BEGINNING FICTION WORKSHOP
Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. The beginning workshop in fiction is designed for students with little or no experience writing literary texts in fiction. Students are introduced to a range of technical and imaginative concerns through exercises and discussions, and they eventually produce their own writing for the critical analysis of the class. The focus of the course is on the rudiments of voice, character, setting, point of view, plot, and lyrical use of language. Students will begin to develop the critical skills that will allow them to read like writers and understand, on a technical level, how accomplished creative writing is produced. Outside readings of a wide range of fiction supplement and inform the exercises and longer written projects.
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Instructor:
Baylina Pu
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Instructor:
Varud Gupta
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Instructor:
Blakey Bessire
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Instructor:
Valentina Jaramillo
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Instructor:
Britt A Alphson
Info - 3 points
BEGINNING NONFICTION WORKSHOP
Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. The beginning workshop in nonfiction is designed for students with little or no experience in writing literary nonfiction. Students are introduced to a range of technical and imaginative concerns through exercises and discussions, and they eventually submit their own writing for the critical analysis of the class. Outside readings supplement and inform the exercises and longer written projects.
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Instructor:
Miranda Mazariegos
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Instructor:
Mariam Syed
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Instructor:
Sofia Rodrigues Bolina
Info - 3 points
BEGINNING POETRY WORKSHOP
Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. The beginning poetry workshop is designed for students who have a serious interest in poetry writing but who lack a significant background in the rudiments of the craft and/or have had little or no previous poetry workshop experience. Students will be assigned weekly writing exercises emphasizing such aspects of verse composition as the poetic line, the image, rhyme and other sound devices, verse forms, repetition, tone, irony, and others. Students will also read an extensive variety of exemplary work in verse, submit brief critical analyses of poems, and critique each others original work.
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Instructor:
Sophie Kautenburger
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Instructor:
Margaret A Carter
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Instructor:
Oana Nicola
Info - 3 points
INTERMEDIATE FICTION WORKSHOP
Intermediate workshops are for students with some experience with creative writing, and whose prior work merits admission to the class (as judged by the professor). Intermediate workshops present a higher creative standard than beginning workshops, and increased expectations to produce finished work. By the end of the semester, each student will have produced at least seventy pages of original fiction. Students are additionally expected to write extensive critiques of the work of their peers. Please visit
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
for information about registration procedures.
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Instructor:
Sofia Montrone
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Instructor:
Giada Scodellaro
Info - 3 points
INTERMEDIATE NONFICTION WRKSHP
The intermediate workshop in nonfiction is designed for students with some experience in writing literary nonfiction. Intermediate workshops present a higher creative standard than beginning workshops and an expectation that students will produce finished work. Outside readings supplement and inform the exercises and longer written projects. By the end of the semester, students will have produced thirty to forty pages of original work in at least two traditions of literary nonfiction. Please visit
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
for information about registration procedures.
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Instructor:
Elizabeth L Greenwood
CULPA: 3 Info - 3 points
INTERMEDIATE POETRY WORKSHOP
Intermediate poetry workshops are for students with some prior instruction in the rudiments of poetry writing and prior poetry workshop experience. Intermediate poetry workshops pose greater challenges to students and maintain higher critical standards than beginning workshops. Students will be instructed in more complex aspects of the craft, including the poetic persona, the prose poem, the collage, open-field composition, and others. They will also be assigned more challenging verse forms such as the villanelle and also non-European verse forms such as the pantoum. They will read extensively, submit brief critical analyses, and put their instruction into regular practice by composing original work that will be critiqued by their peers. By the end of the semester each student will have assembled a substantial portfolio of finished work. Please visit
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
for information about registration procedures.
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Instructor:
Mitchell Glazier
Info - 3 points
Hauntings: Ghosts, Presences & Residues
Hauntings: Ghosts in Lit
“I believe
—
I know that ghosts
have
wandered the earth. Be with me always
—
take any form
—
drive me mad!”
