAPS 1500H .

LITR 1010D. Advanced Digital Language Arts .

An advanced writing working for which participants produce, individually or in collaborative arrangements, a significant work of language-driven, digitally-mediated art in networked and programmable media. This work will be given historical and critical context, as participants become more aware of what it is they are doing when they use digital systems to write, or when they create instruments for and of writing. Throughout the course — and especially before final projects become the focus — there will be seminar-style reading and discussion: readings from other works of digital language art and from selected critical writing in the field.

LITR 1010E. Advanced Screenwriting .

Screenwriting for feature-length and episodic works. Participants should already have experience writing short screenplays and be prepared to develop a longer piece. See the Literary Arts Department website for course entry procedures for all advanced workshops. Work sample and instructor permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1010F. Advanced Translation .

Translation draws from many fields including linguistics, comparative literature, literary studies, anthropology, cultural studies, cognitive science, and creative writing. While we consider different theories and approaches to translation, students will embark on a semester-length translation project. Expect to read and energetically discuss readings, to give a presentation on your ongoing translation, and to write a critical essay and numerous translation exercises on your way toward completing a manuscript in translation (the length of which will be determined by the work itself and an agreement between professor and student). Enrollment limited to 12. Instructor permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1010G. Writing3D .

An advanced experimental workshop for writing in immersive 3D, introducing text, sound, spatial poetics, and narrative movement into Brown's Legacy Cave (now house in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts) with links to the YURT (Yurt Ultimate Reality Theater in the Center for Computation and Vixualization). An easy-to-learn and easy-to-use application allows non-programmers to create projects on laptops and then to run them in immersive 3D audiovisuality without the necessity for specialist support. Broadly interdisciplinary, the course encourages collaboration between students with different skills in different media, who work together to discover a literary aesthetic in artificially rendered space.

LITR 1010H. Advanced Digital & Cross-Disciplinary Language Arts .

Project-oriented workshop for writers and language artists working to integrate practices from other disciplines as they devise, compose, and make their work. Recommended for students with some prior interdisciplinary practice or digital media experience. Learning is through making, reading, discussion, group projects, collaboration, and research presentations. Enrollment limited to 12. S/NC.

LITR 1110B. American Political Drama .

What exactly is an American political play? We'll examine issues of personal freedom, community rights, and the positioning of public power. Are we different from the myths of America? Political theater enables us to see our moral choices and aspirations. From Aristophanes to Suzan-Lori Parks, we will look at various political texts while we attempt to create new approaches to the writing of American Political Theater.

LITR 1110E. Innovative Narrative .

Stereotexts: a project-driven writing workshop focused on innovative multidimensional approaches to narrative. Projects using two or more media such as print and digital formats or texts and sound, filmed text, hyperfictions, narratives with multiple voices or even multiple spaces, text installations, fictions that put contraries into play, etc., are all welcome. Writing samples and project descriptions required.

LITR 1110F. Narrative Strategies .

A course essentially geared to the creative and critical writer interested in experimenting with some of the narrative structures suggested by the great films. To include films of Akerman, Antonioni, Eisenstein, Hou Hsiao, Hsien, Goddard, marker, Tarkovsky and others and texts by Duras, Sebald and Vittorini. Instructor permission required.

LITR 1110G. Narrative Voice: Fact and Fiction .

No description available.

LITR 1110J. The Short Story .

Experiments in writing; extensive reading in traditional and experimental collections of fiction in shorter forms. Writing samples of no more than ten pages should be left at 68 1/2 Brown Street on the first day of the semester. Instructor permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1110L. Aspects of Contemporary Prose Practice .

Using Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus , Tayeb Saleh's The Weddingof Zein and Other Stories , Luis Bernard Honwana's We Killed Mangy Dog , and Our Sister Killjoy , this course will look at prose narrative in contemporary African Literature, for a background to general narrative practice. Among areas of special interest, the course will examine the contents and structure of the short story, not as an abbreviated novel, but as an autonomous genre. We shall also look at literature in translation, and discuss what the reader loses in the process if anything, and how much that matters, if at all. Students will be expected to work on short stories and novel chapters. Instructor permission required. Enrollment limited to 12. S/NC.

LITR 1110M. Stereotexts: Experimental Multidimensional Fiction Workshop .

A project-driven writing workshop focused on innovative multidimensional approaches to narrative. Projects using two or more media such as print and digital formats or text and sound, filmed text, hyperfictions, narratives with multiple voices or even multiple spaces, text installations, fictions that put contraries into play, etc., all are welcome submissions.

LITR 1110N. Workshop for Potential Literature .

A novel without the letter "E", 100,000-billion sonnets by permutation and texts that take the shape of a Mobius-Strip-- all this time and more, as workshop participants try their hands in writing in response to problems created by and inspired by a group of writers engaged in strange constraints and procedures. Instructor permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1110O. Hybrid Texts, Hybrid Thinking .

In neither being fiction, poetry, memoir, theory, nor art writing but a crossing of these genres, the hybrid text proffers an open and complexly layered environment for engaging questions of perception, knowledge and articulation. In this course, we will study exemplary works of literature and venture briefly into visual art. Both critical and creative responses will be required.

LITR 1110P. Alternative Scriptwriting: Writing Beyond the Rules .

This course will consider various screenwriting genres and how to write against genre or extend the traditional screenwriting forms. Students applying must have already completed either a 90+ page screenplay or have taken Advanced Playwriting ( LITR 1010C ) or Advanced Screenwriting ( LITR 1010E ) at Brown. S/NC.

LITR 1110R. Performance Dimensions of Text .

Poets Theater is an online seminar/workshop in which students will read and “rehearse”/perform the poems, scripts and scores by writers who extend the possibilities of dramatic language. Modeled as an "atelier," students will explore the relationships between the performative and the printed/textual, asking how the page serves as a blueprint for sound, video, movement, and theatrical practice. Students will write “in conversation” with assigned readings by innovators such as Augusto Boal, Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange, Richard Foreman, Douglass Kearney, Tracie Morris, Cecilia Vicuna, August Wilson, Fiona Templeton, Kevin Killian, and others. As an interdisciplinary workshop, this course invites students from all backgrounds. S/NC. Instructor's permission required. Enrollment limited to 12.

LITR 1110S. Fiction into Film .

A study of various directors' attempts to transfer masterpieces of fiction into film. Concerning both genres we will ask Gertrude Stein's question: What are masterpieces, and why are there so few of them? Includes fiction by Austen, Bierce, Carter, Cowley, Doyle, Faulkner, Forster, Fowles, Kesey, Joyce, McCullers, Morrison, Nabokov, O'Connor, Thompson, Walker, Spielberg, Woolf, Yamamoto as directed by Burton, Forman, Felini, Gilliam, Huston, Jordan, Kurasawa, Lee, Potter, and others. Class and weekly screenings. Enrollment limited to 12. S/NC.

LITR 1110T. Script to Screen .

Script to Screen is an intensive production course designed for students with some proficiency in screenwriting and little to no directing or filmmaking experience. The course aims to serve as a two-way bridge, opening writing students up to possibilities for production, while also investigating how production experiences can inform future writing. Activities include shooting and editing video exercises, working with actors, and filming practice scenes. A local casting director will conduct a workshop and bring in actors for scene work. A highly acclaimed guest director will work with students over three classes, conducting an acting workshop and critiquing scene work.

LITR 1110U. Script to Screen: Fundamentals of Filmmaking .

This intensive production course is designed for students who have some proficiency in screenwriting or poetry and little to no filmmaking experience. The course aims to serve as a two-way bridge, opening screenwriting and poetry students up to the possibility of making films, while also investigating how production experiences can inform future writing projects. We will experiment with a variety of filmmaking techniques and tools to investigate the symbiotic relationships between writing and visual language. The equal importance of sound in the film viewing experience will also be explored, with students learning techniques for recording and editing multitrack soundtracks. Guest filmmakers will join us and respond to student work.

LITR 1110V. Script to Screen: Scene Work .

This intensive script development and directing workshop is designed for students who have some proficiency in screenwriting, and little to no directing experience. Basic shooting and editing skills are helpful, or will be learned in the first half of the semester. The course aims to serve as a two-way bridge, opening screenwriting students up to the possibility of directing their work, while also investigating how acting and directing experiences, and workshopping material with actors, can inform future screenwriting. Activities include learning acting and directing techniques, scene analysis, writing and revising scenes, casting and working with actors, creating a scene through improvisation, and filming practice versions of scenes. Guests will join us for workshops and final reviews.

LITR 1110W. Losing Record .

These past few years have forced us all to confront some harsh truths about our place on this planet. In this creative non-fiction course we will grapple with what it means to lose. More than just the agony of defeat, loss is a universal condition of entropic grief or enlightening relief, often as a result of forces beyond our control. We will examine first what it means to lose things, then people, and finally our place(s). We'll also explore the ways melancholy, grief, and non-attachment have been variously treated—all in effort to archive our own losing records. What can we do to keep from forgetting? And is it possible to forgive without forgetting (injury, trauma, theft)? When is it appropriate, or even desirable, to forget? In-class prompts will include transcendental meditations, journaling, and object histories.

LITR 1150A. Ecopoetics in Practice .

What we have perpetrated on our environment has certainly affected a poet's means and material, thinking and life. Can poetry embody values that acknowledge the economy of interrelationship between human and non-human realms? How might poetry register the complex interdependency that draws us into a dialogue with the world, moving beyond theme and reference? In this class, we will think-with ecoscapes, ecotones, and Animalia (ourselves included, along with our humanimal contexts), and other life and nonlife forms, via the lapping possibilities of poetic language. We will write, read, discuss, create, think, experience. Do be prepared for some “field work”. S/NC

LITR 1150B. The Foreign Home: Interdisciplinary Arts .

Project-centered workshop for exploration beyond one's "home" genre, whether in video, poetry, fiction, music, performance or visual arts. Contemporary and art-historical interdisciplinary works will ground our investigation into the tension between expertise and "beginner's mind". Collaborative and individual work expected. See general course description above for entry procedures for all special topics workshops/seminars. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1150C. Unpublishable Writing .

Before becoming the dominant form of book-marking, "the codex" meant a tree stump where criminals were tied. After examining conventions of western print culture, we will explore literary practices which are performative, sculptural, multimedia, or out-scale. Through the course is primarily for creative projects, critical research will also be expected.

LITR 1150E. Strange Attractors: Adaptations/Translations .

A workshop for students from all genres and disciplines to explore adaptation as creative process. Adaptation can be between any genres and from any source. See general course description above for entry procedures for all special topics workshops/seminars. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1150F. Home and Abroad .

This course combines seminar and workshop sessions for students with special interest in the writing of novels and short fiction. Attention will be given to the ways certain English and American writers - Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Graham Greene - have interpreted the lives of people in other and foreign cultures. These are classic examples of the meeting of insiders and outsiders in the house of fiction. Instructor permission required. Enrollment limited to 12.

LITR 1150G. Books by Hand .

As both a seminar and workshop, this course will explore small press publishing and bookmaking from historical, contemporary and hands-on perspectives. Students will be asked to design and carry out small creative projects throughout the semester as well as research particular concerns in the field. See general course description above for course entry procedures for all special topics workshop/seminars. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1150H. Latin American Poetry Live .

We focus on 18 essential poets from Latin America. If you do not weep and run naked shouting through the streets of Providence you will not have read the poems closely. Bilingualism is not a prerequisite, but all the texts are bilingual and we will consider translation issues in a way that is accessible to and engaging for everyone. Several of the poems we consider are book length magisterial works. The poems are political, erotic, domestic, colloquial, innovative, or incendiary, and sometimes all at once. This section does not require permission from instructor.

LITR 1150I. The Lyric Essay .

Advanced level workshop for graduates and undergraduates to explore the possibilities of creative nonfiction in a radical or hybrid mode. See general course description above for course entry procedures for all special topics workshop/seminars. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1150J. The Cinematic Essay .

A creative writing seminar in which we take the Essay Film as the primary inspiration for weekly writing exercises. Works by Marker, Godard, Ivens, Resnais, Varda, Akerman, Herzog, Morris, Su Friedrich, Sadie Benning and Trihn Mon-Ha to be included. Also writing by Cannetti, Gass, Handke, Cha, Hong Kingston and more. See general course description above for course entry procedures for all special topics workshop/seminars. Written permission required. S/NC. Students MUST register for the lecture section and the screening.

LITR 1150M. Short Fiction Experiments .

A course in fiction which pushes against the very definitions of stories and fictions. Using short forms, we will examine our habits and assumptions of story telling and engage in willful adventures of mind, spirit, and language. Prerequisites include a passion for trying everything and anything once. No prior writing experience needed. Written permission required.

LITR 1150N. The Novella: An Adventure in Writing .

In this workshop/seminar, we will explore the ever elusive world of the novella - how to think of this work, what the rules are, where the boundaries lay. Alongside their reading of writers such as Marguerite Dumas and Michael Ondaatje, students will embark on their own novella-writing journeys. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1150P. John Cage and Meditative Poetics .

Primarily an interdisciplinary literature course, we will experience the writing and thinking of John Cage in the context of a wider exploration of creative process with a basis in american and european interpretations of Buddhist practice and thought. We will explore the work of contemporary artists such as Bill Viola, Philip Glass, Meredith Monk, Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman, as well as Samuel Beckett and others. Students in the course will be expected to write in both creative and critical modes. Instruction in basic meditation practice is recommended but optional throughout the semester. Written permission required.

LITR 1150Q. Reading, Writing and Thinking for the Stage .

Composed of contemporary dramatic literature for playwrights. Contemporary texts are studied. Use of each author's dramatic techniques, the influence of the times on his drama, his themes, the demands of market driven theater and popular art considered. Simultaneously students will write an original 60-page manuscript. Students applying must have already completed plays of 60 pages or have advanced playwriting experience. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1150R. Exemplary Ancient Fictions .

We shall discuss and examine a selection of pre-Gutenberg narratives from Gilgamesh and Genesis through Ovid and fairytales and medieval romance, with a focus on the ancient art of narrative. We shall also try our hands at exercises in the alternative fictional strategies these works suggest. Course entry based on the submission of a writing sample (and in-class writing in response to an assignment) at the first class session.

LITR 1150S. What Moves at the Margins .

A multi-genre seminar/workshop based on fiction, non-fiction and dramatic literature that has been banned or otherwise marginalized because it is critical, interrogative and alternative. Weekly writing exercises based on readings and discussions in class. A term project is required. For students who love literature. For admission, students may submit fiction, non-fiction or drama. Enrollment limited to 12. S/NC.

LITR 1150T. Foreign Home .

Project-centered workshop for exploration beyond one's "home" genre, whether in video, poetry, fiction, music, performance or visual arts. Contemporary and art-historical interdisciplinary works will ground our investigation into the tension between expertise and "beginner's mind". Collaborative and individual work expected. Instructor's permission required.

LITR 1150U. Prose City: The Making of Spatial Texts .

In this workshop/seminar, we will explore, through selected reading and writing exercises, some basic questions of "writing city": how is place captured, encompassed; how can the city emerge in language as a character, an event, as reflective space; how do we enter the city; how do we recognize its borders? Students will be asked to create a portfolio of texts for an imagined city, as well as to think through concepts such as "structure," "location," "encounter," and "identity" as they occur in the paragraph. Instructor's permission required.

