Peqod :: Classes - Columbia University Catalog of Classes

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here:
https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses
.

Spring 2026:

Section 1, taught by Angel Nafis: Poetry Belongs With Us

As legend Lucille Clifton said, “poetry began when somebody walked out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, “Ahhh.” That was the first poem.” In this class we will be demystifying the fundamentals of writing poetry by sharpening our most natural sonic and narrative instincts. We will use these instincts to guide our insights as we explore and practice specific craft elements and structural gestures—from the Ode, Elegy, and Sonnet, to Ekphrasis and Erasure. We’ll study the work of contemporary luminaries like Gwendolyn Brooks, Kaveh Akbar, Sharon Olds, Jenny Xie, June Jordan, Ocean Vuong, and more; using their example to inspire us on how best to understand and command the poetic line. Class time will include weekly writing prompts and share-outs. Come prepared to take risks and foster curiosity.

Section 2, taught by Miranda Field:

This class approaches poetry as a practice energized as much by playful provocation as by engagement with urgent issues of the day. In-class writing and weekly prompts designed to provoke creative ingenuity will keep you writing, ensuring everyone has new poems to workshop regularly. A list of quotes headed “
What is This Thing Called Poetry?
” starts the class off with a discussion intended to open our minds and challenge pre-conceived notions on the topic. This will be followed by other, more focused questions and propositions, providing discussion topics for each class: How do artifice and raw reality intertwine in a poem’s making? In what ways can poems deepen our understanding of ourselves, each other, and the world we share? How do we, as poets, unlock the full potential of our chosen medium, language? What do we mean by “voice” in a poem, and when and how does “voice” emerge? Required readings are central to our work together, and specified titles and volumes must be acquired by the third week of the semester. Supplemental material will be provided as handouts and distributed in class.

Department: English @Barnard
Instructor: Brionne Janae
Info
Instructor: Farnoosh Fathi
Info
3 points

Details

ENGL BC3110

Language and Pop Culture in Contemporary

Language & Pop Culture: F

Department: French @Barnard
Instructor: Karen Santos da Silva
CULPA: 4 Info
3 points

Details

FREN BC3111

PLAYWRITING I

Department: English @Barnard
Instructor: Ellen McLaughlin
CULPA: 4 Info
3 points

Details

ENGL BC3113

STORY WRITING

Department: English @Barnard
Instructor: Nellie G Hermann
Info
3 points

Details

ENGL BC3115

FICTION WRITING

Writing sample required to apply. Instructions and the application form can be found here:
https://english.barnard.edu/english/creative-writing-courses
.

Section 1 (taught by Sarah Wang in Spring 2026)

Narrative Strategies:
This course will explore the different ways that stories can be told. How a story is written is as important as what a story is about. Is there a turn at the end that changes everything you thought you knew? Is the narrator speaking from inside experience, reportage from the front lines of another world? How can the epistolary form be utilized to effect? Students will workshop their own stories, participate in four in-class generative writing sessions, and read weekly short stories demonstrating various strategies for style, voice, setting, dialogue, form, and point of view. Particular focus will be placed on writing from the margins and writing as an act of bearing witness.

Section 2 (taught by Gina Apostol in Spring 2026):

This course will focus particularly on crafting the literary technique of point of view in fiction. Students will craft work with this question in mind: in what ways are art and ethics combined in the crafting of point of view? Students will practice writing from different narration modes: third person limited and omniscient, free indirect discourse, first person, and so on. They will consider the ethics of point of view by reading short stories, among them stories from Borges’s
Labyrinths
, John Keene’s
Counternarratives
, and Angela Carter’s
Saints and Strangers.
Some theoretical matters will include: postcoloniality in narration; identity in narration; ‘queering’ history; and critical race thought. Students will write three different pieces with the crafting of point of view in mind. Students will workshop each other’s pieces as well as discuss the texts in relation to their practice of the art of fiction.

Department: English @Barnard
Instructor: Weike Wang
CULPA: 1 Info
Instructor: Idra L Novey
CULPA: 2 Wikipedia Info
3 points

Details

ENGL BC3117

ADVANCED POETRY WRITING

Department: English @Barnard
Instructor: Patricia S Jones
Info
Instructor: Faculty
h-index: 37 Info
3 points

Details

ENGL BC3118

SCREENWRITING FUNDAMENTALS

SCREENWRITING FUNDMENTALS

Department: Film @Barnard
W 2:10 p.m.-5 p.m.
Instructor: Peter Nickowitz
Info
3 points

Details

FILM BC3119

CITY,LANDSCAPE, & ECOLOGY

City, Landscape, Ecology
is a thematically driven course that centers on issues and polemics related to landscape, land settlement and ecology over the past two centuries. The class looks at changing attitudes to the natural world from the eighteenth century to the present, tracing important historical shifts in the consideration of nature across the ecological sciences, conservation practices, landscape design, and environmental activism, law and policy. Lectures focus on the critical role that artists and architects have played, and are to play, in making visible the sources of environmental degradation and in developing new means of mitigating anthropogenic ecological change.

City, Landscape, Ecology
is divided into three parts. Part I explores important episodes in the history of
landscape
: picturesque garden theory, notions of “wilderness” as epitomized in national and state parks in the United States, Modern and Postmodern garden practices, and place of landscape in the work of artists from the 1960s to the present. The purpose here is to better understand the role that territorial organization plays in the construction of social practices, human subjectivities, and technologies of power. Lectures in this part are shaped around a dialectical pair of historical episodes–– for example, the picturesque garden is paired with the enclosure of the commons, and American national parks are discussed in relation to the systematic removal of native peoples.

We then turn to
ecology
and related issues of climate, urbanization and sustainability in Part II. Here we will look at the rise of ecological thinking in the 1960s; approaches to the environment that were based on the systems-thinking approach of the era. In the session “Capitalism, Race and Population Growth” we examine the history of the “crisis” of scarcity from Thomas Robert Malthus, to Paul R. Ehrlich (
The Population Bomb
, 1968) to today and look at questions of environmental racism, violence and equity.

The course concludes with Part III on
Environmental Repair
. At this important juncture in the course, we will ask what is to be done today. We’ll examine the work of contemporary theorists, architects, landscape architects, policy makers and environmentalists who have channeled some of the lessons

Department: Architecture @Barnard
TR 2:40 p.m.-3:55 p.m.
Instructor: Ralph Ghoche
CULPA: 1 h-index: 2 Info
3 points