—Emily Brontë
, Wuthering Heights
In this course we’ll expand our understanding of how writing is often the site of lingering, numinous, immaterial presences. We’ll begin with the tradition of
the ghost story
— a literary device beloved by writers for centuries across many genres. Beyond the consideration of the supernatural, we’ll also investigate more abstract capacities in which texts—and writers (and sometimes editors!)—are inevitably possessed by an
other
, a presence that lingers persistently, making itself known whether we welcome it or not. Memory and trauma are their own kinds of ghosts. Similarly, we’ll discover how traces of works by writers we admire, our teachers, even a specific text or image, can manifest as spectral forms inhabiting our work. We’ll address the complexities of those vestiges in terms of appropriation and originality—what Harold Bloom calls “the anxiety of influence.” Students will process and explore these ideas in both creative and analytical writings throughout the semester.
Course Books (available at Book Culture):
Eileen Myles
, Afterglow
Diana Khoi Nguyen,
Ghost Of
Lucie Brock Broido,
Trouble in Mind
Mary Reufle
, A Little White Shadow
Max Porter
, Grief is the Thing With Feathers
All other readings will be posted on Courseworks as PDFs.
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Instructor:
Samantha Zighelboim
Info - 3 points
BODY & WORD
Our writing often appears primarily as a product of cognitive faculties, and we easily overlook the profound influence our bodies exert on our thoughts and, consequently, our writing. Our perception of language itself is tied to how we perceive our physical selves. We can understand our bodies materially, as intricate structures of bone, muscle, and cells, or kinesthetically, through movement, force, and tone, intertwined with a spectrum of sensations like pain and pleasure, which intersect with our psychological and emotional landscapes. Through a series of movement exercises, readings, and writing assignments, this seminar delves into the profound impact a deeper understanding of our bodies and their movement can have on our writing, and conversely, how writing can influence our bodily experiences. Using various artistic mediums such as dance, film, literature, and fine arts, we aim to enhance our ability to articulate and write the body's presence and movement through space and time. Students from all concentrations are encouraged to join.
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Instructor:
Matty Davis
Info - 3 points
ADVANCED FICTION WORKSHOP
Building on the work of the Intermediate Workshop, Advanced Workshops are reserved for the most accomplished creative writing students. A significant body of writing must be produced and revised. Particular attention will be paid to the components of fiction: voice, perspective, characterization, and form. Students will be expected to finish several short stories, executing a total artistic vision on a piece of writing. The critical focus of the class will include an examination of endings and formal wholeness, sustaining narrative arcs, compelling a reader's interest for the duration of the text, and generating a sense of urgency and drama in the work. Please visit
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
for information about registration procedures.
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Instructor:
Diane M Cook
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Instructor:
Joss Lake
Info - 3 points
SENIOR FICTION WORKSHOP
Seniors who are majors in creative writing are given priority for this course. Enrollment is limited, and is by permission of the professor. The senior workshop offers students the opportunity to work exclusively with classmates who are at the same high level of accomplishment in the major. Students in the senior workshops will produce and revise a new and substantial body of work. In-class critiques and conferences with the professor will be tailored to needs of each student. Please visit
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
for information about registration procedures.
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Instructor:
Heidi S Julavits
CULPA: 1 Wikipedia Info - 4 points
VOICES & VISIONS OF CHILDHOOD
Childhood, in some sense, is a universally shared area of expertise: everyone alive was once a kid. At the same time, childhood remains a profound mystery. There’s so much we don’t remember! And the experiences we do retain—did we really understand them, then or now? Even the most ordinary moments of early life can acquire extraordinary significance: they are the touchstones and talismans that we use to make sense of the world, and our place within it. But why? And how?
As we read and write about childhood in this class, we will be asking questions fundamental to the art of fiction: where does a story begin? How is a character formed? Youth, like literature, is filled with symbols. Kids, like writers, are imaginative, metaphorical thinkers, prone to both flights of fancy and glimpses of the truth. The stories of our youth often follow a predictable, prescribed narrative—we are, after all, rarely the authors of our own upbringing—and yet there are a few phases of life with as many plot twists, climactic and often traumatic events that shape who we are. In this way, our line of inquiry in this course will be at once literary and personal. We will be reading and writing about a subject that is nothing short of profound: the origins of life.