LITR 1150V. The Novel in Brief .

This workshop/seminar takes the novel form on a wild ride as it investigates concepts such as compression, fragmentation, miniaturization, and sequencing in the construction of narratives. Students will be required to write their own brief novel over the course of the semester. Writing sample due at first class session. Instructor permission given after review of manuscripts. Enrollment limited to 12.

LITR 1150W. Clown Aesthetics .

Clown as literary structure and trope as well as character will be our focus. We will ask if this "clown aesthetic" exists, could exist, should or might continue to exist -- in fiction, performance, and film in particular. Clowning of all kinds considered from history, theory, literary and performing arts. Graduate and undergraduate students from all disciplines invited. This workshop course includes individual research as well as collaborative projects. Come to first class for permission. Enrollment limited to 12. S/NC.

LITR 1150X. Reading, Writing and Thinking .

We will explore various ways to engage with a work of art in order to fuel one's imagination and projects. Close textual reading of several books with writing assignments based on the readings. Writers will include Woolf, Stein, Beckett, Coetze, Kertesz and others. Writing samples due at first class session. Instructor permission given after review of manuscripts. Enrollment limited to 12. S/NC.

LITR 1150Y. Fiction Through Poetry .

This course is designed for poets, fiction writers, and cross-genre enthusiasts interested in looking at narrative as it occurs at the level of the sentence, even the level of the word. We will use a variety of poetic texts as well as other fractured content as means to think about fiction, and the borderlands of storytelling. Instructor permission required (bring a writing sample to the first class meeting). Enrollment limited to 12. S/NC

LITR 1150Z. Reading for Writers .

We will look closely and deeply and with a writer's passion and agenda to the various formal decisions used in a variety of astonishing and evocative texts with the objective of utilizing some of these strategies in weekly compositions of our own. Writers include: Aria, Berssenbrugge, Coetzee, Kertesz, Kincaid, Lispector, Mueller.

LITR 1151B. Figures of Thought .

What can you say about what can’t be said, and what form does such a saying take? From the gnostic gospels to Agamben, Yeats to Yves Bonnefoy, we'll follow these fleeting figures of thought and their messages. We will read a variety of writings from the deep past to the present. These writings will come in a variety of forms but illuminate a path ahead of the one we daily follow. Students will keep journals that respond to the world and writing and bring these as material for discussion in class. Each one will give a presentation during the term.

LITR 1151C. Virginia Woolf: Four Novels .

This is a class for writers and will entail close devotional readings of the texts and weekly writing experiments based on methods, motions, patterns, rhythms, abstractions and other narrative strategies employed by the novels. We'll read the following books by Woolf: Jacob's Room, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts. S/NC required. Writing samples due at first class meeting.

LITR 1151D. Art of Film .

This is a course in the art of film writing, directing, editing picture and sound, and producing, be it narrative or avant-garde. Students will engage the theory and practice of the art of filmmaking via readings, viewings, writings, and making their own films. Each student will complete four films from initial conception to the final film in a collaborative environment.

LITR 1151E. Latin American Death Trip .

Death is the subject of many of the greatest (most moving, innovative, funny, haunting, political, oneiric) Latin American poems of the 20th century, from Gorostiza’s Death without End to Villaurrutia’s Nostalgia for Death to Saenz’ The Night. What particularities of culture, gender, age, faith or experience might account for the visionary clarity of death as constant companion or permeable border, etc.? What makes the poems great? Our class will read classic Latin American books in bilingual editions (so Spanish literacy is not a requirement, but we will talk about translation issues).

LITR 1151F. Choose Your Own Adventure .

LITR 1151G. Everything Emily .

This is a course that wallows in Emily Dickinson—one of the most important poets at the foundations of American poetry and, still today, one of our most exacting and most experimental practitioners. No one in the ensuing 150 years has surpassed her radical modes of expression, invention, and vision. We will engage with her poetry, her letters, her biography, and many of the works of criticism, visual art, film, and poetry that her work has inspired, as well as exploring the Dickinson collections in Brown’s Hay Library and visiting her Amherst home.

LITR 1151H. Discomfort .

Comfort is overrated! This course is an invitation to leave our comfort zones and dive into texts that invite us to rethink the way we view history, the world, fiction, writing, race relations etc. We will read recommended texts and discuss them in class. Discussions will include but not be limited to the narrative techniques employed by the writers and our response to the texts, both as readers and as writers.

LITR 1151I. Remaster + Remix .

This workshop/seminar will use the intuition, logic and esthetics of popular music forms such as punk, house, dub step, reggae and blues to delve into the complex connections between a selection of classic novels and versions of these novels retold. What tensions get reset when writers on an empire’s margin write back? What assumptions get shifted when women refocus a novel’s concerns? What are the possibilities and dangers in reconstructing classics while trying to mash them up? And why are we breathless when a stylist riffs? French Antillean notions of creolité will offer guidance. Main guide—the books.

LITR 1151J. Bob Marley: Lyrics and Legend .

Bob Marley is one of the most accomplished songwriters of all time. We're going to engage with the lyrics of this postcolonial Caribbean writer; contemplate him as a subject of memoirs, biographies and documentaries; and explore him as a figure in the creative imaginations of novelists and poets such as Marlon James and Lorna Goodison. We're also going to look at reggae as an important literary esthetic. And of course listen to a lot of his music. Special attention will be paid to the albums and singles produced under the guidance of Lee "Scratch" Perry.

LITR 1151K. Art of Assemblage: Collage, Reportage + Re-Appropriation .

In this class we will examine works of literature that challenge and re-imagine the poetic form using re-purposed text, research, fragment and image to enter into conversation with history and contemporary culture, and illuminate the every day realities of life. We’ll explore the use and effect of collage in visual work and music, and investigate how the form operates when transformed for the page through reading, class discussion, and creative writing exercises.

LITR 1151L. World Tour: Recent Poetry in Translation .

This is a reading, writing, translation, and discussion class. Commit to a vigorous combination of all four. Some translation theory will be reviewed, but the emphasis of the course is upon models of translations. Texts will include translations of books by Laszlo Krasznahorkai, Jean Fremon, Yoshimasu Gozo, Kim Hysoon, Anja Utler, Adonis, and others. Enrollment limited to 12. S/NC

LITR 1151M. Cross-Fertilizations: Text-Based Performance .

Gabrielle Civil is a conceptual and performance artists whose stated aim is to "open up space." With that in mind, the aim of this course is to open up -- and engage -- multiple spaces of language as it operates in the interstices of poetry, visual art, music, performance, shamanism, documentation, and activism. Among the texts we shall read are those by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Yoko Ono, LaTasha N. Nevada-Diggs -- through them, we shall consider how performed language can activate various forms of engagement, perception, dissemination and understanding.

LITR 1151N. Zoologic: Wild Animals in the Surveillance State .

This interdisciplinary course asks students to research and deeply engage with the current status of wild animals in various states of surveillance (either through conservation and preservation, or for entertainment), trafficked for the pet trade, or living essentially as "refugees" in the human world. Original critical research will result in creative and collaborative projects. Site visits to animal sanctuaries, and lectures from people working with animals in a number of disciplines will be featured. Selection will prioritize seniority and relevant experience (any discipline.)

LITR 1151O. Ideas of Narration Before Don Quixote .

We shall read fictional narratives (and some narrative poetry) from the first moments of preserved literature up to Don Quixote, for clues about how earlier writers thought about form and narration. Of what was narrative fashioned before “omniscience” was a relevant term? Before there was a science of psychology that could speak to the protagonists? What can we say about the diversity and unpredictability of early narrative writing, and how does that contrast with the more consistent look and feel of the nineteenth century? How can these “ancient fictions” inform an interest in narrative innovation and formal ingenuity today?

LITR 1151P. Documentary Poetics .

This course will explore 20th and 21st century documentary poetic texts to provide points of discussion and inspiration for our own investigative poetry. We’ll look at a range of works, from those confronting the legal record to those creating their own record of the infraordinary quotidian (Perec’s term), and discuss the various aesthetic, ethical, social, and procedural questions raised. Participants will be asked to develop and create their own final documentary poetry projects. Readings will include works by Reznikoff, Niedecker, Williams, M. NourbeSe Philip, C.D. Wright, Bernadette Mayer, Cole Swensen, Raúl Zurita, Anne Carson, Cristina Rivera-Garza, and many others.

LITR 1151Q. Great Adventure .

This hybrid seminar/prose workshop will take you to Antarctica, Japan, France, Cambodia, outer space—and to other places too. But much of your writing will be about yourself. Your cross-genre wandering through novels, essays, and indefinable hybrid works by a fascinating list of thinkers and stylists, will lead to questions about your own sense of place, belonging, contextual otherness, and the pleasures, powers and implications of your gaze. You'll search for answers through the medium of your own creative work—lyric essays, fictional vignettes, pictures.

LITR 1151R. Ecstatic Alphabets: Poetry by Other Means .

How to do things with words? How to do words with things? The latter is a question whose answers might prove as—if not more—compelling than its familiar inverse. Both are at the core of this course focusing on interdisciplinary works for which notions intrinsic to poetry serve as either springboard or endpoint. We will study contemporary examples as well as historical antecedents, and will experiment with producing genre-defying works that animate the written word. Among the strategies we will cover are verbivocovisual works, cut-ups and collage, sound poetry and concrete poetry, happenings, agitprop, poets theater, and dance.

LITR 1151S. Fan_Fic .

Fan fiction is a thing, right? And, let's be honest, we all secretly love this kinda thing! O, to relive those Microsoft '95 nights spent reading semi-romantic Legend of Zelda fan fiction... What compels us to reinvent the stories we're already attached to? The texts we might consider fan fiction exist on a spectrum somewhere between high literary and kitsch, between Milton and My Immortal. If not a proper genre, let's imagine that fan fiction is a particular (perhaps ancient) practice of literary mimesis. The question is whether it's possible to create a wholly original derivative.

LITR 1151T. Poetry for Healing Territories .

The texts we’ll be reading in this seminar/workshop address the will to heal and recuperate after loss. These are poets with courage enough to reclaim lost territory—and from their reclamations, we too are given permission to claim that which we’ve lost, that which has been taken, and that which is constantly pursued and harassed in us. How are these poets able to write through dissolution in a way that substantiates healing? What is gained in every/any instance of loss?

LITR 1151U. Literatura Puertorriqueña: Cruce-Ficctiones y Contra-Poemas .

The purpose of this course is to analyze the myriad ways Puerto Rico and the United States have influenced each other through literature, music, and art. In 1898, the island was ceded to the U.S. by Spain following the Spanish American war. Since then, an ongoing exchange (often one-sided) regarding the political status of the island and its people has informed a wealth of literary materials, musical hybridity, and radically avant-garde arts.

LITR 1151V. Black Box Poetics .

We live in an age when most of the language we read and write runs through proprietary digital systems we do not understand. Accordingly, this course approaches poetry in terms of code[s], data collection, overflow, opacity, and one-way mirrors. We will consider ununderstandability itself as an aesthetic property, discuss compositional strategies of selective clarity and obscurity, and use poetics to probe the unknowable. We will look closely at source code, but our purposes will be more conceptual than technical. No coding experience is required.

LITR 1151W. The Restless Desk: Hybrid Writing, Performance, Collaboration .

Immersion in a range of writing possibilities linked to performance and collaboration. Assigned readings will explore multiple genres, theory, and engage writing prompts that are ”experiments of attention”, working with voice, instrumentation, movement, visuals, improvisation. We will invoke “documentary poetics” as a method that engages inquiry and research and consider historical and contemporary literary performance practices. Students will design semester-long creative projects out of these multiple trajectories. Several guest musicians, performers, writers will be visiting. We will have use of the University’s recording studio and prepare a final class performance.

LITR 1151X. Interdisciplinary Arts Workshop: Translation of Concept .

Art-making is an act of translation – a thought, process, question, object, declaration, desire, system, or intention is filtered through the artist and subsequently finds new existence in the form of art. This project-centered workshop is a cross-genre exploration of that filter, where participants working in differing genres will be asked to engage a wide range of materials to “translate” into their art-making process. Please be prepared to write, dance, sing, mix, draw, ask, reach, and fail, in and out of your comfort zone. Individual and collaborative work expected. For writers, dancers, architects, musicians, painters, digital artists, “non-artists.” Written permission required.

LITR 1151Y. Against Genre .

An experimental workshop in creative writing hybridized with other forms--not only literary work that does not adhere to traditional genres, like prose-poetry, but writing that includes video, or music, or collage, and which includes practices like appropriation and non-traditional distribution. Including weekly reading assignments (Gabrielle Civil, Yoko Ono, Jack Halberstam, Claudia Rankine, Kate Durbin, Rick Moody, Mary-Kim Arnold, Shelly Jackson, and others), weekly writing prompts, one oral presentation.

LITR 1151Z. Paysagisme and the Art of Eco-Responsibility .

Though the French word paysagisme is usually translated as "landscaping," "landscape design," or "landscape architecture," the field also incorporates many land-based issues, including urban planning, public space use, sustainable agriculture, land reclamation, botany, ecology; also, it has provided a pronounced aesthetic element in garden and park design, and overlaps with late 20th-century and contemporary art movement known as land art. This course seeks to make this alternative way of viewing the environment available to students at Brown, emphasizing the way that paysagisme and its inclusive gesture of bringing art, aesthetics, and land use together, fosters new modes of ecological responsibility. This intensive half-credit course begins half-way through the semester, starting on October 25. Students MUST register by the deadline for adding a class; the course still operates within the academic calendar and students will not be able to attend class prior to registering for the course. Contact the instructor with any questions.

LITR 1152A. Survey of the Historic Avant-Garde .

The avant-garde is a famously slippery category; the definition we'll be working from, more or less, is the series of movements and individuals from 1900 to 1940, based mostly in Europe, that led culture and the arts in directions that talked back to power, pushed aesthetic limits outward, and explored ways to give the arts social and political weight. While largely focused on writers, we'll also spend a lot of time with visual artists and other media and will address questions such the line between Modernism and the Avant-Garde and the roles of women in these movements.

LITR 1152B. Ekphrasis in Action .

Ekphrasis, according to its most basic definition, is simply poetry that addresses art; we'll be stretching that definition, making it into a way of interacting with art, of living with art, and even of looking at things in ways that make them into art. We'll be both reading texts in which others stretch the definition of ekphrasis and visiting sites on or quite near the Brown campus to engage in on-site exploration and writing. It’s a course about discovering and exploring the ways that we represent and therefore create and recreate the world.

LITR 1152C. Writers-in-the-Community Training & Residencies .

This course will operate mostly “in the field.” We will spend some weeks discussing pedagogical approaches to teaching creative writing in community settings. We will thereafter train in residence, observing a poetry residency at a local elementary school, with visits to other community settings as well (sites to be determined). We will continue to discuss pedagogy, classroom practices and management, administrator-writer relations, and all other necessary logistical planning throughout the semester. By week 7, students will engage in their own writing residencies in pairs or small teams, working in a community setting of their choosing (K-12 school, shelter, library, etc.).

