Taught by Prof. Gabe Fried

In this eight-week online workshop, students will expand their notions of how poetry can engage the elemental, poignant, and often disquieting subject of childhood by drafting new poems that take up the its perceptions, language, and landscapes. In doing so, they will explore the potency and the vulnerabilities of children, as well as the thrall of childhood nostalgia. Students will rediscover and deploy the cadences of childhood rhymes, riddles, chants, taunts, and games, using those beats and melodies in new and surprising (sometimes creepy!) ways. Throughout, we will trace the sometimes fraught relationship of children to each other and to former children (a.k.a. adults).  In order to expand our sense of how we might portray and make use of childhood in poetry, we take inspirations from poets like Cameron Awkward-Rich, Catherine Barnett, Elizabeth Bishop, Paula Bohince, Lucie Brock-Broido, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jennifer Chang, Natalie Diaz, Cornelius Eady, Joy Harjo, Robert Hayden, Randall Jarrell, Stanley Kunitz, Brenda Shaughnessy, Craig Morgan Teicher, and others. 

Offered in the second eight-week session. 

Taught by Prof. France Dickey 

Taught by Prof. Maureen Konkle

Taught by Prof. Phong Nguyen

Taught by Prof. Michael Marlo

Taught by Prof. Karen Piper

From women in the French resistance to survivors of genocide in Rwanda, this class will focus on women writing about war in the mid-to-late twentieth century.  We will look at the way in which women’s experiences of war have ranged from being targeted or victimized to being active participants. We will also discuss the impact of war on intimate relationships, including problems with PTSD, and analyze connections between nation building, war, and notions of masculinity.  We will we be reading contemporary fiction about wars around the world, including Africa, India, Europe, Japan, Iraq, and Serbia. 

Taught by Prof. John Evelev

Struggling first with the Puritans’ distrust of fiction and later to overcome the cultural domination of Britain, the novel quickly became the dominant expression of American literature in the nineteenth century.  This course traces the major shifts of genre and form within the American novel from its beginnings in epistolary novels of manners and seduction in the late eighteenth century to the naturalistic depiction of urban poverty and vice in 1900.  While noting the important formal transformations within the American novel, we will also explore some of its persistent social and political concerns, including women’s “private” experience as privileged topic (contrasted with women’s underprivileged role in American public life), the creation of a distinctly American past (which may be based upon and unsettled by injustices), and the threat of racial and class violence.

Texts to be studied include: Hannah Foster, The Coquette (1797);Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Hope Leslie (1827); Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables (1851); Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851); Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1855); Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896); Charles Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1901); Crane, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets (1893/1896)

This is an asynchronous online course.  There will be required weekly discussion board posts, 4 short essays, and a final project that revises and expands one of the earlier essays.

Taught by Prof. Scott Garson

In this course, students will learn advanced fiction-writing techniques and approaches, such as drawing connections between disparate elements within a story. To that end, this course will introduce students to the vocabulary and techniques of fiction writing, as well as strategies for implementing them. In addition to undertaking close reading and generative writing exercises, students are encouraged to enter into a wider literary context, positioning their work in dialogue with published fiction of the past, present, and future.

• Taught by Karen Piper

• Taught by Heather Heckman-McKenna

• Taught by Aliki Barnstone

• Taught by Carsten Strathausen
• Capstone eligible

• Taught by Johanna Kramer

Taught by Frances Dickey

Taught by Andrew Hoberek

Taught by Michael Marlo

• Taught by Penny Smith-Parris