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Instructor:
Melissa Oliva-Lozada
Info - 3 points
Animal Tales
"We polish an animal mirror to look for ourselves."
-Donna Haraway
In the last several decades, Animal Studies has emerged as a robust interdisciplinary field that once again seeks to engage with “the question of the animal,” as Derrida puts it. In this course, we will look at works of cultural production that explore the myriad relationships between human and nonhuman animals. We will read stories that dissolve the barrier between the domestic and the wild. We will read stories about human-animal hybrids. We will read stories from an animal’s-eye-view, imagining the world as an animal might: as a worm digging through the dirt toward an imagined utopia, as an elephant seeking vengeance against poachers, as a cultivated monkey exhausted by the cruelty of human society.
As the popular post-humanist scholar Donna Haraway puts it: We polish an animal mirror to look at ourselves. What can animals teach us about ourselves, and more importantly, what can animals teach us about how to survive our own nature? In the midst of this sixth extinction, animals are disappearing at a rapid rate due to human activity. Will it still be possible to cohabit peacefully, ecologically, with one another? By imagining the private lives of animals and writing stories from their perspective, can we still intervene and cultivate the necessary cross-species connections that will carry us into a more just and entwined future?
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Instructor:
Anelise I Chen
Info - 3 points
THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE
Ecstasy of Influence
What does it mean to be original? How do we differentiate plagiarism from pastiche, appropriation from homage? And how do we build on pre-existing traditions while simultaneously creating work that reflects our own unique experiences of the world?
In a 2007 essay for
Harper
’
s
magazine, Jonathan Lethem countered critic Harold Bloom’s theory of “the anxiety of influence” by proposing, instead, an “ecstasy of influence”; Lethem suggested that writers embrace rather than reject the unavoidable imprints of their literary forbearers. Beginning with Lethem’s essay—which, itself, is composed entirely of borrowed (or “sampled”) text—this class will consider the nature of literary influence, and its role in the development of voice.
Each week, students will read from pairings of older stories and novel excerpts with contemporary work that falls within the same artistic lineage. In doing so, we’ll track the movement of stylistic, structural, and thematic approaches to fiction across time, and think about the different ways that stories and novels can converse with one another. We will also consider the influence of other artistic mediums—music, visual art, film and television—on various texts. Students will then write their own original short pieces modeled after the readings. Just as musicians cover songs, we will “cover” texts, adding our own interpretive imprints.
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Instructor:
Adam Z Wilson
Info - 3 points
ART OF THE PARAGRAPH
The paragraph is the organizational principal which defines all prose. In this class, we will examine the techniques by which paragraphs are developed, created, and shaped.
Elements of composition will be analyzed in depth. Techniques discussed include: rhythm, cadence, movement (and the illusion of life), sentence and syntax, grammar as poetic intent, the taut relationship of tone and voice, the orchestration of suspense and action, openings and endings, the veneer of authority, tension, subtext, the delivery of information, and the element of surprise.
Oh—and you can expect a heavy emphasis on self-editing.
This is a practical class oriented around craft and technique for students who are serious about developing their sense of control. Each week we will focus on the micro in order to understand the broader act of creation. This is a comprehensive seminar on prose composition for students who truly love language, as such this class is genre-agnostic and is open to poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers alike.
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Instructor:
Molly L McGhee
Info - 3 points
OPEN NONFICTION WORKSHOP
Prerequisite: Student must have taken beginning workshop in any undergraduate creative writing concentration. Open Nonfiction Workshop is designed for students with some experience in writing literary nonfiction. Intermediate workshops present a higher creative standard than beginning workshops and an expectation that students will produce finished work. Outside readings supplement and inform the exercises and longer written projects. By the end of the semester, students will have produced thirty to forty pages of original work in at least two traditions of literary nonfiction. Please visit
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
for information about registration procedures.