LITR 1152E. Between the Seams: Hybrid Works .

Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works Of Billy The Kid is part novel, poetry sequence, and visual collage; Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red is novel and poem. If, as Georges Bataille has put it, literature is a series of dislocations rather than a continuum, these “hybrid” works and others mark important breaks in the literary status quo. We will take inspiration from writing in which structures rub up against each other. Using poetry and prose, we’ll seek intuitive logics in juxtaposition of text and image, and look at writers using hybrid forms as models for documenting ways of knowing and unknowing.

LITR 1152F. The Shape of Longing .

What are some of the formal shapes longing takes in poetry and fiction, film and music? Through a devotional experience with great works of art, creative pieces will be generated by the students and shared in class. Texts shall include Wagner, Sappho, Tagore, Rumi, St John of the Cross, Desnos, Kawabata, Woolf, Frisch, Valentine, Howe, Pessoa, Vuong, Angelopoulus, Weerasethakul, Kieslowski, Chacon, Jenkins, Coltrane and West.

LITR 1152G. Rebuilding the Book .

In the face of digital and other emergent technologies, where is the book today—what are its limits? Conversely, what is its essence? We'll blend the history of the book and its relationship to the visual arts with the creation of inventive book structures. Slide lectures and discussions will cover the emergence of writing and its gradual incorporation into book structures from tablet through scroll to codex, focusing on the development of the relationship between text and image, with a focus on late 19th century livre d’artiste, the “democratic multiple” (1960s); and two contemporary developments: the sculptural book and the altered book.

LITR 1152H. Writing from the Archives/In the Subjunctive Mood .

Memory, history, and trace haunt the present, perception, and the cultural contexts in which we live. When we turn to the archival record, we note its focus on the powerful, and its critical exclusion of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and LGTBQ people, people with disabilities, and “wild” women. A growing number of writers employ new means to open the lens to render the present more clearly through counter-narrative, critical fabulation, and reparative technique. We will read and write in this vein toward a new poetics of archive and study methods that give attention to the “unrecorded” incident, emotion, image, and music.

LITR 1152I. Poets' Tour of the Essay .

In this advanced workshop seminar, we will read essays that draw us into the question of art and evidence, surveying prose forms that fall across the spectrum. A sub-genre of nonfiction with the ability to shapeshift across forms, essays’ elastic, bridging and blurring qualities span memoir, epistle, catalog, argument, observation, travelogue and more. We will read essays written in the past that demonstrate as much ingenuity as the post-modern, and contemporary essays that straddle genre. We will discuss the “poetics” of the essay as we look for innovation within the form to examine what new insight is gained through experiment. Interested students should bring a literary writing sample to the first class meeting. The instructor will announce at the first class the date/time that a class list and waitlist will be posted (typically a few days after the first class meeting).

LITR 1152J. Hybrid Writing Workshop: The Long Engagement .

In this course we will explore the tradition and possibilities of open-form hybrid writing via extended engagement with other works of literature and artworks, as well as with the writing practice itself. We will read a range of writers’ such engagements and class time will largely be devoted to reading discussion, workshop, and occasional in-class writing exercises. In weekly writing assignments we will work across genres, with chance procedures and exploratory modes designed to extend, deepen and complicate our writing practices. Students’ final project will be a long engagement with the work of another writer of their choosing.

LITR 1152K. The Shape of Longing .

This class will examine a variety of formal strategies that artists, writers, composers and mystics have used to render longing palpable, present and felt in works of art.  Through a series of writing assignments, students will make their own explorations into this charged, expansive, and elusive terrain. A rigorous class of risk and experimentation.

LITR 1152L. I’m Feeling Myself: The Black Female Body as Its Own Utopia .

Audre Lorde described sensuality as an immense, untapped power within each of us “that lies in a deeply female plane.” What would that power, generated by a Black woman’s body, look like? By focusing solely on the poetry, art, and music of Black women, we explore the Black female body as its own utopia. Weekly readings include Lorde, Jordan, hooks, Morrison, and Dove, alongside the artwork of Mickalene Thomas and Wangechi Mutu, and the music videos of Rihanna, Janet Jackson, and Beyoncé. By re-centering the western gaze on the Black feminine erotic, we discover a poetics of the impolite body.

LITR 1152M. Speculative Fiction and the Literature of Imagination .

Speculative Fiction and the Literature of Imagination is a seminar in the development of speculative fiction as a form over the last generation, its role in articulating political counternarratives, especially in the case of Afrofuturism, its reliance on imagination as a creative strategy, and its position as a particularly uncompromising outpost of experimental writing. The class will consist of weekly readings, as well as frequent creative assignments on issues raised by particular texts, and will include one presentation on a speculative work by each participant. Readings will include Mary Shelley, Sun Ra, Ursula LeGuin, Octavia Butler, William Gibson, N. K. Jemisin, and Ted Chiang, etc.

LITR 1152N. Ecopoetics in Action .

What we have perpetrated on our environment has certainly affected a poet's means and material, thinking and life. Can poetry embody values that acknowledge the economy of interrelationship between human and non-human realms? How might poetry register the complex interdependency that draws us into a dialogue with the world, moving beyond theme and reference? In this class, we will think-with ecoscapes, ecotones, and Animalia (ourselves included, along with our humanimal contexts), and other life and nonlife forms, via the lapping possibilities of poetic language. We will write, read, discuss, create, think, experience. Do be prepared for some “field work”.

LITR 1152O. G-d Dream .

What, historically and aesthetically, constitutes an oracular vision, a clairvoyant revelation, a sign from another dimension? In this class we will explore a variety of ecstatic visions, from the Revelations of John of Patmos and Dream of the Rood, to Timothy Leary and L. Ron Hubbard, all in an effort to hone our own innervisions of what exists beyond. In this multimedia workshop we shall be free to experiment with language, sound, light, pigment. Can our own creative endeavors become expressions of "...the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."?

LITR 1152P. Structuring and Revising Reported Narrative Nonfiction .

This is a class in crafting and structuring essential, reported stories for maximum impact. How do you properly pace a longform story? How do you pitch, report, outline, and edit one? With the collapse of newspapers and magazines around the country, how can we still beautifully tell some of the critical stories that are going untold? The first half of class will run like a magazine editorial meeting, discussing weekly pitches grounded in a particular region—and, later, drafts, which will workshop. The second half of class, we will discuss reading that explores various approaches to structure, voice, and genre.

LITR 1152Q. Land Arts .

This ekphrastic workshop/seminar overflows the traditional definition of Land Art to encompass a much greater range, including contemporary modes of ecologically-oriented art. The class will be broken down into five thematic sections: 1) interventional land art, in which the earth is sculpted, excavated, or augmented; 2) ephemeral land art; in which elements from the landscape are worked into impermanent works; 3) kinetic land art, in which artists participate in the land, rather than making an object of or from it; 4) growing land art, in which plants and trees are grown into constantly changing and yet permanent forms; and 5) ecologically-oriented art, in which a variety of materials and practices are engaged to underscore contemporary issues of ecological importance.

LITR 1152R. Money! .

“Money, it’s a crime/Share it fairly, but don’t take a slice of my pie…” So begins the end verse of Pink Floyd’s dad-rock classic “Money”. We'll explore financial literacy, class and identity, market trends, consumer demands, and alternative forms of currency—all by way of literary realism. At the beginning of the semester, you will be randomly assigned a character with their own income, assets, and debts. From week to week you will tell their story in real time, tracking their investments (if any) in state-sanctioned markets (and/or other channels). What will your single mother do with an inheritance after the untimely passing of her father? Whether coming from a hyper-capitalist or Marxist-Lacanian perspective, we'll reckon with the many ways (implicit and explicit) that money has come to define our lives—and perhaps, how and where it should never come between us.

LITR 1152S. Race and the Making of Art (ARTS 1004). .

Interested students must register for ARTS 1004 .

LITR 1152T. Memory’s Imagination .

Taking inspiration from the autobiographical work of newly minted Nobel Laureate, Annie Ernaux, we will examine and produce works of fiction, creative narrative non-fiction and hybrid texts that cleave, in that good old double-sense, to personal experience and/or personal passions. Works by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, Michael Ondaatje, John Keene, Jessica Au and Svetlana Alexeivich will be on the menu to inform and inspire. Students can expect a substantial weekly reading load and should come to each class prepared to discuss the assigned texts and linked creative assignments.

LITR 1152V. The Space Crone and Her Children: Queer Reproductions in Science Fiction .

Rockets and Martian terraforming are frequent themes in the news. Less mentioned is human reproduction. Given humans must reproduce in space to actualize grand narratives of extraterrestrial exploration, this is a curious omission. Fortunately, science fiction does not neglect these matters. Sexuality, gender, and birth are of great interest to speculative writers; the future is an exciting place to live erotic lives. This is a course about possible genders, possible sexualities, possible ecologies. Reading queer feminist science fiction—e.g., Octavia Butler, Irene Clyde, Samuel Delany, N. K. Jemisin, Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ—we will consider how cycles of life might (already) be otherwise and interrogate current events re: reproductive and LGBTQIA+ rights, thinking both analytically and imaginatively. Participants will develop their own speculative prose.

LITR 1152W. Cinema Poetics .

We shall study the poetics of cinema and how the video-poem can expand, deepen, rescue, extend our writing and writing practices. We'll watch a panoply of poem-films, video art, and "poetic" feature length films to discern their basic components of sound + text + motion, their principles of composition and editing techniques. Our texts will explore concepts of diaspora and memory, documentary poetics, footage and sound recordings from which students will assemble video poems or essays of their own. Students will need access to a video editing application such as iMovie, Adobe Premiere, Premiere Rush, Stop Motion Studios, DaVinci Resolve, Canva, for instance.

LITR 1152X. Writing with the Family Archives .

VHS tapes, recipes, birth and immunization records, letters, heirlooms, passports, a shoebox of photographs, old laptops — these are among the tangible artifacts that make up the family archive. Amid the tangible, we recognize the intangible and ephemeral matter, such as oral histories, songs, missing records, objects lost in migration now only filed in memory. how do we open a creative space for these often undervalued inventories? In this class we shall read several texts of poetry and hybrid nonfiction that grapple with familial documents & materials, while, at the same time, beginning our own archival projects. We shall raise questions about the kind of research this project entails, the ethics of writing about kin, how to work creatively with photographs, audio, objects and documents, and how to write into that empty gap of what's missing from the archive.

LITR 1152Z. Creative Process Workshop .

Creative Writing can be understood as a method of turning ideas, sounds, images, snippets, fragments, dreams, research -- and any and all of life's materials -- into fully realized literary works. The "work" of these works is hidden when we read books and published authors, and thus our sense of how excellent work is achieved can be underdeveloped or perfectionistic. When we rely on only a reader's perspective to guide us as artists, it provides little to no sense of artistic path. The path that an artist takes to develop a work is one that is non-linear, messy, and full of wonderful byways. It doesn't easily fit into an editorial perspective, and thus the way in which work is discussed will be different from literature courses. This workshop is for writers of all levels to explore in more depth their

LITR 1200. Writers on Writing .

Offers students an introduction to the study of literature (including works from more than one genre) with special attention given to a writer's way of reading. This course will include visits to the course by contemporary writers, who will read to the class and talk about their work. Enrollment is limited to 30 students.

LITR 1220A. History and Practice of English Versification .

An opportunity to study through reading and imitating poems that represent a variety of poetic eras and traditions. S/NC.

LITR 1220B. Samuel Beckett .

This course will mark the centenary of the author by reading and discussing a range of works from Samuel Beckett's substantial output of fiction, poetry, drama and translation.

LITR 1220C. The Cantos in their Environment .

A reading of Pound's Cantos, with attention to their origin and developments, their background and their influence.

LITR 1220D. The Bible as Literary Source .

A survey of the English Bible and its presence in English and American literature. Students will learn to notice and account for Biblical echoes in a wide variety of writings from several cultures.

LITR 1220E. Dada and Surrealism .

Two of the most famous modernist movements, studied through their writings, their visual arts, their performances, and their manifestoes; their origins and influence; their place in history. S/NC.

LITR 1220F. Restoration Drama .

A survey of English drama and theatrical practice from the reopening of the theaters at the Restoration to the early eighteenth century. Works of the major playwrights, including Dryden, Congreve, Wycherly, Gay. S/NC.

LITR 1220G. The Waste Land and After .

We shall examine Eliot's poem, and then deal with early poems by W.H. Auden and the work of Charles Williams and David Jones. S/NC

LITR 1220H. Gertrude Stein and What Comes After (ENGL 1711M) .

Interested students must register for ENGL 1711M.

LITR 1220I. Zoopoetics (ENGL 1900J) .

Interested students must register for ENGL 1900J .

LITR 1230C. Poetry Newly in Translation in English .

This is a reading, writing. translation, and discussion class. Commit to a vigorous combination of all four. Some translation theory will be reviewed, but the emphasis of the course is upon models of translations. Texts will include works by Iva Blatny, Inger Christensen, Luljeta Lleshanaku, David Huerta, Takashi Hiraide; new translations of Rimbaud and Baudelaire and others. Enrollment limited to 20. S/NC

LITR 1230D. Poetry, Mind, World .

How does the poetic mind negotiate between an account of itself and an account of the world? How have poets used landscape as a model of mind, as an erotics, as elegy? Merleau-Ponty, Hardy, Houle, Alexander, Dewdney, Hass, D'Aquino, Audubon and others. Presentation, several short essays, a poem, and one final essay.

LITR 1230E. Form and Theory of Fiction .

"Form and Theory of Fiction" offers an exploration of narrative theories directed particularly at creative writers, in conjunction with a hands-on examination of contemporary fictional narrative practices. Theoretical readings include historical essays on fiction and work by Gaston Bachelard, Mieke Bal, Gilles Deleuze, and others. Enrollment limited to 20.

LITR 1230F. Writing, Reading City .

In this course, we will explore correlations, points of convergence, and possible mimesis between city and text. Students will be expected to keep a weekly journal, to have a city in question, and to write both imaginatively and critically in response to readings and class discussion.

LITR 1230G. Master Poets of Apartheid Streets: Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks .

With the theme of "Slavery and Justice" in recent Brown University review, [4] "Master Poets of Apartheid Streets: Perpetual Resistance against de jure and de facto Segregation" is the formal and precise embouchure as Critical Realism which legislates as antidote to pernicious social, economic and educational racism: the aesthetic stance of this seminar is "An Integer Is a Whole Number." Through close attention to the conventions of poetry as praxis by these four master poets, in social context, the modality of this study is poetic discourse (what Frederick Douglass called "a sacred effort" in Douglass' description of President A. Lincoln's 'Second Inaugural.' Peripheral insights will be provided by Brown University researchers of the past: Charles H. Nichols, Winthrop Jordan, Richard Slotkin, in their three dissertations, and James R. Patterson's most recent book on "Brown v. Board of Education." Written permission required. Enrollment limited to 20. S/NC.

LITR 1230H. Being in Time .

In this discussion-based course, we will examine the many roles time plays in the building of narratives as well as its impact on contemporary concepts of self. We will use both literary and philosophical texts to explore the spaces between time and perception, time and memory, time and experience, and time and grammar. Written permission required.