HYBRID NONFICTION FORMS
Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. Creative nonfiction is a frustratingly vague term. How do we give it real literary meaning; examine its compositional aims and techniques, its achievements and especially its aspirations? This course will focus on works that we might call visionary - works that combine art forms, genres and styles in striking ways. Works in which image and text combine to create a third interactive language for the reader. Works still termed fiction history or journalism that join fact and fiction to interrogate their uses and implications. Certain memoirs that are deliberately anti-autobiographical, turning from personal narrative to the sounds, sight, impressions and ideas of the writers milieu. Certain essays that join personal reflection to arts and cultural criticism, drawing on research and imagination, the vernacular and the formal, even prose and poetry. The assemblage or collage that, created from notebook entries, lists, quotations, footnotes and indexes achieves its coherence through fragments and associations, found and original texts.
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Instructor:
Margo L Jefferson
CULPA: 1 Info - 3 points
WRITING ABOUT ART
Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required.
This course will introduce students to writing about visual art. We will take our models from art history and contemporary art discourse, and students will be prompted to write with and about current art exhibitions and events throughout the city. The modes of art writing we will encounter include: the practice of ekphrasis (poems which describe or derive their inspiration from a work of art); writers such as John Ashbery, Gary Indiana, Eileen Myles, and others who for periods of their life held positions as art critics while composing poetry and works of fiction; writers such as Etel Adnan, Susan Howe, and Renee Gladman who have produced literature and works of art in equal measure. We will also look at artists who have written essays and poetry throughout their careers such as Robert Smithson, Glenn Ligon, Gregg Bordowitz, Moyra Davey, and Hannah Black, and consider both the visual qualities of writing and the ways that visual artists have used writing in their work. Lastly, we will consider what it means to write through a “milieu” of visual artists, such as those associated with the New York School and Moscow Conceptualism. Throughout the course students will produce original works and complete a final writing project that enriches, complicates, and departs from their own interests and preoccupations.
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Instructor:
Eliza B Callahan
Info - 3 points
Writing the Sixties
NF Sem: Writing the Sixti
In this seminar, we will target nonfiction from the 1960s—the decade that saw an avalanche of new forms, new awareness, new freedoms, and new conflicts, as well as the beginnings of social movements and cultural preoccupations that continue to frame our lives, as writers and as citizens, in the 21st century: civil rights, feminism, environmentalism, LGBTQ rights, pop culture, and the rise of mass media. We will look back more than a half century to examine the development of modern criticism, memoir, reporting, and profile-writing, and the ways they entwine. Along the way, we will ask questions about these classic nonfiction forms: How do reporters, essayists, and critics make sense of the new? How do they create work as rich as the best novels and short stories? Can criticism rise to the level of art? What roles do voice, point-of-view, character, dialogue, and plot—the traditional elements of fiction—play? As we go, we will witness the unfolding of arguably the most transitional decade in American history—with such events as the Kennedy assassination, the Watts Riots, the Human Be In, and the Vietnam War, along with the rise of Pop art, rock ‘n’ roll, and a new era of moviemaking—as it was documented in real time by writers at
The New Yorker
, New Journalists at
Esquire
, and critics at
Partisan Review
and
Harper
’s, among other publications. Some writers we will consider: James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Rachel Carson, Dwight Macdonald, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Pauline Kael, Nik Cohn, Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Ross, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Thomas Pynchon, John Updike, Michael Herr, Martha Gellhorn, John McPhee, and Betty Friedan. We will be joined by guest speakers.