LITR 1230I. The Documentary Vision in New Literature of the Americas .

A study of genre-defiant works, lyric treatments, atypical narratives, film poems, etc., including works by Anne Carson, Elena Poniatowska, W.S. Merwin, Maggie Nelson, Raoul Zurita and others. Enrollment limited to 20.

LITR 1230J. Writing: Material Differences .

An exploration of practices that make a material difference to writing, that may change what writing is in specific cultural circumstance and locations. We will look for such differences through transcultural and translingual experiments with writing, beginning "West" and moving "East." We will engage with a selection of widely divergent writers and genres, with emphases on poetics - particularly a translated rendition of Chinese poetics (such as was taken up by Pound and became influential in English literature) - and on theories that we can use for our practice, from: Fenollosa, Foucault, Derrida, and others. Enrollment limited to 20.

LITR 1230K. Latin American Death Trip .

Death is the subject of many of the greatest (most moving, innovative, funny, haunting, political, oneiric) Latin American poems of the 20th century, from Gorostiza's Death without End to Villaurrutia's Nostalgia for Death to Saenz' The Night . What is up with Latin Americans and death? What particularities of culture, gender, age, faith or experience might account for the visionary clarity of death as constant companion or permeable border, etc.? What makes the poems great? We shall read classic Latin American books in bilingual editions (so Spanish literacy is not a requirement, but we'll talk about translation issues). Students will be expected to participate in literary discussions, to write essays and a death poem. Enrollment limited to 20.

LITR 1230L. Eros: Hot and Sour .

Literature, early and late, distant and near, at the intersection of love and loathing. A seminar on selected texts deriving their blood from poetry, their flesh from fiction, their anatomy from form and theory. Including works by Rikki Ducornet, Anne Carson, Roland Barthes, Helen Cixous, Gertrude Stein, Catullus, Henry Miller, et al. Enrollment limited to 20.

LITR 1230M. Poetry and Ethics (COLT 1812J) .

Interested students must register for COLT 1812J .

LITR 1230N. Robert Coover -- Foremost Storyteller .

We shall examine the works of contemporary American fiction writer, Robert Coover. During his long, celebrated career, Coover has imaginatively responded to writers and forms that have come before him. We'll investigate how Coover appropriates earlier traditions and think about how he simultaneously preserves and subverts literary traditions. We shall consider such concepts as myth, religion, and history, and determine how Coover applies these. We'll focus on authorial strategies and themes explored. Furthermore, we'll define literary terminology as a tools for textual and critical analysis. Finally, through this experience you can develop or refine the capacity for self-expression and communication. Enrollment limited to 20.

LITR 1230O. Suppression and Invention in Modern Persian Literature .

This course begins with symbolic elements from classical mystic Persian literature and journeys into pre- and post-revolution Persian short fiction and poetry. We shall analyze creative responses to restricted expression, study efforts to modernize in a variety of genres, and finish with the rise of the woman writer in Iran. Enrollment limited to 20.

LITR 1230P. The New Wave in Iranian Cinema .

We shall explore this movement that produced remarkable award-winning films in Iran. Applying author (auteur) theory, we will study new Iranian movies, analyzing "signs and meaning" in their cinematic language, also investigating effects of Iranian culture on this new artistic wave. Enrollment limited to 20. S/NC

LITR 1230Q. London Consequences .

This course focuses upon a selection of British prose from the 1960s and 1970s, and gives particular attention to post-war literary history in Britain, autobiographical fiction and the legacy of neo-modernism. We'll consider the work of, among others, Anna Kavan, J.G. Ballar, Nicholas Mosley, Muriel Spark, Christine Brooke-Rose, Stefan Themerson, Ann Quin and B.S. Johnson, along with (if available) London Consequences, a collaborative novel co-edited by Johnson.

LITR 1230T. The Origins of the Detective Story .

This class will explore the development of the Detective genre, focusing on its roots in the 19th century and considering more broadly how genres develop and change. Readings include E.T.A. Hoffmann's "Mademoiselle de Scudery", Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin stories, Wilkie Collins, Arthur Conan Doyle, Martin Hewett, and selections from Detection by Gaslight and The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime. We will also look at theoretical texts, including Franco Moretti's "Clues". This course fulfills Literary Arts' pre-20th century literature requirement. Enrollment limited to 20.

LITR 1230U. Samuel Beckett .

This course will examine the works of Samuel Beckett--novels, plays and stories--from the beginning of his career to his death. We will read the majority of Beckett's work, with a major focus on his novel trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable) and on the other work Beckett published between 1948 and 1961 (especially Endgame and How It Is).

LITR 1230V. Why Don't We Fall in Love? .

We focus here on intersections of the erotic and poetry. How do we fall in love? Why? We will explore joy and happiness, love and lust, devotion and seduction. We will also, unfortunately, explore longing, heartbreak, jealousy, unrequited love. We will explore, through literature and film, the ageless enigma that prompted Ruth Stone to proclaim, "there is no choice among the voices / of love..."

LITR 1230W. Spectroscopy: [Identifying] Black Bodies in Narrative .

We shall focus on character development and narrative structure through the formation and presence of textual and cinematic black bodies. Our discussions will focus on the identification of that which is not allowed to speak -- the prototypical foil (Caliban), the other (Man Friday), the black body (Jim). How are narratives (how are we) shaped by that which cannot be acknowledged?

LITR 1230X. The New Long Poem .

An energetic study of powerful, book-length poems recently published in English, including texts as core to 20th c. literature as Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo to books as archly exacting as John Ashbery's Flow Chart, as affably innovative as Lyn Hejinian's My Life, as ingeniously formal as Inger Christiansen's alphabet and as unruly as Frank Stanford's The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You. Also: Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, Evan S. Connell’s Notes Found in a Bottle on a Beach at Carmel, W.S. Merwin’s The Folding Cliffs, and the intra-genre Cecilia Vicuna’s Spit Temple.

LITR 1230Y. Structuring (and De-Structuring) Novels: Special Topics Literature Seminar .

How to structure a novel? This is a question most novelists approach with dread, because, a) all the good plots and structures have been used up; b) plots can feel annoying anyway, like a capitulation to cinema or theater; and c) nevertheless, it is impossible to write in total darkness. We’ll dispel this darkness by reading works by a range of novelists. How do these authors strike a balance between complex thought and elegant/unusual structure? And how can we, as writers, maintain narrative coherence over the course of hundreds of pages?

LITR 1230Z. Syncretic Gods .

Is it possible to kill a God? What happens within a generation to change the face of a God? To change the nature of a God itself? In this course we will research the various transformations of the myths of Yoruba deities as they too traverse middle passage in the suffocating holds of merchant ships. We will commit to the (subversive) task of imagining and re-imagining the myths of the Orishas. Using as a foundation the seventeen drawings in Cuban artist Alberto del Pozo’s Orichas series, we will cover the storied lives of these our immortal and syncretic Gods.

LITR 1231A. Time Mechanics: Poetry as Translation .

This seminar focuses on experimental translations and transcreations in the spirit of Spicer’s claim in After Lorca: “A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer.” Various approaches to leading a text across the time and space divide will be studied. If for Pound to “make new” is to look elsewhere, for Zukofsky it’s to listen closely. If Hawkey’s Ventrakl posits the poem’s decomposition over time, Bang gives us a current, self-obsolescing version of Dante’s hell. And while Hsia Yü’s poems stage the clash of analogue and digital transmission technologies, Brandon Brown offers contemporary readers Fleur du mal version 2.0.

LITR 1231B. The Enchantment of Re-Imagining .

The author, Sam Leith, likened the recent Jane Austen project (in which six authors are tasked with rewriting Jane Austen for a modern audience) to “writing fiction as literary criticism.” In this course, we are invited to think more speculatively about the role of re-imagination in literature and society by reading texts which do not only re-imagine the past by reframing history but which also re-imagine life and the present to offer us an alternate view. In some cases, these texts re-write existing classics. We will engage closely with the texts and relevant works of criticism.

LITR 1231C. Experimental Poets of Color .

In this course we'll read and critically engage with contemporary experimental poets of color writing in English in the US and Canada. Exploring the intersection of poetics, aesthetics, critical race (and mixed race) theory, and social justice activism in the arts, we will question the modernist and post-modernist assumptions that experimentation and innovation are exclusively the domain of whiteness. We will explore how racism, colonialism, and other contemporary systems of oppression condition responses to poets of color, and consider how poets of color respond to and engage with these systems both overtly and through their aesthetic experimentation.

LITR 1231D. Narrative Possession: spirits, shamans and the walking dead .

Narrative Possession offers a creative and critical investigation of the nature of possession as it manifests in film, fiction, and theory, exploring narrative depictions of possession across a wide range of international cultural practices including shamanism, voodoo, Spiritualism and séance. We will explore the theoretical and political ramifications of possession as it pertains to embodiment, sovereignty, private property and personal identity. Texts include works by Toni Morrison, Muriel Spark, Antoine Volodine, Zora Neal Hurston, Lafcadio Hearn, Ishmael Reed, Cesar Aira, kobo Abe, Derrida, Sartre, and De Certeau. Films include works by Cocteau, Camus, Tourneur, and Russell.

LITR 1231E. Rereading Writing .

We will study writing and, more generally, language art in terms of reading, both reexamining theories and practices of writing — in linguistics, the philosophy of language, and in the actual making of literature — and also by proposing that reading is constitutive of language regardless of its medium. What is reading, historically, theoretically, and in the digitally mediated future of culture? If reading brings language into being, then how should we read and what should we compose to be read? Readings from Saussure and Ong to Hayles, Derrida, and beyond. Optional critical-creative project.

LITR 1231F. Listening/Voicing .

“How you sound??” the poet Amiri Baraka once asked. This seminar is concerned with acts of communication as pertains to voicing and listening. How do poets sound out in the world, and to whom? We will explore notions of voice as more than a site of identity production, looking at, for example, the various fractures possible in Sappho’s “voice” and what is carried to us through history, while also considering forms of singular and collective sounding via a range of poets and writers. On the other side of voice, we’ll read into and experiment with acts of deep listening.

LITR 1231G. Traditions of Rupture: the Latin American Avant-Garde .

We will read and write creative responses to poetry and hybrid works by the generation of early 20th-century Latin American writers who shaped a distinct corpus owing as much to the European tradition as to the region’s postcolonial history and vernacular: Huidobro, Vallejo, Neruda, Borges, and Guillén, and the Brazilian Modernists. We will also study postwar innovators—Berenguer, di Giorgio, Paz, Pizarnik, Parra, and the Brazilian Concrete Poets—as well as contemporary writers’ contributions to the expansion of the field. Special focus will be devoted to translation matters, indigenous writing, and ecopoetics. Knowledge of Spanish and/or Portuguese is not necessary.

LITR 1231H. New York City 1965-2001 .

NYC's a city constantly in crisis. It's a city in protest, turning over its own history, its fatal oversights. A place where missteps made in the blink of an eye might mean death—or sliding into the dark groove between princes(ses) and peasants. We’re looking for NYC's story from 1965 to 2001. Why these years as bookends? Why this city made of boroughs held together by a sticky substance of uncertain origin we might call pride or ideology…? More importantly, what does it take to write historical fiction? To write about the places most important to us?

LITR 1231I. The Sacred & Profane: Dante, Milton, Rushdie .

We will explore a variety of sacred texts in the Abrahamic tradition to better understand the major works of four radical makers (in chronologic order): Dante Alighieri, John Milton, Charles Mingus, and Salman Rushdie. We will read supplementary texts by Durkheim, Eliade Mircea, Simone Weil, Carl Jung, and Edward Said.

LITR 1231J. Histories .

Historical figures like Herodotus, Hannibal, Billy the Kid and Calamity Jane have all served as energy nodes around which writers have built significant works of prose. In this seminar we will examine texts like Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants as part of an exploration of that prose which, if we can kick awake that poor overworked pearl, posits the historical as its grain of sand. Students can expect a substantial weekly reading load of primary and secondary source material and should come to each class prepared to discuss the assigned texts.

LITR 1231K. Innovations in Indian Literature .

Modern Indian literature developed in the shadow of colonialism and the birth of the nation state. Indian writers working in English and vernacular languages were forced to confront a sudden—and fragmented—modernity. What innovative narrative and literary strategies did they embrace in response to this historical and cultural pressure? Do these techniques have application beyond the Indian context? In general, how do cultural and political forces precipitate formal innovation?

LITR 1300. Independent Study in Reading, Research, and Writing About Literature .

Provides advanced students with an opportunity to pursue tutorial instruction oriented toward a literary research topic.

LITR 1310. Independent Study in Creative Writing .

Offers tutorial instruction oriented toward some significant work in progress by the student. Typically taken by honors or capstone candidates in the antepenultimate or penultimate semester. See instructor to seek permission during the semester before undertaking the course of study. One advanced-level workshop is prerequisite. S/NC.

LITR 1410A. Fiction Honors .

A workshop setting for the completion of theses by advanced writers of fiction. See general course description above for course entry procedures for all honors workshops. Instructor permission required. Enrollment limited to 12 senior Literary Arts concentrators. S/NC.

LITR 1410C. Playwriting Honors .

A workshop setting for the completion of theses or capstone projects by advanced writers of dramatic literature. See general course description above for course entry procedures for all honors/capstone workshops. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 1510. Honors Independent Study in Creative Writing .

Provides tutorial instruction for students completing their theses or capstone projects. Typically taken by honors or capstone candidates in their final semester. See instructor to seek permission during the semester before undertaking the course of study. S/NC.

LITR 2010A. Graduate Fiction .

Advanced practice of the art: a writing seminar, limited to graduate students in Literary Arts. Emphasis is placed on developing a better understanding of the creative process, strategies and forms. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 2010B. Graduate Poetry .

LITR 2010C. Graduate Playwriting .

LITR 2110A. Theatrical Styles on Stage and Page .

An investigation of theatrical forms and for collaborations among actors, directors and playwrights. This course is limited to participants in the MFA programs in acting, directing and playwriting. Instructor permission required. S/NC.

LITR 2110C. Reading, Writing and Thinking .

A course for graduate prose writers. We will explore various ways to engage with a work of art in order to fuel one¿s imagination and projects. Close textual reading of several books with writing assignments based on the readings. Writers will include Woolf, Stein, Beckett, Coetze, Kertesz and others. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 2110E. The Foreign Home: Interdisciplinary Arts .

Project-centered workshop for exploration beyond one's "home" genre, whether in video, poetry, fiction, music, performance or visual arts. Contemporary and art-historical interdisciplinary works will ground our investigation into the tension between expertise and "beginner's mind". Collaborative and individual work expected. Written permission required. S/NC.

LITR 2110F. Essays Without Borders .

A workshop for writing, performing, or media artists exploring essay or non-fiction forms in any genre. No project too strange, no essay too fanciful. Readings and research into experimental non-fiction. Individual and group work as well as critical and artistic projects. Literary Arts MFAs will be given priority. Come to first meeting for permission. Enrollment limited to 12. Permission required. S/NC.

LITR 2110G. Writing The Novel .

For advanced fiction writers who wish to work in long form. Through this course, participants will read a selection of novels and investigate the form; the primary emphasis will be placed on the work being undertaken by the members of the workshop itself. S/NC.

LITR 2110H. Embodying the Book .

What are the limits of the book? How far can it go? Alternatively, what is its essence? What is absolutely essential to it? This collaborative class brings writers together with RISD industrial designers and graphics artists to consider these questions and to create inventive book structures. Focus will be on collaboration itself, with texts addressing various aspects, such as the ethics of cooperation and group dynamics, as well as on the history and nature of the book as a cultural tool and force. Working in teams of three, students will invent their own structures and work together to embody them.

LITR 2110K. Deep Rivers, Lost Roads, Bent Symbols: Poets and Poetry Outside the Frame .

Geographically and/or aesthetically suspect, often shelved under the wrong rubric. Word-works by hermits and wanderers, sots and sot nots, whose language confirm, as Sister Rosetta Tharpe sang: Strange Things Happening Every Day. Including work by Besmilr Brigham, Wong May, Bernadette Mayer, Mary Reufle, Frank Stanford, David Fisher, a new translation of Beowulf (by an American! A Woman!), and others. There may also be music.

LITR 2110M. Challenging the Single Story: Reading Africa .

In recent years, there has been an explosion of new writing from Africa on the international scene, even as the single narrative of the continent persists. In this course, we will engage with fiction published in the last 15 years as well as critical texts and essays. Students will read fiction written in different genres. We will examine, among other things, how these writers negotiate their themes without compromising the integrity of their craft with a view to excelling in our own writing.

LITR 2110O. Dialogue, Monologue, & Dialect .

This hybrid workshop/seminar for graduate students will use works of fiction, cinema, theater, and narrative poetry as beginning points for experiments and discussions centered on a wide range of concepts and practices designed to widen how they hear and see the possibilities of voice and body language in their work. Special attention will be paid to regional and international, especially hybrid, forms of English.

LITR 2110P. World of Echoes: The Poet as Translator .

How is a poet’s translation different from other translations? What factors determine a poet’s choice to translate a specific author? For this seminar we will read innovative poetry recently translated by a diverse group of poets. Examples include Jennifer Scapettone’s rendering of Amelia Rosselli’s Locomotrix, Sawako Nakayasu’s translations of Chika Sagawa, and Daniel Borzutzky’s version of Raúl Zurita’s The Book of Planks. Besides the translated materials, we will consider their relationship to the translator/poets’ own works and the politics of cultural transmission. Students may engage in translation projects themselves or respond creatively to the materials, thereby also engaging in translation.

LITR 2210A. House Language .

We shall explore the house and its adjacent places and categories, with a focus upon narrative mannerism, terror and the grotesque, and the creation of literary form. We'll discuss stories, essays, household artifacts and etiquette, architectural plans and dangerous parlor games. Works by, among others: Georges Perec, H.G. Wells, Shirley Jackson, Isabella Beeton, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Frank Lloyd Wright, Rube Goldberg and Edith Wharton.

LITR 2230. Graduate Independent Study in Reading, Research, and Writing About Literature .

Provides graduate students with an opportunity to pursue tutorial instruction oriented toward a literary research topic.

LITR 2310. Graduate Independent Studies in Literary Writing .

Offers tutorial instruction oriented toward some significant work in progress by the graduate student. S/NC.

LITR 2402C. Reading the Large Language Models: Artificial Intelligence, Language, and Literary Art (HMAN 2402C). .

Interested students must register for HMAN 2402C

LITR 2410. Graduate Thesis Independent Study in Literary Writing .

Provides tutorial instruction for graduate students completing their graduate creative theses. Typically taken in the final semester. See instructor to seek permission during the semester before undertaking the course of study. S/NC.

LITR 2450. Exchange Scholar Program .

LITR 2600. Seminar in Teaching Creative Writing .

A course focused on how to design and lead a creative writing workshop. Reading, writing and laboratory workshop sessions. Designed for first-year Literary Arts graduate students. S/NC.

LITR 2700. Pedagogy Seminar .

The Pedagogy Seminar examines ideas about teaching in a literary arts/creative writing environment. The pros and cons of the “workshop”-style will be discussed alongside alternative models, and general topics of exploration will include: creative process pedagogy, writing-to-learn, multi-genre approaches, uses of readings/research, and general classroom management. Designing an inclusive classroom and syllabus as well as exploring generative and innovative practices will be covered as well. A special emphasis will be on preparing students to feel confident and to explore a range of creative process issues. Personal writing as well as syllabus design will be expected.

LITR 2710. Literary Arts Pedagogy in Practice .

The Pedagogy in Practice Seminar examines ideas about teaching in a literary arts/creative writing environment. The pros and cons of the “workshop”-style will be discussed alongside alternative models, and general topics of exploration will include: creative process pedagogy, writing-to-learn, multi-genre approaches, uses of readings/research, and general classroom management. This is a hands-on forum to provide guidance on how to build an inclusive, pedagogically effective meeting space. A special emphasis will be on preparing instructors to feel confident and explore a range of creative process issues. There will be opportunities to develop personal writing, especially in response to student work.

LITR 2780. Graduate Independent Study in Professional Development .

This half-credit course is for a Literary Arts graduate student not enrolled in a pedagogy seminar. Through this independent study, the graduate student will work with a faculty advisor to prepare for the post-MFA experience. This may include a focus on aspects of teaching, but may also focus on related professional pursuits, such as working in literary agency, publishing and professional writing.

Brown’s Department in Literary Arts provides a home for innovative writers of fiction, poetry, playwriting, screenwriting, literary translation, digital/cross-disciplonary and mixed media.  The concentration allows student writers to develop their skills in one or more genres while deepening their understanding of the craft of writing. Many courses in this concentration require a writing sample; students should consult a concentration advisor or the concentration website for strategies on getting into the appropriate course(s).

Candidates for the Bachelor of Arts degree with concentration in Literary Arts will be expected to complete the following course work:

1. At least four writing workshops from among the following series: LITR 0100A , LITR 0100B , LITR 0110A , LITR 0110B , LITR 0110D , LITR 0110E , LITR 011oH the various courses under LITR 0210, LITR 0310/0311, LITR 0610, LITR 1010, LITR 1110, LITR 1150/1151/1152 and LITR 1410 . At least two genres must be covered within the four workshops taken. An independent study in literary arts ( LITR 1310  and LITR 1510) may count toward the workshop requirement. Other writing-intensive courses may also count, at the discretion of the advisor.

2. Six elective reading and research in literary arts courses, which must include:

• a course in literary theory or the history of literary criticism
• a course that primarily covers readings and research in literary arts created before 1800
• a course that primarily covers readings and research in literary arts created before 1900
• a course that primarily covers readings and research in literary arts created after 1900

These courses, selected in consultation with a concentration advisor, may come from (but are not limited to) the following departments: Africana Studies, American Civilization, Classics, Comparative Literature, East Asian Studies, Egyptology, French Studies, German Studies, Hispanic Studies, Italian Studies, Judaic Studies, Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures in English, Middle East Studies, Modern Culture and Media, Music, Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Slavic Studies, South Asian Studies, Theatre, Speech and Dance, Visual Arts. With approval from the concentration advisor, courses covering pre-20th century time periods may be distributed in a variant manner, so long as they cover two distinct literary time periods that precede the 20th century

3. Among the ten required courses, at least four must be at the 1000-level or above. At least six classes (workshops and reading/research courses) that shall count toward the concentration must be taken at Brown through the Literary Arts Department; up to one of the six LITR courses may be a course taken in another department but cross-listed by Literary Arts. No more than two of the ten required courses for the concentration may also count toward fulfilling a second concentration.

4.  During the senior year, all students must take at least one course within the Literary Arts course offerings (courses with LITR designation by the Registrar, or courses approved by the concentration advisor).

Honors in Creative Writing: Course requirements are the same as those for the regular concentration (four workshops, six elective literature-reading courses), with the following changes and additions: honors candidates must include two 1000-level workshops or independent studies among their courses; and complete a thesis. Students in their seventh semester who are enrolled in or have completed at least one 1000-level workshop (or independent study) may submit honors applications to the Literary Arts Department from the first day of the fall semester to 25 September; and from 1 through 25 February in the spring. Interested students should obtain information from the office of the Literary Arts Department.

Honors in Literary Arts Production: Course requirements are the same as those for the regular concentration (four workshop, six literature-reading courses), with the following changes and additions: honors candidates must include two 1000-level workshops, production courses or related independent studies among their courses; and complete a production capstone project. Students in their seventh semester who are enrolled in or have completed at least one 1000-level workshop, production course or independent study, may submit honors applications to the Literary Arts Department from the first day of the fall semester to 25 September; and from 1 through 25 February in the spring. Interested students should obtain information form the Literary Arts Department.

The Graduate Program in Literary Arts offers a Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A) degree with courses in fiction, poetry and digital/cross-disciplinary practices. 

For more information on admission and program requirements, please visit the following website:

http://www.brown.edu/academics/gradschool/programs/literary-arts

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Researchers@Brown

Literary Arts

For over 40 years, Literary Arts at Brown University has been a creative and intellectual center for the U.S. literary avant-garde.  Along with a handful of other writing programs nationwide, Brown provides a home for innovative writers of fiction, poetry, electronic writing (hypertext) and mixed media.

Established in the mid-1960s by poet, translator and critic Edwin Honig, Literary Arts at Brown continues its tradition of hiring and retaining a faculty comprised of nationally and internationally known authors.  Each year, the program offers 60 – 70 classes, awards the M.F.A. degree to approximately 12 graduate student writers, and confers Honors on about 35 talented seniors who will have completed the undergraduate concentration in Literary Arts.

The online MFA application deadline is 15 December.  Applicants can expect admission decisions by 15 March.

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Affiliations

Faculty administrative positions.

Shenoda, Matthew Chair of Literary Arts

Faculty Positions

Cayley, John H Professor of Literary Arts

Channer, Colin C D Associate Professor of Literary Arts

Colella, Laura E Assistant Professor of the Practice of Literary Arts

Coover, Robert T.B. Stowell University Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts

Ebeid, Carolina Bonderman Assistant Professor of the Practice of Literary Arts

Field, Thalia L Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Creative Writing

Gander, Forrest Adele Kellenberg Seaver '49 Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing, Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts, and Professor Emeritus of Comparitive Literature

Hunt, Laird B Professor of Literary Arts

Ives, Lucy B Bonderman Professor of of the Practice of Literary Arts

Mahajan, Karan Associate Professor of Literary Arts

Mari, Francesca Assistant Professor of the Practice of Literary Arts

Maso, Carole Professor Emerita of Literary Arts

Nakayasu, Sawako Assistant Professor of Literary Arts

Nelson, Peter Gale Senior Lecturer in Literary Arts

Shenoda, Matthew Professor of Literary Arts

Sikelianos, Eleni A Professor of Literary Arts

Steinbach, Meredith Professor Emerita of Literary Arts

Swensen, Cole Professor Emerita of Literary Arts

Townsend, Jacinda Assistant Professor of Literary Arts

Wideman, John Edgar Asa Messer Professor Emeritus of Africana Studies and Literary Arts

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Creative Writing at Brown University

Go directly to any of the following sections:

• Available Degrees
• Student Demographics

Creative Writing Degrees Available at Brown

• Bachelor’s Degree in Creative Writing
• Master’s Degree in Creative Writing

Brown Creative Writing Rankings

In College Factual's most recent rankings for the best schools for creative writing majors , Brown came in at #7. This puts it in the top 5% of the country in this field of study. It is also ranked #1 in Rhode Island .

Popularity of Creative Writing at Brown

During the 2020-2021 academic year, Brown University handed out 34 bachelor's degrees in creative writing. This is a decrease of 36% over the previous year when 53 degrees were handed out.

In 2021, 1 students received their master’s degree in creative writing from Brown. This makes it the #207 most popular school for creative writing master’s degree candidates in the country.

Brown Creative Writing Students

Take a look at the following statistics related to the make-up of the creative writing majors at Brown University.

Brown Creative Writing Bachelor’s Program

Of the 34 creative writing students who graduated with a bachelor's degree in 2020-2021 from Brown, about 29% were men and 71% were women.

The following table and chart show the ethnic background for students who recently graduated from Brown University with a bachelor's in creative writing.

Brown Creative Writing Master’s Program

All of the 1 students who graduated with a Master’s in creative writing from Brown in 2021 were men.

The majority of the master's degree graduates for this major are black or African Americans. About 100% of grads fell into this category.

The following table and chart show the ethnic background for students who recently graduated from Brown University with a master's in creative writing.

• National Center for Education Statistics
• O*NET Online
• Image Credit: By Ad Meskens under License

More about our data sources and methodologies .

Popular Reports

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Undergraduate Admission

Supplementary materials.

Applicants are neither required nor expected to provide additional materials as part of the admission process, but the opportunity to do so is available to any candidate.

• First-Year Applicants

Music or Visual Art Submissions

If you are accomplished in music or visual art, you may include additional supplements with your application in the Common Application through SlideRoom . You do not need to wait for access to your Brown Applicant Portal to upload music or visual art materials to SlideRoom.

When submitting through SlideRoom, you must create your SlideRoom account and submit your material on or before November 2 for QuestBridge Match applicants, November 2 for Early Decision and January 4 for Regular Decision. All QuestBridge-affiliated applicants submitting a music and/or visual arts portfolio(s) should use the QuestBridge program(s) in SlideRoom; this includes QuestBridge College Match finalists who did not match with a college in the fall but are using the Questbridge Application to apply through Brown's Regular Decision process. 

We cannot assist students with issues submitting their supplements unless they have created an account in SlideRoom and started their portfolio by November 2 (QuestBridge Match applicants), November 2 (for Early Decision) or January 4 (for Regular Decision applicants). Creating a SlideRoom account and starting your portfolio well before submitting your material is strongly recommended to ensure that you are able to meet the submission requirements.

Music Submission Details Visual Art Submission Details

Academic Paper/Research Abstract

If you have completed an advanced academic paper or significant research project that you want to include as part of your application, you may upload that document or an abstract to your Brown Applicant Portal under the category of Academic Paper/Research. Please include a brief note to provide us with context for your submission, for example: approximate date(s) you were involved, whether you worked on this independently or as part of a team, what external recognition you may have received and anything else you want us to know. 

Dance, Theatre Arts and Performance Studies

While many Brown students are accomplished in the performing arts and pursue dance and theater in and out of the classroom, auditions and portfolios are neither required nor reviewed for students interested in Dance and Theatre Arts and Performance Studies.

All Other Supplementary Materials

We prefer that you upload all other supplementary materials to your file after you receive access to your Brown Applicant Portal.

We recommend that you do not send a collection of award certificates or similar materials.

If you have a YouTube video you'd like to share, or maintain an online presence that showcases your background, talents or creativity, please include that link in the Brown University Questions (Activities) section of the Common Application.

One optional letter of recommendation may be requested and submitted through the Common Application. Any additional supplementary recommendations should be sent directly by your recommender, either as a PDF emailed to [email protected]  or by fax to 401-863-9300. Be sure to ask your recommender to include your full name, date of birth and high school in their letter so that we can match the letter to your application.

What are your chances of acceptance?

Calculate for all schools, your chance of acceptance.

Your chancing factors

Extracurriculars.