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Instructor:
Mark Rozzo
Info - 3 points
NONFICTION-ISH
NF SEM - NONFICTION-ISH
This craft seminar aims to uncover daring and unusual approaches to literature informed by nonfiction (and nonfiction-adjacent) practices. In this course we will closely read and analyze a diverse set of works, including Samuel R. Delany’s memoir-polemic of New York street life, Lydia Davis’s very short stories drawn from life, Svetlana Alexievich’s “novel of voices,” Sheila Heti’s alphabetical diaries, Adania Shibli’s double-telling of a crime story, Eliot Weinberger’s ways of looking at translation and Chinese poetry, Sei Shōnagon’s observations from eleventh-century Japan, Christopher Isherwood’s autofiction, Emmanuel Carrère’s “nonfiction novels,” Sigrid Nunez’s memoir “of” Susan Sontag, Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulations, W. G. Sebald’s essay-fiction, and Rainer Maria Rilke’s semiautobiographical novel in journal entries, alongside shorter pieces and extracts by writers like Eileen Myles, Alejandro Zambra, Maria Stepanova, Ben Mauk, and more. What we learn in this course we will apply to our own work, which will consist of regular ungraded generative writing prompts and two graded creative writing responses. Students will also learn to keep a daily writing journal, from which selections will serve as the midterm and final.
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Instructor:
James C Yeh
Info - 3 points
DISRUPTIVE BODIES, DISRUPTIVE TEXTS: TRA
TRANS IMAGININGS
Until the mid-twentieth century, philosophies of embodiment failed to think through the morphology of trans bodies and lives, leaving trans experience, in a sense, “un-worded” in the critical imagination.
Disruptive Bodies, Disruptive Texts: Trans Imaginings
will examine how trans creatives have responded to this silence, rethinking cis-centric theories of embodiment to unearth innovative “vocabulary” for those lives and bodies long erased from archives and linguistic intelligibilities. Indeed, even in its representations of silence and loss for trans experience, the archive demands a certain attention: What is held in the weight of silence? How do such silences, or rather “silencings,” inform trans embodiment? Is transness destined to forever see itself bound up in hauntings, in violence?
The US publishing industry favours trans narratives that operate within traditional memoir or political and activist nonfiction. Yet, transness, in its disruption of supposed bodily norms, powerfully destabilises essayistic conventions. What is trans nonfiction when its written for us and by us? How then do we define trans nonfiction? What is transness at the level of the sentence, the paragraph? What textures, dimensions, or discussions does it bring to nonfiction as form, genre, and critical discourse?
Disruptive Bodies, Disruptive Texts: Trans Imaginings
will explore transness not only as content but as syntax, as form. The course will consider those works of trans creation that remove cis-lenses for approaching, organising, and understanding trans experience and literature. Instead, we will consider how the trans body emerges as rich centre from which to rework ideas of embodiment and essay form. And from that centre we will disrupt.
Each week, students will receive a generative prompt (either to complete in class or after) specific to the themes and concerns of the relevant reading materials. These are opportunities to experiment as the work will not be workshopped or critiqued.
Twice during the semester, students will lead discussions on assigned books, craft essays, and criticism and theory. At the end of the term, students will submit a final portfolio consisting of a project of their own design.
OPEN POETRY WORKSHOP
ADVANCED POETRY WORKSHOP
Prerequisite: Student must have taken beginning workshop in any undergraduate creative writing concentration. Open workshops are for students who are acquainted with and have experience in at least one beginning workshop in creative writing. In Open Poetry Workshops, students may be instructed in aspects of craft including the poetic persona, the prose poem, the collage, open-field composition, and others. They may also study verse forms such as the villanelle, sonnet, sestina, ballad, acrostic, free verse and also non-European verse forms such as the pantoum. They may read source texts as examples and/or critical texts as theoretical frameworks, and afterward, submit brief critical analyses. They will put their instruction into regular practice by composing original work that will be critiqued by their peers. Students will be encouraged to develop their strengths and to cultivate a distinctive poetic vision and voice but must also demonstrate a willingness to broaden their range and experiment with new forms and notions of the poem. A portfolio of poems will be written and revised with critical input from the instructor and workshop. Please visit
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
for information about registration procedures.
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Instructor:
Timothy B Donnelly
Info - 3 points
SENIOR POETRY WORKSHOP
Seniors who are majors in creative writing are given priority for this course. Enrollment is limited, and is by permission of the professor. The senior workshop offers students the opportunity to work exclusively with classmates who are at the same high level of accomplishment in the major. Students in the senior workshops will produce and revise a new and substantial body of work. In-class critiques and conferences with the professor will be tailored to needs of each student. Please visit
https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
for information about registration procedures.