List of All U.S. Colleges with a Creative Writing Major

Writing has been my passion practically since I learned to read in kindergarten. I would write stories about princesses and my family dog, Gansett. When it came time to look at colleges, I was set on attending one with a strong creative writing program. Ultimately, I graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a B.A. in Writing Seminars.

Today, colleges across the country offer creative writing as a major. Because writing skills are essential for a wide range of careers, and because most curricula emphasize broad liberal arts competencies, a degree in creative writing can set you up for success in numerous fields, whether you want to be an editor or a lawyer.

Interested in majoring in creative writing? Learn which schools offer the major and what to look for in a program.

Overview of the Creative Writing Major

Creative writing is about more than spinning tales. For your major, you’ll generally need to pursue a curriculum grounded in literature, history, foreign language, and other humanities courses, along with distribution courses, if the college requires them.

Most creative writing majors must participate in workshops, in which students present their work and listen to peer critiques, usually with a certain number of advanced courses in the mix. In some cases, colleges will ask you to specialize in a particular genre, such as fiction, poetry, or playwriting. 

To succeed in creative writing, you’ll need to have a tough spine, in order to open yourself up to feedback from your classmates and instructors. You may need to give readings in public — if not as an undergraduate, certainly during your career. Of course, a passion for creating is essential, too, as is a willingness to revise your work and learn from the greats and your peers.

A creative writing major opens up doors to many careers, including journalism, content marketing, copywriting, teaching, and others. Even careers that don’t center around writing often have a strong writing component: you’ll need to write reports, deliver presentations, and so on.

Some writers go on to earn an MFA, which will help you hone your craft. It’s also often a prerequisite for teaching creative writing at the college level.

What to Look for in a College as a Creative Writing Major

Published authors on faculty.

Many world-renowned authors have another claim to fame: professorships. Writers who have taught their craft include (among many others):

• Maya Angelou (Wake Forest University)
• Colson Whitehead (many colleges, including Vassar College and Columbia University)
• Stephen Dixon (Johns Hopkins University)
• Viet Thanh Nguyen (University of Southern California)
• Eula Biss (Northwestern University)
• Toni Morrison (Princeton University)

Be aware that as an undergraduate, you may not be able to learn from the greats. That’s why it’s important to look into which courses these faculty teach before you have dreams of being mentored by Salman Rushdie — who is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU.

Genres Offered

While many schools that have creative writing majors offer fiction and poetry courses and tracks, there are some niche genres that could be more difficult to find. If you’re interested in playwriting, for example, you won’t find that at every school. Before you decide on a program, be sure it includes the genres you’d like to explore further, whether that’s flash fiction, creative nonfiction, or something else.

Workshopping Opportunities

The core of most quality creative writing curriculum is workshopping. This means sharing your work in your classes and listening to your peers discuss and critique it. While this may sound intimidating, it can do a lot to help you hone your work and become a better writer. Look for colleges that make this the bedrock of their curriculum.

Showcasing Opportunities

Are there opportunities to present your work, such as college-sponsored readings where undergraduates can participate? Or, perhaps the school has a great literary journal. At my school, students could submit their plays and have them performed by fellow students. 

List of All U.S. Colleges With a Creative Writing Major

What are your chances of acceptance.

No matter what major you’re considering, the first step is ensuring you’re academically comparable to students who were previously accepted to the college or university. Most selective schools use the Academic Index to filter out applicants who aren’t up to their standards.

You’ll also want to demonstrate your fit with the school and specific major with the qualitative components of your application, like your extracurriculars and essays. For a prospective creative writing major, the essay is particularly important because this is a way to demonstrate your writing prowess. Activities might include editing your school’s newspaper or literary journal, publishing your work, and participating in pre-college writing workshops.

Want to know your chances of being accepted to top creative writing schools? Try our Chancing Engine (it’s free). Unlike other calculators, it takes your individual profile into account, including academic stats and qualitative components like your activities. Give it a try and get a jumpstart on your journey as a creative writing major!

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College Info

Finding a dedicated creative writing program at a school you're excited about can be a real challenge, and that's even before you start worrying about getting in. Nonetheless, there are some great options. In order to help you find the best school for you, this list rounds up some of the best colleges for creative writing in the United States .

The Best Creative Writing Programs: Ranking Criteria

You should never take college rankings as absolute truth —not even the very official-seeming US News ones. Instead, use these kinds of lists as a jumping-off place for your own exploration of colleges. Pay attention not just to what the rankings are but to how the rankings are determined.

To help with that, I'll explain how I came up with this highly unscientific list of great creative writing colleges. I started by narrowing my search down to schools that offered a specific creative writing major. (If you don't see a school you were expecting, it's likely because they only have a minor.)

In ranking the schools, I considered five major criteria:

• #1: MFA Ranking —If a school has a great graduate creative writing program, it means you'll be taught by those same professors and the excellent graduate students they attract. Schools with strong MFA programs are also more likely to have solid alumni networks and internship opportunities. However, many schools with great undergrad programs do not offer MFAs, in which case I simply focused on the other four options.
• #2: General School Reputation —The vast majority of your classes won't be in creative writing, so it's important that other parts of the school, especially the English department, are great as well.
• #3: Extracurricular Opportunities —One of the key advantages of majoring in creative writing is that it can provide access to writing opportunities outside the classroom, so I took what kind of internship programs, author readings, and literary magazines the school offers into consideration.
• #4: Diversity of Class Options —I gave extra points to schools with a variety of genre options and specific, interesting classes.
• #5: Alumni/Prestige —This last criterion is a bit more subjective: is the school known for turning out good writers? Certainly it's less important than what kind of education you'll actually get, but having a brand-name degree (so to speak) can be helpful.

The Best Creative Writing Schools

Now, let's get to the good stuff: the list of schools! The exact numbering is always arguable, so look at it as a general trend from absolutely amazing to still super great, rather than fixating on why one school is ranked #3 and another is ranked #4.

#1: Northwestern University

Northwestern's undergrad creative writing program boasts acclaimed professors and an unparalleled track record of turning out successful writers (including Divergent author Veronica Roth and short-story writer Karen Russell).

Outside the classroom, you can work on the student-run literary journal, intern at a publication in nearby Chicago, or submit to the Department of English's yearly writing competition . The university is also home to a top journalism program , so if you want to try your hand at nonfiction as well, you'll have plenty of opportunities to do so.

#2: Columbia University

Like Northwestern, Columbia is home to both a world-class creative writing program and a top journalism school (plus one of the best English departments in the country), so you have a wide range of writing-related course options. Columbia also benefits from its location in New York City, which is bursting at the seams with publishing houses, literary journals, and talented authors.

#3: University of Iowa

The University of Iowa's big draw is the infrastructure of its graduate Writers' Workshop, which is often considered the best MFA program in the country.

As an English and Creative Writing major here, you'll take classes from great young writers and established professors alike, and get to choose from a wide range of topics. This major provides transferable skills important for a liberal arts major with a creative focus. You'll also have access to the university's impressive literary community, including frequent readings, writing prizes and scholarships, and the acclaimed literary journal The Iowa Review .

#4: Emory University

Emory is renowned for its dedicated undergrad creative writing program , which draws the very best visiting scholars and writers. Students here have the chance to attend intimate question-and-answer sessions with award-winning authors, study a range of genres, compete for writing awards and scholarships, and work closely with an adviser to complete an honors project.

#5: Oberlin College

A small liberal arts school in Ohio, Oberlin offers very different advantages than the schools above do. You'll have fewer opportunities to pursue writing in the surrounding city, but the quality of the teachers and the range of courses might make up for that. Moreover, it boasts just as impressive alumni, including actress and writer Lena Dunham.

#6: Hamilton College

Hamilton is another small college, located in upstate New York. It's known for giving students the freedom to pursue their interests and the support to help them explore topics in real depth, both inside and outside the classroom. Hamilton's creative writing program takes full advantage with small classes and lots of opportunities to intern and publish; it also has one of the best writing centers in the country.

#7: Brown University

Brown's Literary Arts program offers one of the top MFAs in the US as well as an undergraduate major . For the major, you must take four creative writing workshops and six reading-intensive courses, which span an array of departments and topics, from music and literature to Middle East studies and Egyptology.

#8: Washington University in St. Louis

Washington University has an excellent creative writing MFA program, lots of super specific class options, and a number of scholarships specifically earmarked for creative writing students. This school’s undergraduate English program also offers a concentration in creative writing that allows students to specialize in a specific genre: poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction. If you’re interested in exploring your potential in a specific writing genre, Washington University could be a great pick for you.

#9: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MIT might not be a school you generally associate with writing, but it actually has an excellent program that offers courses in digital media and science writing, as well as creative writing, and provides plenty of guidance on how graduates can navigate the tricky job market.

Not to mention the school is located in Cambridge, a haven for book lovers and writers of all kinds. Though it probably isn’t a good fit for students who hate science, MIT is a great place for aspiring writers who want to build writing skills that are marketable in a wide range of industries.

#10: University of Michigan

University of Michigan is one of the best state universities in the country and has a top-notch MFA program. This school’s undergrad creative writing sub-concentration requires students to submit applications for admittance to advanced creative writing courses. These applications give students crucial practice in both building a writing portfolio and articulating their interest in creative writing to an audience who will evaluate their work. If you're looking to attend a big school with a great creative writing major, this is a fantastic choice.

#11: Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins is another school that's known more for engineering than it is for writing, but, like MIT, it has a dedicated writing program. As a major here, you must take not only courses in prose, poetry, and literature, but also classes on topics such as philosophy and history.

#12: Colorado College

Colorado College is a small liberal arts school known for its block plan , which allows students to focus on one class per three-and-a-half-week block. The creative writing track of the English major includes a sequence of four writing workshops and also requires students to attend every reading of the Visiting Writers Series.

Bonus School: New York University

I didn't include NYU in the main list because it doesn't have a dedicated creative writing major, but it's a great school for aspiring writers nonetheless, offering one of the most impressive creative writing faculties in the country and all the benefits of a Manhattan location.

How To Pick the Best Creative Writing School for You

Just because Northwestern is a great school for creative writing doesn't mean you should set your heart on going there. (The football fans are completely terrifying, for one thing.) So where should you go then?

Here are some questions to ask yourself when looking at creative writing programs to help you determine the best school for you:

Does It Have Courses You're Interested In?

Look at the course offerings and see whether they interest you. While you can't predict exactly what classes you'll love, you want to avoid a mismatch where what you want to study and what the program offers are completely different. For example, if you want to write sonnets but the school focuses more on teaching fiction, it probably won't be a great fit for you.

Also, don't forget to look at the English courses and creative writing workshops! In most programs, you'll be taking a lot of these, too.

What Opportunities Are There To Pursue Writing Outside of Class?

I touched on this idea in the criteria section, but it's important enough that I want to reiterate it here. Some of the best writing experience you can get is found outside the classroom, so see what kind of writing-related extracurriculars a school has before committing to it.

Great options include getting involved with the campus newspaper, working on the school's literary journal, or interning at the university press.

Who Will Be Teaching You?

Who are the professors? What kind of work have they published? Check teacher ratings on Rate My Professors (but make sure to read the actual reviews—and always take them with a grain of salt).

If you're looking at a big school, there's a good chance that a lot of your teachers will be graduate students. But that's not necessarily a bad thing: a lot of the best teachers I had in college were graduate students. Just take into consideration what kind of graduate program the school has. If there's a great creative writing MFA program, then the graduate students are likely to be better writers and more engaged teachers.

What Are the Alumni Doing Now?

If you have a sense of what you want to do after you graduate, see if any alumni of the program are pursuing that type of career. The stronger the alumni network is, the more connections you'll have when it comes time to get a job.

What About the Rest of the School?

Don't pick a school for which you like the creative writing program but dread everything else about it. Most of your time will be spent doing other things, whether hanging out in the dorms, exploring off campus, or fulfilling general education requirements.

Many schools require you to apply to the creative writing major, so make doubly sure you'll be happy with your choice even if you aren't accepted to the program.

What's Next?

Are you sure a creative writing major is the right fit for you? Read our post on the pros and cons of the major to help you decide what path to take in college.

For more general advice about choosing a college, check out our complete guide to finding the right school for you. Some major factors to consider include deciding whether you're interested in a small college or a big university , an in-state or out-of-state institution , and a public or private school .

Alex is an experienced tutor and writer. Over the past five years, she has worked with almost a hundred students and written about pop culture for a wide range of publications. She graduated with honors from University of Chicago, receiving a BA in English and Anthropology, and then went on to earn an MA at NYU in Cultural Reporting and Criticism. In high school, she was a National Merit Scholar, took 12 AP tests and scored 99 percentile scores on the SAT and ACT.

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Literary Arts

Graduate students in Brown's Literary Arts MFA program may choose to focus in one of three tracks – Fiction, Poetry, or Digital/Cross Disciplinary Writing. The Graduate School has notified candidates regarding admission decisions for Fall 2024 in all three tracks: Cross-Disciplinary, Fiction and Poetry.

The two-year program is structured to allow graduate student writers maximum possible time for creative and intellectual exploration. Students attend two courses each semester: the writing workshop and an elective in the first three semesters (with an additional half-course in pedagogy in semesters two and three); and in the final semester an independent study for completing the thesis as well as an elective.

Elective courses may be selected from among the full offerings of the Brown University curriculum. In years past, students have taken courses in literature, history, philosophy, theater and performance studies, modern culture and media, religious studies, and foreign languages. Studio fine arts courses and translation workshops are often appropriate choices – as are workshops offered on special topics or in other genres. 

The thesis may be a substantial work of fiction or poetry, or a substantial digital or cross-disciplinary project. It is intended to represent the student’s achievement during the two years in residency at Brown.

Application deadline

Applications  may be submitted from 30 September to 11:59 pm ET on 15 December 2023. If seeking a fee waiver , the deadline is 1 December.

Learn More About the Program

Graduate program handbook, learn about applying, financial information.

Major code BA5232

College of Arts and Sciences   English Department   Ellis 201 Athens, OH 45701 Fax: 740.593.2832 [email protected] www.ohio.edu/cas/english/

Dr. Carey Snyder , contact person [email protected]

Program Overview

In the English – Creative Writing major, you will engage with genres of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from the inside out, by generating and revising your own work as well as exploring closely how published work uses the techniques of craft. All creative writing students participate in workshops led by nationally recognized writers which focus on understanding and constructing different literary forms; to achieve these goals, workshops emphasize the study of texts by established writers as well as students’ experimentation with their own creative process. The major is also flexible enough to match your own interests and goals: you can fulfill up to 12 of the required hours in the major with courses focusing on literature, rhetoric, or literary theory, or by combining these with apprenticeship or internship experiences. To ensure a solid foundation in the skills and knowledge that employers and graduate schools expect from any English graduate, the English – Creative Writing major includes the English Core in analysis, research, and literary history. 

Admissions Information

Freshman/first-year admission.

Enrollment in an English major entails no requirements beyond University admission requirements.

Change of Program Policy

For students currently enrolled at Ohio University, transferring into an English major requires a 2.0 GPA. Students choosing to transfer into the English  – Creative Writing major should contact the director of undergraduate studies in the English department for assistance. Students who wish to add an English major in addition to another major program should seek assistance from the director of undergraduate studies; students with a second major outside the College of Arts and Sciences will be responsible for meeting the degree requirements of both the English – Creative Writing major and the College of Arts and Sciences.

External Transfer Admission

For students currently enrolled at institutions other than Ohio University, transferring into an English major entails no requirements beyond University admission requirements. Students should contact the director of undergraduate studies in the English Department for assistance.

Opportunities Upon Graduation

After a curriculum that emphasizes critical thinking and analytical reading as well as multiple genres of writing, English – Creative Writing students enjoy the same wide variety of opportunity upon graduation that other English majors have. Many of our graduates go on to graduate programs, not only M.A. or M.F.A. programs in Creative Writing but also programs in Information Science or Education. Others work in publishing, web content development, grant-writing and community organizing, advertising, or other creative industries. Having invested in developing their own creativity as well as in the well-rounded education that this degree requires, English – Creative Writing students can face the unexpected challenges of the 21 st -century job market with confidence.

Potential employers for those who hold a degree in Creative Writing include, but are certainly not limited to, newspaper and magazine organizations, the entertainment industry, government agencies, institutions of higher education, public and private K-12 schools, publishing companies, marketing agencies, non-profit organizations, businesses, etc.

Browse through dozens of internship opportunities and full-time job postings for Ohio University students and alumni on Handshake , OHIO’s key resource for researching jobs, employers, workshops, and professional development events.

Requirements

Universitywide graduation requirements.

Ohio University requires the completion of a minimum of 120 semester hours for the conferral of a bachelor’s degree. This program can be completed within that 120-hour requirement. For more information on the minimum hours requirement and other universitywide requirements, please review the  Graduation Requirements – Universitywide    page.

Liberal Arts and Sciences Distribution Requirement

View the College and Liberal Arts and Sciences Distribution Requirements   .

English Hours Requirement

For a B.A. degree with a major in English - Creative Writing , a student must complete a total of 42 semester credit hours in ENG coursework.

Intercultural Foundations

Complete the following course:

• ENG 1100 - Crossing Cultures with Text Credit Hours: 3

Literary Reading

Complete one of the following courses:

• ENG 2010 - Introduction to Prose Fiction and Nonfiction Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 2020 - Introduction to Poetry and Drama Credit Hours: 3

British or American Literature I

• ENG 2510 - British Literature I Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 2530 - American Literature I Credit Hours: 3

British or American Literature II

• ENG 2520 - British Literature II Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 2540 - American Literature II Credit Hours: 3

Intercultural Breadth

Complete one course from the following:

• ENG 3240 - Jewish American Literature Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 3250 - Women’s Literature Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 3260 - Queer Literature Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 3270 - Queer Rhetorics and Writing Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 3370 - Black Literature to 1930 Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 3380 - Ethnic American Literature Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 3390 - Black Literature from 1930 to the Present Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 3450 - Intercultural Adaptations: Answering the Anglo-American Literary Canon Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 3550 - Global Literature Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 3850 - Writing About Culture and Society Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 4660 - International Authors Credit Hours: 3

Writing and Research

• ENG 3070J - Writing and Research in English Studies Credit Hours: 3

Senior Seminar

• ENG 4600 - Topics in English Studies Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 4640 - British Authors Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 4650 - American Authors Credit Hours: 3

Creative Writing Workshops

Complete three of the following workshops with at least one intermediate or advanced workshop:

• ENG 3610 - Creative Writing: Fiction Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 3620 - Creative Writing: Poetry Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 3630 - Creative Writing: Nonfiction Credit Hours: 3

Intermediate:

• ENG 3950 - Creative Writing Workshop: Nonfiction II Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 3960 - Creative Writing Workshop: Fiction II Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 3970 - Intermediate Creative Writing Workshop: Poetry Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 4860 - Advanced Workshop in Fiction Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 4870 - Advanced Workshop in Poetry Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 4880 - Advanced Workshop in Nonfiction Credit Hours: 3

Creative Writing Form and Theory

• ENG 4810 - Form and Theory of Literary Genres: Fiction Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 4820 - Form and Theory of Literary Genres: Poetry Credit Hours: 3
• ENG 4830 - Form and Theory of Literary Genres: Nonfiction Credit Hours: 3

Major Electives

Complete three additional ENG courses for at least nine hours excluding ENG 2800   , ENG 3***J, ENG 4510   , ENG 4520   , ENG 4911   , and ENG 4912   . Six hours may be at the 2000-level or higher; three hours must be at the 3000-level or higher.

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Creative Writing Graduate Programs

About the Program and Placement Record

• Faculty Research Areas
• Teaching Assistantships

Creative Writing M.A.

• Admission Requirements
• Degree and Graduation Requirements
• Master's Essay
• Master's Thesis

Creative Writing Ph.D.

• Doctoral Dissertation
• Foreign Language Requirement
• Ph.D. Comprehensive Examination

One of the first universities in the country to offer a Ph.D. in Creative Writing, Ohio University continues as home to a thriving, widely respected graduate program with concentrations in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction.

Small by design, our graduate program offers a comprehensive curriculum, an award-winning faculty and the intimacy of small classes.

Placement Record

Over the past three years, seven of our nine graduating creative writing Ph.D. students have landed tenure-track jobs, post-doctorates, or prestigious visiting writer posts. Our MA graduates go on to study in the top MFA and Ph.D. programs.

• English M.A. Placements
• English Ph.D. Placements

Students in the Creative Writing M.A. and Ph.D. programs enjoy:

• Graduate stipends, up to $15,000 per year, with opportunities to teach a wide range of courses, including creative writing workshops
• Generous graduate student travel funding
• Editorial fellowships on New Ohio Review , Quarter after Eight , and Brevity
• Opportunities to interact with distinguished visiting writers

M.A. candidates complete two years of study and write a thesis of creative work in their genre. Doctoral candidates complete five years of study, comprehensive exams, a major critical essay, and a creative dissertation.

Literary Journals

The department and its students publish three literary journals:

• New Ohio Review , a national literary journal
• Quarter After Eight , a prose journal edited by graduate students
• Sphere , an undergraduate journal

Annual Events

The department hosts several annual events including an ambitious Spring Literary Festival that brings five nationally distinguished writers to campus for three-days of readings, craft talks, and student discussion. Recent visitors have included Tony Hoagland, Kathryn Harrison, Barry Lopez, Francine Prose, Peter Ho Davies, Kim Addonizio, David Shields, Robert Hass, Charles Simic, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Marilynne Robinson.

Visiting writers engage with our program year-round as well, appearing in both undergraduate and graduate classes, meeting one-on-one with select students, and offering evening readings in the intimate Galbreath Chapel.

In addition to a regular Dogwood Bloom reading series for our graduate students, the creative writing program hosts an annual Writers' Harvest benefit reading for the Southeastern Ohio Food Bank?s Second Harvest, a food distribution program serving Athens, Hocking, Perry, Vinton, Jackson, Gallia, Meigs, Morgan and Washington counties.

2024 Faculty and Student Awards

May 15, 2024 English

Congratulations to English faculty and students on their awards and accomplishments!

Faculty awards & fellowships.

Long Faculty Fellowship: Gerard Passannante

Professor Gerard Passannante has been selected as the AY24-25 Long Faculty Fellow. Passannante will use the time afforded by the Long Faculty Fellowship to develop a course that puts imagined museums into dialogue with real institutions, as students consider the museum as a critical performance space, a site of political and social resistance, and a site of cultural imperialism and theft. The class centers experiential learning, which will entail visits to area collections and archives, and conversations with the people who work there, including curators and directors at the Phillips collection, the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. The course will also introduce students to guests like the author Chloe Aridjis and filmmaker Jem Cohen.

Faculty Service Award: Karen Nelson

Director of the Center for Literary and Comparative Studies Karen Nelson received the Faculty Service Award. The Faculty Service Award seeks to recognize a member of the Department of English faculty who is particularly dedicated to service to the department, leadership, and support of graduate students.

"Karen Nelson is a wonderful member of the our literary community who is tirelessly dedicated to service. She goes above and beyond in her mentorship of graduate students, organizing of departmental events and community, and more. She is instrumental in supporting faculty of all stages in learning about funding and other opportunities."

"Her devotion to the students of the department alongside her willingness to be honest about the state of our world and the attentive detail she pays to everyone and everything makes her deserving of this award year after year."

Kandice Chuh Mentorship Award: David Simon

Professor David Simon received the Kandice Chuh Mentorship Award. Named for former UMD English Professor Kandice Chuh, the Mentorship Award seeks to honor a faculty member for their fostering of community, intellectual generosity, support and commitment to graduate students and their causes.

"David is the embodiment of intellectual generosity. His feedback on graduate papers is evidence of that. He is thoughtful, engages openly with ideas, asks questions and makes suggestions for how you can improve your analysis. His openness spreads to the classroom and individual mentorship meetings. David is dedicated to helping students build generative thoughts, ideas and writing."

"David Simon is a thoughtful and supportive mentor to all graduate students who meet him. He does what many won’t: he thinks with you. As a result of our conversations and feedback on writing, my dissertation is so much stronger and exciting. And maybe most importantly—I enjoy the work more! He is a treasure of the English department!"

Professional Track Faculty Teaching Awards: Aysha Jawed, Alan Montroso and Daune O'Brien

Lecturer Aysha Jawed, Lecturer Alan Montroso and Senior Lecturer Daune O'Brien received the 2024 Teaching Excellence Award, with an honorable mention to Lecturer Liam Daley.

Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award: Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Professor Lillian-Yvonne Bertram has received a 2024 Grants to Artists award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. The $45,000 awards are unrestricted, and “intended to provide recipients with the financial means to engage in whatever artistic endeavors they wish to pursue.”

Dumbarton Oaks Fellowship: Vessela Valiavitcharska

Professor Vessela Valiavitcharska has received a Dumbarton Oaks Fellowship in Byzantine Studies for 2024–25.

Teaching Innovation Grant: Marisa Parham

Professor Marisa Parham was awarded a TLTC grant for NarraSpace. $400k will support innovation in digital storytelling and interactive scholarship, with a focus on investigating ways to center BIPOC, queer and transnational perspective through experimental and emergent technologies.

Graduate Student Awards & Highlights

Da Som Lee and Dylan Lewis won the James A. Robinson Awards for outstanding graduate student teaching of undergraduate courses. Lee also received the Mary Savage Snouffer Dissertation Fellowship.

Diana Proenza and Annemarie Mott Ewing won the Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award. Proenza also won the English Summer Archival Research Award.

Aaron Bartlett received honorable mention for the Sally Mitchell Prize for North American Victorian Studies Association Best Graduate Student Paper.

Fernando Duran received the Wylie Dissertation Fellowship.

Dalton Greene received the Kwiatek Fellowship.

Charlie Mitchell won the Kinnaird Award (M.A.) and Declan Langton won the Kinnaird Award (Ph.D.)

Jeannette Schollaert won the Carl Bode Dissertation Prize.

Job Placements

Frederick O’Neal Cherry Ph.D. '24 is assistant professor of African American literature at Auburn University.

Alexis Walston Ph.D. '24 is assistant professor of English at Belmont University.

Creative Writing Accomplishments

Current students.

Kimberly O'Connor MFA ’09, judge of the Academy of American Poets Poetry Prize, has chosen “Manic Pixie Dream Sestina” by January Santoso, a first-year MFA student.

Mary Lynn Reed MFA ’13, judge of the Katherine Anne Porter Fiction Prize, has chosen “In the Shape of a Man Whose Feet Face Backwards” by Subraj Singh, a third-year MFA student. Singh's “All That Hunger, All That Thirst” was published in Agni 98. “Ship Sister” was published in the New England Review. Singh is a finalist for the 2024 Chautauqua Janus Prize and was also admitted into the Ph.D. Program in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Preet Bhela’s poem "Hollows" received an honorable mention in the 2024 Pratt Library Poetry Contest, and will be published in the Little Patuxent Review this summer. Preet will also be reading at the Pratt Library on August 20 along with the two other honorees.

Eliamani Ismail has new publications with Puerto Del Sol, Brittle Paper, and Hooligan Magazine. Ismail was also invited to be a featured reader at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, Utah, and was a BIPOC scholar at this year’s Washington Writers Conference. Eliamani also became a fiction editor at Lampblack Magazine.

Olivia McClure published a poem in Atticus Review.

Tega Oghenechovwen’s "We Can Start This Story” was published in the Kenyon Review.

Annie Przypyszny’s poetry was published in Broad River Review, Atticus Review, the Institutionalized Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, SPANK the CARP, Barnstorm Journal, Cola Literary Review and the Madison Review.

Ava Serra's “Methodology: Inner Child Mercy Massacre” was included in Under Her Eye. “Internal Ultrasound on a PMDD Patient;” “Baby Diner Blood Rent;” “a coward pretends he’s bambi” and “This is Not a Conversation About My Body” was published in Jelly Bucket. “This is Not a Conversation About My Body” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. “Sarah” was published in Salt Hill.

Elizabeth Bryant, Corinne Brinkley and Tega Oghenechovwen have been named 2024 Kimbilio Fellows and will attend The Kimbilio Retreat on the Taos, New Mexico campus of Southern Methodist University in the Carson National Forest this summer. Bryant also received a full scholarship to the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at UMass Amherst and a Douglass Center grant for summer funding.

Tega Oghenechovwen was accepted for the 2024 Tin House Summer Workshop at Reed College.

Emily Banks MFA ’15 has been hired as a tenure-track assistant professor of English and creative writing at Franklin College, where she previously was a visiting assistant professor.

Derek Ellis MFA ’19 completed his first year in the Ph.D. program in creative writing at SUNY Binghamton University.

Book Publications

“Family Lore” by Elizabeth Acevedo MFA ’15, published in August 2023 by Ecco, was a Good Morning America Book Club pick; winner of the NAACP Image Award in Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction and shortlisted for The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.

“Green Island” by Liz Countryman MFA ’06 is forthcoming in June 2024 from Tupelo Press.

“Velvet” by William Fargason MFA ’14 was published in May 2024 by Northwestern University Press.

“City of Laughter” by Temim Fruchter ’02, MFA ’19 was published in January 2024 by Grove Atlantic.

“The Bomb Cloud” by Tyler Mills MFA ’08 was published in March 2024 by Unbound Edition Press.

“Bitter Water Opera” by Nicolette Polek MFA ’19 was published in April 2024 by Graywolf Press and was a New Yorker Best Book of 2024.

Undergraduate Student Awards

The Henrietta Spiegel Creative Writing Award

Each year, we honor outstanding creative writing minors with the Henrietta Spiegel Creative Writing Award. Henrietta Spiegel was the widow of a UMD faculty member. After her husband’s death, she completed her B.A. in English in 1989 at the age of 85 with a GPA of 3.9. Upon the completion of her degree, she established this award to honor undergraduate work in creative writing judged by the creative writing faculty to be the most outstanding. This year’s Henrietta Spiegel Creative Writing Award for Fiction goes to Allison Faith Choi and the award for Poetry goes to Caleigh Marie Larkin.