FICTION WORKSHOP
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Instructor:
Hannah L Assadi
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Instructor:
Nicholas Christopher
Wikipedia Info -
Instructor:
Dennard T Dayle
Info -
Instructor:
Sophie M Dess
Info -
Instructor:
Joanna B Hershon
CULPA: 3 Info -
Instructor:
Heidi S Julavits
CULPA: 1 Wikipedia Info -
Instructor:
Victor D Lavalle
CULPA: 2 Wikipedia Info -
Instructor:
Hilary J Leichter
Info -
Instructor:
David M Gordon
Info -
Instructor:
Darcey Steinke
Wikipedia Info -
Instructor:
Kat Tang
Info -
Instructor:
Diksha Basu
Wikipedia Info - 6 points
NONFICTION WORKSHOP
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Instructor:
Cristen A Beam
Info -
Instructor:
Kate Zambreno
Info -
Instructor:
Michelle Orange
Info - 6 points
POETRY WORKSHOP
-
Instructor:
Mark Bibbins
Wikipedia Info -
Instructor:
Timothy B Donnelly
Info -
Instructor:
Shane McCrae
Wikipedia Info -
Instructor:
Emily F Skillings
Info -
Instructor:
Lynn Xu
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Instructor:
Thea Matthews
Info - 6 points
CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR
THE WRITER AS TEACHER
CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR
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Instructor:
Keri E Bertino
Info - 3 points
CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR
Travellers Tales
CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR
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Instructor:
Nicholas Christopher
Wikipedia Info - 3 points
CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR
POETRY FOR PROSE WRITERS
CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR
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Instructor:
Monica Ferrell
Info - 3 points
CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR
THE COMMA SUTRA: GRAMMAR
CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR
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Instructor:
Barbara K Fischer
Info - 3 points
CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR
THE WRITER AS TEACHER
CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR
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Instructor:
Dorothea S Lasky
Wikipedia Info - 3 points
CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR
SHORT PROSE FORMS
CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR
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Instructor:
Alan Ziegler
CULPA: 5
Info
- 3 points
CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR
Editing and the Writer
CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR
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Instructor:
Brigid Hughes
Wikipedia Info - 3 points
FICTION SEMINAR
WRITING POWERFUL DIALOGUE
.
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Instructor:
James Canon
Wikipedia Info - 3 points
FICTION SEMINAR
BUILDING A BETTER NOVEL
.
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Instructor:
Victor D Lavalle
CULPA: 2 Wikipedia Info - 3 points
FICTION SEMINAR
EXPATRIATE LITERATURE
.
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Instructor:
Joshua A Cohen
Wikipedia Info - 3 points
NONFICTION SEMINAR
LITERARY JOURNALISM
.
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Instructor:
Jaquira Diaz
Wikipedia Info - 3 points
NONFICTION SEMINAR
WRITING THE BODY
.
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Instructor:
Leslie S Jamison
Wikipedia Info - 3 points
NONFICTION SEMINAR
MEMOIR AND IMAGINATION
.
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Instructor:
Margo L Jefferson
CULPA: 1 Info - 3 points
POETRY SEMINAR
UNLEASHING THE POETIC DEMON
.
-
Instructor:
Dorothea S Lasky
Wikipedia Info - 3 points
TRANSLATION WORKSHOP
LIT TRANSLATION WRKSHP
-
Instructor:
Susan Bernofsky
Wikipedia Info -
Instructor:
Emma Ramadan
Info - 3 points
TRANSLATION SEMINAR
QUEER WORLD / QUEER WORDS
TRANSLATION SEMINAR
-
Instructor:
Michael Moore
h-index: 2 Info - 3 points
NONFICTION LECTURE
NARRATIVE STRUCTURE
NONFICTION LECTURE
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Instructor:
Chloe Jones
Info - 3 points