The Sandy Mack Award for the Outstanding English Honors Thesis

English Honors is a selective program within the English major, one in which students take intensive writing and research seminars, and develop a lengthy critical thesis or creative workover the course of three semesters. An award is given each year to the student with the most outstanding overall record in English Honors. This award is named for Sandy Mack, the faculty member who developed the English Honors Program and guided it for a decade. This award goes to Bossman Kwaku Owusu-Ayim for “I. The Old Genesis & II. His Grateful Children,” directed by Rion Scott and Emily Mitchell.

The Joseph W. Houppert Memorial Prize

The Joseph W. Houppert Prize was named for Joseph Houppert, a scholar of the English Renaissance and a distinguished member of this department from 1963 until his death in 1979. Professor Houppert was always very concerned with the teaching of undergraduate students and particularly for the teaching of good writing. Consequently, his colleagues established this competition in his memory, with a prize to be awarded annually to the undergraduate who has written the best essay on Shakespeare during the academic year. The Houppert Prize was awarded to Ariel Marie Hammerash for her essay entitled “Apparitions and Agency: The Staging of the Banquet Scene in The Tragedy of Macbeth.”

Sara Ann Soper English Undergraduate Service Award

The Sara Ann Soper English Undergraduate Service Award was established by Shannon Altman, who graduated in 1999 with a double degree in English and Education. While she was an undergraduate, Shannon designed and implemented an undergraduate tutoring service at nearby Eleanor Roosevelt High School. Two years after she graduated, she gave the department a significant gift to endow the Sara Ann Soper English Undergraduate Service Award to honor a graduating senior who has volunteered time, energy, and commitment to community service. Shannon named the award after her mother, as a testimony to her achievements as a role model for others. This year, the recipient of the Sara Ann Soper Award is Julia Janet Pavlick.

The Mike Angel Award

The Mike Angel Award recognizes a student who has faced extreme hardship in completing his or her degree, and has demonstrated distinction, extraordinary merit, and perseverance as an English major. It was established by faculty and students in 1984 to honor the achievements of Mike Angel, a fine student and wonderful human being who overcame great obstacles in order to earn a B.A. in English. This year’s Mike Angel Award goes to Nicholas John Pietrowski.

The Joyce Tayloe Horrell Award

The Joyce Tayloe Horrell Award is the largest award by the department to any student, and was established in 1989 through the generosity of Joseph Horrell in memory of his wife Joyce Tayloe Horrell. Tayloe Horrell was an Honors graduate student, a scholar of the works of the writer Henry James, and a teacher in the English Department from 1960 until 1967. The Horrell Award is conferred annually on the English major who has demonstrated the highest academic achievement overall among the graduating class. It is a pleasure to present this year’s Horrell Award to Abigail Fealy Furman.

Academic Excellence Awards

In every graduating class, certain students stand out for their consistently high performance. Today, we are presenting thirteen Academic Excellence Awards to those students with the most outstanding academic records in their major coursework. Each of these students has received a major GPA of 4.0.

• Isabella Francesca Diaz Baker
• Emma Rose Behrens
• Abigail Fealy Furman
• Shannon Estellyn Ganley
• Chloe Lilah Johnson
• Laura Catherine Kazdoba
• Ananyaa Malhotra
• Rachel Abigail Morris
• Auset Nso Nkem
• Bossman Kwaku Owusu-Ayim
• Cassandra Annalee Rochmis
• Rebecca Shriver Scherr
• Alison Vy Vo

Professional Writing Contest Awards

• Elijah Martin: Alternative Media, "The 'Right To Repair' Smartphones"
• Andy Szekerczes: Grant Proposal, "Young Writers Workshop"
• Elena Rangelov: Campus Proposal, "Improving Meat-Restricted Diet Accommodations in UMD Dining Halls"
• Asma Tariq: Civic Proposal, "Combating Feline Upper Respiratory Infections in Montgomery County Adoption Centers"
• Pearl Tamrakar: Review of Research, "The Impacts of Health Disparities on Minority Health"
• Asongafac Asaha: Artistic Review, "Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio: A Retelling of the Real Boy"
• Cody Cochrane: Manual, "How to Build a Desktop Computer"
• Sara Stromberg: Manual, "Terrapin's Turf Server Training Manual"
• Matthew Heinz: Narrative Non-Fiction, "Oh, Deer: An Exploration of White-Tailed Deer Management. Its Impacts in Suburban Maryland"
• Riley Lowther: Bill Analysis, "Collective Bargaining @ UMD Campuses"
• Sage Phillips: Business Proposal, "Carbon Neutral Florida Gypsum Plant"
• Jessica Gorski: Business Proposal, "Expanding La Finca's Online Sales to Brick & Mortar"

Book Tour: At home with Amor Towles

The library in Amor Towles’s beautifully appointed home not far from Gramercy Park in Manhattan looks and feels like the Platonic ideal of the concept: tall windows, tasteful art on the walls, many comfortable seating options and well-ordered shelves filled with classic literature. Perfect for reading in, of course, but when I visited in March, Towles first wanted to talk about writing. This is the room where he composed, among other books, his acclaimed bestsellers “A Gentleman in Moscow” and “The Lincoln Highway.” (His newest, “Table for Two,” a collection of stories and a novella, was published last month.)

Towles first brought out a few of what he calls the “design books” for his novels — notebooks that he fills with details for about four years before he starts officially writing. “I’m just trying to imagine: What happens? Who are the people?” he said. “Where are they from, what’s their personality? What are the settings? Who says what, and why? What are the tones?”

Some of the notes he scribbles are longer and more fully realized than others, but Towles estimates that he writes 80 percent of what ends up in his fiction on a computer, once the handwritten design books have done their duty.

Guides from the past

To conjure all those details and tones, Towles partly and very happily relies on documents dating from the eras he writes about. His shelves still include classic travel guides to Moscow, including one published by Intourist in 1932 and a Baedeker guide from 1914. “Intourist was the Politburo-owned tourist agency of Russia,” Towles said, “and at one time its offices were in the Metropol Hotel [the primary setting of ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’]. I had street maps from the ’30s that I could look at. Part of it was to see how they described for the Westerner something that they were trying to impress them with, et cetera.”

A framed picture of Ewan McGregor, in character, used in the production of the recently released adaptation of “A Gentleman in Moscow,” sits on a shelf nearby. Towles said it appeared as part of a secret police file in the show: “You don’t even notice it on screen, but it’s tucked under a paper clip on top of the file.”

A full encyclopedia set from 1931 is another treasure that combines pleasure and work for Towles. “I think it was 48 cents per book. My first novel, ‘Rules of Civility,’ happened to be set in 1938, and I thought: ‘This is great, I can check the population of New York City right there.’ I love old, weird reference.”

A treasured checklist

Towles majored in literature as an undergraduate at Yale and took the few creative-writing courses the school offered at the time. When he was a sophomore, the experimental-fiction writer Walter Abish was a visiting professor.

“At the end of the class,” Towles remembered, “he said to us: ‘All this has been great. I liked your work. I hope my comments have been helpful. But probably the most valuable thing I can do is give you a hundred books that I like.’ So he gave us this list. And because he was an avant-gardist, it was a lot of people who, at the age of 19, I had never heard of: Andre Breton, Barthelme, Beckett, Heinrich Böll … international writers, but all playing with form, that’s what he was interested in.”

Towles immediately started checking for the recommended titles anytime he visited a used-book store. “I’d stack them up, and I’d read a novel a day off of his list,” he said. “That was a totally different kind of experience than studying Henry James or Shakespeare or Chaucer in the academy. A lot of these books [on Abish’s list] were not perfectly made. A lot of them are stabs at something.”

Matthiessen, mentor and friend

The year after Abish taught at the school, Peter Matthiessen arrived for a semester. Matthiessen was already a celebrated writer of both nonfiction (“The Snow Leopard”) and fiction (“At Play in the Fields of the Lord”). He singled out Towles’s work for praise and told the young writer, “I’m going to take your time here very seriously, and I hope that you’re going to take your time with me very seriously, too.” The encouragement was “a gift,” Towles said. The next year, Towles worked with him again, and the two struck up a long friendship.

Towles laughed remembering Matthiessen’s underwhelmed reaction to the draft manuscript of “Rules of Civility” (“He didn’t know why I was writing a book set in 1938”), but when the book became a bestseller, the mentor wrote him a note of congratulations, saying that his daughter had loved it and was thrilled to find her father’s name in its acknowledgments.

New ideas, new language

In addition to his fond remembrances of his formal education, Towles referred to himself more than once during the tour as a “reader-writer,” someone who is constantly refining each of those skills in a conscious conversation between them. He stopped at a shelf of books — the “big ideas” collection, kept together — by Augustine, Darwin, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and others. “What these things have in common for me is that [their authors] had to invent a new language to express their discovery. They weren’t doing the new version of something or doing a ‘spin’ on so and so. [Freud’s] ‘Interpretation of Dreams’ is a totally radical, weird book.”

“Marx and the group around him, they invented that whole thing of, ‘There is no more time! Now is the time to make a decision!’ This sweeping, bold things in single-sentence paragraphs: ‘ All people must …’ That’s electric. And you realize that you can apply that language in your novel. It’s doing something very different. I get very interested in how non-narrativists turn on language in the pursuit of a particular outcome, that I can then sort of use in some weird way.”

“Now you’re in the first-edition zone,” Towles said, opening the glass doors directly behind his writing desk. “And now you’re really into heroes: Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Conrad, Emily Dickinson.” (Towles also listed the Transcendentalists in this league; he was born and raised in the Boston area and said that “a lot of the personality aspects of Emerson and Thoreau are second nature to me.”)

“This is kind of crazy, just time coming around the corner,” he said, pulling one modest-size blue book off the shelf. “This is a first edition of ‘The Great Gatsby.’ It was owned by Dorothy Ann Scarritt,” he noted, pointing to her signature inside the book. “This is August 1925. She later becomes famous because she is Oppenheimer’s secretary at Los Alamos. She’s like the second employee at Los Alamos; she’s there the entire time and she organizes his entire life. She’s involved with bringing everyone in, getting them set up.”

Scarritt’s signature has a lot of company among Towles’s books. A signed copy of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize lecture — a small book nestled inside a larger case — was a gift from his wife. Towles is a longtime fan of Dylan’s and mentioned him in the same sentence as Rimbaud and T.S. Eliot, so when the singer received the Nobel in literature in 2016 to divided opinion, Towles was ecstatic. “It was not controversial for me at all .”

Going back a century further, Towles took down a copy of Proust signed by its translator, C.K. Scott Moncrieff, to Joseph Conrad in 1922.

On a shelf across the room, Towles has another edition of Proust’s work, as well as several books about what he calls “Proust-y stuff” — “different things about Proust — Proust’s letters, paintings in Proust, the music of Proust …”

A long-running book club

Proust also holds a place of honor in an intense book club that Towles has been in with three close friends for just over two decades. “We basically read a novel a month, and we do projects. And we do almost explicitly dead authors; occasionally we veer from that, but mostly it’s dead. We started with Proust. Twenty years ago, we read it as a team. That took longer. We didn’t do it over seven dinners [one per book], more like 14 — over a year and a half.”

The club’s creation was inspired by Harold Bloom’s “Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?,” in which the literary scholar and critic pondered which writers he’d learned more from about the human condition: Plato or Homer? Freud or Proust?

“I was turning 40 in like two months,” Towles said, recalling when he read Bloom’s book. “I thought, if I live to 80 and read a book carefully a month, that means I have 480 books left. And if that’s true, I better focus on books that you could reread at 20, 40 and 60 and learn something new. I was ranting about this to my friend Ann Brashares at a cocktail party, and she said, ‘I’m in.’ And we’ve been going ever since.”

Given the size and ambitions of the books they normally choose, one of the friends recently suggested a “palate cleanser,” which led to “a dinner we called the Fitzgerald-Salinger Death Match. We realized that we’d all read ‘The Great Gatsby’ and ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ as children . So the question was: Which was better? We would reread both in a week and then come back and debate.” I later realized I had left Towles’s home without asking who won.

About this story

Editing by John Williams. Photography by Jeenah Moon for The Washington Post. Design and development by Beth Broadwater. Photo editing by Annaliese Nurnberg. Copy editing by Jennifer Morehead.

Lecturer, English and Writing and Rhetoric - 2024 - 2025 AY (Faculty Wage)

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International Programs

Meet Jongkwan Yun: From South Korea to Iowa, gaining real-world experience in sport management

Jongkwan Yun is a senior at the University of Iowa (UI) majoring in sport and recreation management with a concentration area in communications public relations/journalism, while minoring in news and media literacy. Yun's interest in sports began as a ski instructor at Konjiam Resort in South Korea. When he was a student in sports management at a Korean college, he had a chance to study abroad in Canada and intern at IFung Sports Management, a Canadian soccer agency . These experiences led him to transfer to Iowa to further his undergraduate studies and gain work experience.  

“I was accepted to several colleges in the U.S. when I was looking to transfer, and the two biggest reasons I chose Iowa were credit recognition and field experience classes,” reflected Yun. “I chose my concentration area and minor because there is an unofficial saying in sport management: ‘A minor is mandatory, double major is optional.’ Also, Iowa ranks high in journalism.”

"Embrace the challenge! It is okay to get hit a lot and get hurt a lot — we are students at Iowa, where we have the support and resources to help us get back up if we fall."

Internship at the Iowa Cubs

After gaining hands-on field experience from the UI Athletic Department Fans First, Yun is currently interning in the operations and promotions department of the Iowa Cubs, the Triple-A affiliate of the Chicago Cubs, through curricular practical training (CPT). “The help from UI International Student and Scholar Services and Professor Anna Jensen, director of Office of Field Experience in sport and recreation management, was invaluable when getting a full-time CPT,” shared Yun, who is a recipient of the 2024 UI International Student Graduation Most Unique CPT Award.  

Future career aspirations

Looking ahead, Yun aims to land a position with a major South Korean company later this year, like Hyundai or CJ CheilJedang, both of which have a sport management and marketing department. If that does not work out, he plans to use Optional Practical Training (OPT) to work for a Major League team in the U.S. before returning to South Korea to work in the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO).  

Advice for international students

Yun suggested, “Take advantage of CPT and OPT opportunities. Many things can be learned through classes at school, but I think more things can be learned in the field while working.” Emphasizing his practical approach, he added, “It’s better to draw your dreams through one experience rather than through many contemplations.”

Yun’s closing message is a note of self-reflection and encouragement to fellow international students: Embrace the challenge! It is okay to get hit a lot and get hurt a lot — we are students at Iowa, where we have the support and resources to help us get back up if we fall. 

learn more about cpt and opt

International Programs  (IP) at the University of Iowa (UI) is committed to enriching the global experience of UI students, faculty, staff, and the general public by leading efforts to promote internationally oriented teaching, research, creative work, and community engagement.  IP provides support for international students and scholars, administers scholarships and assistance for students who study, intern, or do research abroad, and provides funding opportunities and grant-writing assistance for faculty engaged in international research. IP shares their stories through various media, and by hosting multiple public engagement activities each year.

• International Student Graduation Celebration
• international students and scholars

International Programs at the University of Iowa supports the right of all individuals to live freely and to live in peace. We condemn all acts of violence based on race, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, and perceived national or cultural origin. In affirming its commitment to human dignity, International Programs strongly upholds the values expressed in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights .