At least two of the three writing courses must be taken at UC Berkeley.
Students may be allowed to include courses that are not on the following lists with the approval of the creative writing minor faculty advisor. It is the responsibility of the student to provide the faculty advisor with documentary evidence to support the claim of course eligibility. Contact the creative writing minor student academic advisor at [email protected] for more information.
Code | Title | Units |
---|---|---|
Poetry for the People: Introduction to the Art of Poetry | 4 | |
Poetry for the People: The Writing and Teaching of Poetry | 4 | |
Poetry for the People: Practicum | 4 | |
Spoken Word: Oral Tradition & Transformation from Poetry to Hip Hop, Standup & Beyond | 3 | |
Creative Writing for Artists | 4 | |
Creative Writing | 4 | |
Introduction to the Craft of Creative Writing | 4 | |
Introduction to the Craft of Creative Nonfiction | 3 | |
Introduction to the Craft of Short Fiction | 3 | |
Introduction to the Craft of Dramatic Writing | 3 | |
Seminar-Workshop in Creative Writing | 3 | |
Seminar-Workshop on Creative Writing: The Novel | 3 | |
Players, Spectators & Fanatics: Writing on the Cultures of Sports | 3 | |
Reading and Writing Poetry | 3 | |
Creative Prose | 3 | |
Knowing Others, and Being Known: The Art of Writing People | 4 | |
The Art of Writing: Writing the Limits of Empathy | 4 | |
Modes of Writing (Exposition, Fiction, Verse, Etc.) | 4 | |
Short Fiction | 4 | |
Verse | 4 | |
Long Narrative | 4 | |
Playwriting | 4 | |
Prose Nonfiction | 4 | |
Poetry Translation Workshop | 4 | |
Writing about Environmental Design: Short Compositions | 3-4 | |
Writing about Environmental Design: One Longer Composition | 3-4 | |
Introduction to Screenwriting | 4 | |
Screenwriting | 4 | |
TV Writing | 4 | |
Creative Writing in French | 4 | |
Native American Narratives | 4 | |
Fundamentals of Playwriting | 3 | |
Playwriting | 3 |
Code | Title | Units |
---|---|---|
Research-to-Performance Laboratory | 3 | |
Black Theatre Workshop | 3 | |
African American Literature 1920 to Present | 3 | |
Survey of African American Literary Forms and Styles 1920 to 1980 | 3 | |
Neo-Slave Narratives | 3 | |
Novels of Toni Morrison | 3 | |
Literature of the Caribbean: Significant Themes | 4 | |
Special Topics in African American Literature | 3 - 4 | |
African American Poetry: Eyes on the Prize | 4 | |
Classical Poetics | 4 | |
Slavery and Literature in the Greco-Roman World | 4 | |
Native American Literature | 4 | |
Forms of Folklore | 4 | |
Topics in Folklore | 4 | |
Modern Arabic Prose | 3 | |
Classical Arabic Prose | 3 | |
Modern Arabic Poetry | 3 | |
Classical Arabic Poetry | 3 | |
Survey of Arabic Literature (in Arabic) | 3 | |
Survey of Arabic Literature (in Arabic) | 3 | |
Armenian Literature in Social Context | 4 | |
Asian American Literature | 4 | |
Contemporary Narratives on the Philippines and the United States | 3 | |
Genre in Asian American Literature | 4 | |
Gender and Sexuality in Asian American Literature and Culture | 4 | |
Chinese American Literature | 4 | |
Korean American Literature | 4 | |
Readings in Chinese Buddhist Texts | 4 | |
Introductory Readings in Kanbun | 4 | |
Welsh and Arthurian Literature of the Middle Ages | 4 | |
Welsh and Arthurian Literature of the Middle Ages | 4 | |
Irish Literature in Translation | 4 | |
Irish Literature | 4 | |
Irish Literature | 4 | |
Medieval Welsh Language and Literature | 4 | |
Medieval Welsh Language and Literature | 4 | |
Celtic Mythology and Oral Tradition | 4 | |
Chicana Feminist Writers and Discourse | 4 | |
Major Chicano Writers | 4 | |
Chicano and Latin American Literature | 3 | |
Ancient Chinese Prose | 4 | |
Ancient Chinese Poetry | 4 | |
Readings in Classical Chinese Poetry | 4 | |
Readings in Medieval Prose | 4 | |
Readings in Chinese Buddhist Texts | 4 | |
Readings in Vernacular Chinese Literature | 4 | |
Modern Chinese Literature | 4 | |
Contemporary Chinese Literature | 4 | |
Exploring Premodern Chinese Novels | 4 | |
The Story of the Stone | 4 | |
Readings on Creative Writing | 3 | |
Introduction to Comparative Literature | 4 | |
Introduction to Comparative Literature: Literature and Philosophy | 4 | |
Introduction to Comparative Literature: Society and Culture | 4 | |
Introduction to Comparative Literature: Literary and Cultural History | 4 | |
Introduction to Comparative Literature | 4 | |
The Biblical Tradition in Western Literature | 4 | |
The Ancient Mediterranean World | 4 | |
The Middle Ages | 4 | |
The Renaissance | 4 | |
Eighteenth- and 19th-Century Literature | 4 | |
The Modern Period | 4 | |
Fiction and Culture of the Americas | 4 | |
On line: Fiction and Culture of the Americas | 4 | |
Myth and Literature | 4 | |
Topics in Modern Greek Literature | 4 | |
Senior Seminar in Comparative Literature | 4 | |
Topics in Dutch Literature | 3 | |
DUTCH C164 The Indonesian Connection: Dutch (Post)colonial History and Culture in Southeast Asia | 4 | |
Dynamics of Romantic Core Values in East Asian Premodern Literature and Contemporary Film | 4 | |
Expressing the Ineffable in China and Beyond: The Making of Meaning in Poetic Writing | 4 | |
Revising the Classics: Chinese and Greek Poetry in Translation | 4 | |
Reading Global Politics in Contemporary East Asian Literature | 4 | |
Modern East Asian Fiction | 4 | |
Lu Xun and his Worlds | 4 | |
Neurodiversity in Literature | 4 | |
Science Fiction in East Asia | 4 | |
The Seminar on Criticism | 4 | |
The English Bible As Literature | 4 | |
Medieval Literature | 4 | |
Chaucer | 4 | |
Middle English Literature | 4 | |
English Drama | 4 | |
English Drama | 4 | |
The English Renaissance | 4 | |
The English Renaissance | 4 | |
Shakespeare | 4 | |
Shakespeare | 4 | |
Shakespeare and Film | 4 | |
Shakespeare | 4 | |
Shakespeare | 4 | |
Shakespeare in the Theatre | 4 | |
Milton | 4 | |
Literature of the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century | 4 | |
Literature of the Later 18th Century | 4 | |
Romantic Period | 4 | |
Victorian Period | 4 | |
The English Novel | 4 | |
The English Novel | 4 | |
The European Novel | 4 | |
The 20th-Century Novel | 4 | |
The Contemporary Novel | 4 | |
British Literature: 1900-1945 | 4 | |
Modern Poetry | 4 | |
Modern Drama | 4 | |
American Literature: Before 1800 | 4 | |
American Literature: 1800-1865 | 4 | |
American Literature: 1865-1900 | 4 | |
American Literature: 1900-1945 | 4 | |
American Poetry | 4 | |
American Novel | 4 | |
African American Literature and Culture Before 1917 | 4 | |
African American Literature and Culture Since 1917 | 4 | |
Topics in African American Literature and Culture | 4 | |
Contemporary Literature | 4 | |
Literature of American Cultures | 4 | |
Topics in American Studies | 4 | |
Chicana/o Literature and Culture to 1910 | 4 | |
Chicana/o Literature and Culture Since 1910 | 4 | |
Topics in Chicana/o Literature and Culture | 4 | |
Studies in World Literature in English | 4 | |
The Cultures of English | 4 | |
Women Writers | 4 | |
Topics in Asian American Literatures and Cultures | 4 | |
Special Topics | 4 | |
Special Topics in American Cultures | 4 | |
Special Topics | 4 | |
Special Topics in American Cultures | 4 | |
Special Topics | 6 | |
Literature and the Arts | 4 | |
Literature and Sexual Identity | 4 | |
Literature and Psychology | 4 | |
Literature and History | 4 | |
Literature and Disability | 4 | |
Literature and Popular Culture | 4 | |
Literature and Philosophy | 4 | |
British and American Folklore | 4 | |
Literature and Linguistics | 4 | |
Autobiography | 4 | |
Comedy | 4 | |
The Epic | 4 | |
Short Story | 4 | |
The Essay | 4 | |
Lyric Verse | 4 | |
The Novel | 4 | |
The Romance | 4 | |
Satire | 4 | |
Tragedy | 4 | |
Science Fiction | 4 | |
Research Seminar | 4 | |
Comparative Ethnic Literature in America | 4 | |
Comparative Ethnic Literature in America | 3 | |
Existential Panic in American Ethnic Literature | 4 | |
Literature from Ethnic Movements | 4 | |
Medieval Literature | 4 | |
Medieval Literature | 4 | |
Late Medieval Literature | 4 | |
Sixteenth-Century Literature: Marot to Montaigne | 4 | |
Seventeenth-Century Literature | 4 | |
Seventeenth-Century Literature | 4 | |
Eighteenth-Century Literature | 4 | |
Eighteenth-Century Literature | 4 | |
Nineteenth-Century Literature | 4 | |
Nineteenth-Century Literature | 4 | |
Twentieth-Century Literature | 4 | |
Twentieth-Century Literature | 4 | |
Literary Themes, Genres, and Structures | 4 | |
Literary Themes, Genres, and Structures | 4 | |
Literary Criticism | 4 | |
Literary Criticism | 4 | |
Prose Fiction | 4 | |
Modern Theatre | 4 | |
Senior Seminar | 4 | |
French Literature in English Translation | 4 | |
French Literature in English Translation | 4 | |
French Literature in English Translation | 4 | |
French Literature in English Translation | 4 | |
Women in French Literature | 4 | |
Women in French Literature | 4 | |
Francophone Literature | 4 | |
Francophone Literature | 4 | |
Psychoanalytic Theory and Literature | 4 | |
Music and Literature | 4 | |
Literature and the Visual Arts | 4 | |
Philosophy and Literature | 4 | |
Literature and Colonialism | 4 | |
Cultural Representations of Sexualities: Queer Literary Culture | 4 | |
Literary Translation | 4 | |
The Literature of the Middle Ages | 3 | |
Early Modern Literature | 4 | |
From 1800 to the Present | 3 | |
Goethe | 4 | |
Romanticism | 4 | |
German Drama and Opera | 4 | |
Topics in Narrative | 4 | |
Eighteenth- to 21st-Century German Poetry | 3 | |
Modern Literature | 4 | |
Kafka | 4 | |
Literature in the Digital Age | 4 | |
Holocaust: Media, Memory, Representation | 4 | |
Plato and Attic Prose | 4 | |
Homer | 4 | |
Drama and Society | 4 | |
The Greek New Testament | 4 | |
Archaic Poetry | 4 | |
Greek Drama | 4 | |
Hellenistic Poets | 4 | |
Herodotus | 4 | |
Thucydides | 4 | |
Attic Oratory | 4 | |
Plato and Aristotle | 4 | |
Greek Literature of the Hellenistic and Imperial Periods | 4 | |
Modern Hebrew Literature and Culture | 3 | |
Modern Hebrew Literature and Culture | 3 | |
Reading Italian Literature | 4 | |
Dante's Commedia (in Italian) | 4 | |
Literature and Culture of the 13th and 14th Centuries | 4 | |
Sixteenth-Century Literature and Culture | 4 | |
Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture | 4 | |
Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature | 4 | |
Topics in Italian Studies | 4 | |
Dante's Inferno (in English) | 4 | |
Dante's Purgatorio and Paradiso (in English) | 4 | |
Special Topics in Italian Literature | 4 | |
Classical Japanese Poetry | 4 | |
Premodern Japanese Diary (Nikki) Literature | 4 | |
Heian Prose | 4 | |
Edo Literature | 4 | |
Modern Japanese Literature | 4 | |
Contemporary Japanese Literature | 4 | |
Classical Japanese Literature in Translation | 4 | |
Modern Japanese Literature in Translation | 4 | |
Urami: Rancor and Revenge in Japanese Literature | 4 | |
Ghosts and the Modern Literary Imagination | 4 | |
Reframing Disasters: Fukushima, Before and After | 4 | |
Fourth-Year Readings: Korean Literature | 4 | |
Genre and Occasion in Traditional Poetry | 4 | |
Narrating Persons and Objects in Traditional Korean Prose | 4 | |
Modern Korean Poetry | 4 | |
Readings in Modern Korean Literature | 4 | |
Modern Korean Fiction | 4 | |
Contemporary Korean Literature | 4 | |
Intercultural Encounters in Korean Literature | 4 | |
Gender and Korean Literature | 4 | |
Modern Korean Fiction in Translation | 4 | |
Critical Approaches to Modern Korean Literature | 4 | |
Cold War Culture in Korea: Literature and Film | 4 | |
Republican Prose | 4 | |
Vergil | 4 | |
Lyric and Society | 4 | |
Roman Drama | 4 | |
Lucretius, Vergil's Georgics | 4 | |
Latin Epic | 4 | |
Latin Prose to AD 14 | 4 | |
Tacitus | 4 | |
Post-Augustan Prose | 4 | |
Medieval Latin | 4 | |
Readings in Medieval Latin | 4 | |
Cultural Representations of Sexuality | 4 | |
Cultural Representations of Sexualities: Queer Literary Culture | 4 | |
Ancient Mesopotamian Literature | 3 | |
Gilgamesh: King, Hero, and God | 4 | |
Biblical Poetry | 4 | |
Modern Jewish Literatures | 4 | |
Arabic Literature in Translation | 3 | |
Arabic Literature in Translation | 3 | |
Cultural Encounters in Modern Arabic Literature | 3 | |
Narratives of Identity in Israeli and Palestinian Fiction | 4 | |
The Thousand and One Nights in World Literary Imagination | 3 | |
Film and Fiction of Iran | 4 | |
Native American Literature | 4 | |
Readings in Persian Literature | 3 | |
Readings in Persian Literature | 3 | |
Readings in Classical Persian Prose | 3 | |
Readings in Classical Persian Prose | 3 | |
Classical Persian Poetry | 3 | |
Classical Persian Poetry | 3 | |
Contemporary Persian Literature | 3 | |
Contemporary Persian Literature | 3 | |
Modern Analytical Prose in Persian | 3 | |
Introduction to Portuguese Literature and Culture | 4 | |
Modern and Contemporary Brazilian Literature | 4 | |
Studies in Luso-Brazilian Literature | 4 | |
Rhetoric of Narrative Genres in Nonliterate Societies | 4 | |
Rhetoric of Fiction | 4 | |
Rhetoric of Drama | 4 | |
Rhetoric of Poetry | 4 | |
Poetics and Poetry | 4 | |
Novel, Society, and Politics | 4 | |
Rhetoric of Autobiography | 4 | |
Autobiography and American Individualism | 4 | |
Novel into Film | 4 | |
Genre in Film and Literature | 4 | |
Rhetoric of the Political Novel | 4 | |
Intermediate Sanskrit: Sahitya (Literary Sanskrit) | 5 | |
The Works of Hans Christian Andersen | 4 | |
Plays of Ibsen | 4 | |
Strindberg | 4 | |
Studies in Prose | 4 | |
The Novel in Scandinavian | 4 | |
Old Norse Literature | 4 | |
Studies in Scandinavian Literature | 4 | |
Scandinavian Myth and Religion | 4 | |
Scandinavian Myth and Religion | 4 | |
Scandinavian Folklore | 4 | |
Arctic Folklore and Mythology in Nordic Lands | 4 | |
Literature, Art, and Society in 20th-Century Russia | 4 | |
Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and the English Novel | 4 | |
The Novel in Russia and the West | 4 | |
Gogol | 4 | |
Dostoevsky | 4 | |
Tolstoy | 4 | |
Chekhov | 4 | |
Nabokov | 4 | |
Tolstoy and Dostoevsky | 4 | |
Studies in Russian Literature | 4 | |
Russia and Asia | 4 | |
Post-Soviet Cultures | 4 | |
East Slavic Folklore | 3 | |
Balkan Folklore | 3 | |
Polish Literature and Intellectual Trends | 3 | |
Readings in Polish Literature | 4 | |
Survey of Yugoslav Literatures | 3 | |
Advanced Readings in Yugoslav/Post-Yugoslav Studies | 3 | |
Readings in Russian Literature | 4 | |
Pushkin | 4 | |
Russian Prose | 4 | |
Introduction to Modern Indonesian and Malaysian Literature in Translation | 4 | |
Mainland Southeast Asian Literature | 4 | |
Articulations of the Female in Indonesia | 4 | |
Philippines: History, Literature, Performance | 4 | |
Filipino Mythology | 4 | |
Narratives of Vietnam and Vietnamese Diaspora | 4 | |
Survey of Spanish American Literature | 4 | |
Survey of Spanish American Literature | 4 | |
Survey of Spanish Literature | 4 | |
Survey of Spanish Literature | 4 | |
Cervantes | 4 | |
Cervantes | 4 | |
Spanish Poetry | 4 | |
The Spanish American Short Story | 4 | |
Studies in Hispanic Literature | 4 | |
Studies in Hispanic Literature - Writing Intensive | 4 | |
Spanish-American Fiction in English Translation | 4 | |
Readings in Tamil | 4 | |
Readings in Tamil | 4 | |
Plays of Ibsen | 4 | |
Strindberg | 4 | |
Performance Literatures | 4 | |
Black Theatre Workshop | 3 | |
Readings in Modern Turkish | 3 | |
Readings in Modern Turkish | 3 |
Creative writing minor.
Undergraduate and Interdisciplinary Studies
295 Evans Hall
Fiona McFarlane, PhD (Department of English)
413 Wheeler Hall
Laura Demir
When you print this page, you are actually printing everything within the tabs on the page you are on: this may include all the Related Courses and Faculty, in addition to the Requirements or Overview. If you just want to print information on specific tabs, you're better off downloading a PDF of the page, opening it, and then selecting the pages you really want to print.
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Steve Huynh transitioned from creative writing to programming, landing a contract role at Amazon.
He faced an eight-year struggle to get promoted from senior to principal engineer.
Huynh achieved his goal in 2020 and later grew his total compensation at Amazon to $528,000.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Steve Huynh , a 42-year-old from Seattle, Washington. It has been edited for length and clarity.
A friend used his connection to land me an interview for a contract role at Amazon after I expressed interest in transitioning from creative writing to programming. I got the job in 2006 and made it my mission to create such an undeniable presence at the company that my transition into full-time employment would be guaranteed. And I did just that.
After multiple swift promotions that led me to become a senior software engineer by 2012, I found myself in a career rut . It took me eight painful years to finally get promoted. Along the way, I struggled and even considered quitting.
In 2020, my fiercely systematic approach to getting a promotion worked and I achieved my goal of becoming a principal engineer. In my 18 years at Amazon, I successfully went from making $35 an hour as a contractor to making a $270,000 base salary as a principal engineer plus additional income from RSUs for a total compensation of over $528,000.
In my last semester as a creative writing undergrad at the University of Washington , I asked my writing workshop professor what the job landscape for writers looked like. He told me there's no job called writer, there's only a job called waiter. I took his comment to heart and pivoted my job search to programming.
Both of my parents are engineers and I'd been programming since I was little, plus I double minored in math and applied math, so I felt like I was three-quarters of the way to being a software engineer. I ended up falling in love with it.
Shortly after I graduated, I was grabbing drinks with a buddy from high school who was working at Amazon. He knew of a job opening at Amazon for a support engineer role and guaranteed me he could snag me an interview. The job was a contract role, and my responsibility would be to identify and resolve computer issues. It felt software engineer-adjacent, so I took him up on the opportunity and got the job at $35 per hour.
I quickly got into the rhythm of the day-to-day job and didn't find my responsibilities challenging. For half the day I found myself with no other work to complete, so I utilized my free time to learn new programming skills and create a presence at the company.
Amazon is a pretty transparent place so I took advantage of its internal Wikipedia to download as much information as possible about its coding systems. I let my curiosity drive me down a rabbit hole and soaked up as much information from internal sources as I could.
I also made a concerted effort to insert myself into the software development department and create an undeniable presence at the company . For example, if a customer came to me with a website issue due to a software bug, my job as a support person would be to file a bug report. Instead, I'd file the bug report and immediately locate the impacted piece of code and file a fix for it. Software engineers had to review my changes, but I forged a trusting relationship with them by effectively contributing to their jobs. I slowly networked my way into monthly software engineer meetings and steadily expanded my frontier of exposure within the group.
In late 2007, I felt ready for a new role and decided to interview for a lateral move within the company. I was only supposed to reach out to one department for job opportunities at a time, but I contacted and secured interviews with three departments.
To prepare for the interviews, I pooled colleagues for questions they remembered being asked during their interviews and created a comprehensive database. Then I asked my new software engineer friends to give me mock interviews . I ended up getting job offers from all three departments I interviewed for.
I accepted a job in payments as a software development engineer for a base salary of $75,000 where my role was to perform high-scale backend transaction processing. The job was boring from the outside, but we were playing with some pretty big numbers which kept it interesting. I stayed in that role for nearly five years before being promoted to senior development engineer in 2012 with a base salary of $107,000.
Four years after I became a senior engineer , I felt ready to be promoted to principal, but I was denied. Luckily, I'd just gotten moved to a team developing Amazon Tickets, a Ticketmaster alternative, and I loved it. The project shifted me out of a promotion mindset. I was so enraptured with the project.
But in March 2018, two years into development, Amazon Tickets was unexpectedly shuttered . At that point, I was so done. I started feeling disengaged at work and seriously considered quitting. It was the lowest of lows for me.
I quickly got reorged to the Prime Video live events team and started reporting to a new manager. I had the opportunity to lead the live services engineering teams on broadcasts for events like Thursday Night Football. I found it hugely exciting. Plus, I hit it off right away with my new manager and we became a powerhouse duo. He even helped me write and submit my promotion document, though I got denied that first time around.
Amazon has an incredibly granular list of criteria that need to be met before you can be considered for promotion, so I worked with my manager to identify the gaps in my performance, and I got feedback that helped me get systematic about my approach moving forward.
I created a project for each gap that, if completed, could serve as evidence of my ability. I worked backward to create a strict timeline to finish my projects between July 2019 and November 2019, when the promotion document was due.
I was denied again, but my list of missing criteria had shrunk significantly. I created projects for those final skills and submitted another promotion document a few months later and was approved to become a principal engineer at a base salary of $160,000. But, just as I was promoted, the pandemic shut down all our sports leagues, and for the first time in a while, I had time.
I started watching a lot of YouTube videos and decided to use my extra time to throw my hat in the ring and start my own tech channel .
I already owned a lot of photography equipment, so it wasn't too much of a stretch for me. By 2024, my base salary at Amazon had grown to $270,000 plus RSUs for a total compensation of $528,000. I had made nearly as much as my base salary from YouTube the previous year and realized I'd regret not taking a chance on myself and going all in on my YouTube channel. In March of this year, I officially quit Amazon .
Creating content is incredibly satisfying, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't miss working on projects that affected hundreds of millions of people. I miss writing code. I miss being a stone's throw away from brilliant people. Sometimes, I even miss the corporate jargon .
I spent 50% of my waking life at Amazon and feel like it'll always be a part of me. Maybe one day I'll go back, but for now, I'm happy with the path I've chosen. September 23, 2024: This story was updated to clarify Steve Huynh's base salary and total compensation at Amazon.
If you work in Big Tech and would like to share your salary progression and career journey, please email Tess Martinelli at [email protected] .
Read the original article on Business Insider
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Undergraduate Creative Writing Program Office: 609 Kent; 212-854-3774 http://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate
Director of Undergraduate Studies: Prof. Anelise Chen, Fiction, Nonfiction, 609 Kent; 212-854-3774; [email protected]
Undergraduate Executive Committee:
The Creative Writing Program in The School of the Arts combines intensive writing workshops with seminars that study literature from a writer's perspective. Students develop and hone their literary technique in workshops. The seminars (which explore literary technique and history) broaden their sense of possibility by exposing them to various ways that language has been used to make art. Related courses are drawn from departments such as English, comparative literature and society, philosophy, history, and anthropology, among others.
Students consult with faculty advisers to determine the related courses that best inform their creative work. For details on the major, see the Creative Writing website: http://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate .
Margo L. Jefferson
Phillip Lopate
The major in creative writing requires a minimum of 36 points: five workshops, four seminars, and three related courses.
Students in the workshops produce original works of fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, and submit them to their classmates and instructor for a close critical analysis. Workshop critiques (which include detailed written reports and thorough line-edits) assess the mechanics and merits of the writing pieces. Individual instructor conferences distill the critiques into a direct plan of action to improve the work. Student writers develop by practicing the craft under the diligent critical attention of their peers and instructor, which guides them toward new levels of creative endeavor.
Creative writing majors select 15 points within the division in the following courses. One workshop must be in a genre other than the primary focus. For instance, a fiction writer might take four fiction workshops and one poetry workshop.
Code | Title | Points |
---|---|---|
Beginning Workshop | ||
Designed for students who have little or no previous experience writing literary texts in a particular genre. | ||
BEGINNING FICTION WORKSHOP | ||
BEGINNING NONFICTION WORKSHOP | ||
BEGINNING POETRY WORKSHOP | ||
Intermediate Workshop | ||
Permission required. Admission by writing sample. Enrollment limited to 15. Course may be repeated in fulfillment of the major. | ||
INTERMEDIATE FICTION WORKSHOP | ||
INTERMEDIATE NONFICTION WRKSHP | ||
INTERMEDIATE POETRY WORKSHOP | ||
Advanced Workshop | ||
Permission required. Admission by writing sample. Enrollment limited to 15. Course may be repeated in fulfillment of the major. | ||
ADVANCED FICTION WORKSHOP | ||
ADVANCED NONFICTION WORKSHOP | ||
ADVANCED POETRY WORKSHOP | ||
Senior Creative Writing Workshop | ||
Seniors who are creative writing majors are given priority. Enrollment limited to 12, by instructor's permission. The senior workshop offers students the opportunity to work exclusively with classmates who are at the same high level of accomplishment in the major. This course is only offered by graduate faculty professors. | ||
SENIOR FICTION WORKSHOP,Senior Fiction Workshop | ||
SENIOR NONFICTION WORKSHOP | ||
SENIOR POETRY WORKSHOP |
The creative writing seminars form the intellectual ballast of our program. Our seminars offer a close examination of literary techniques such as plot, point of view, tone, and voice. They seek to inform and inspire students by exposing them to a wide variety of approaches in their chosen genre. Our curriculum, via these seminars, actively responds not only to historical literary concerns, but to contemporary ones as well. Extensive readings are required, along with short critical papers and/or creative exercises. By closely analyzing diverse works of literature and participating in roundtable discussions, writers build the resources necessary to produce their own accomplished creative work.
Creative writing majors select 12 points within the division. Any 4 seminars will fulfill the requirement, no matter the student's chosen genre concentration. Below is a sampling of our seminars. The list of seminars currently being offered can be found in the "Courses" section.
Code | Title | Points |
---|---|---|
These seminars offer close examination of literary techniques such as plot, point of view, tone, suspense, and narrative voice. Extensive readings are required, along with creative exercises. | ||
FICTION | ||
HOW TO BUILD A PERSON | ||
Fiction Seminar: The Here & Now | ||
FIRST NOVELS: HOW THEY WORK | ||
THE CRAFT OF WRITING DIALOGUE | ||
NONFICTION | ||
Nonfiction Seminar: The Literary Reporter | ||
ART WRITING FOR WRITERS | ||
TRUTH & FACTS | ||
SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY | ||
POETRY | ||
TRADITIONS IN POETRY | ||
Poetry Seminar: The Crisis of the I | ||
Poetry Seminar: 21st Century American Poetry and Its Concerns | ||
WITNESS,RECORD,DOCUMENT | ||
CROSS GENRE | ||
Cross Genre Seminar: Imagining Berlin | ||
Cross Genre Seminar: Diva Voice, Diva Style, Diva Lyrics | ||
WALKING | ||
Cross-Genre Seminar: Process Writing & Writing Process |
Drawn from various departments, these courses provide concentrated intellectual and creative stimulation, as well as exposure to ideas that enrich students' artistic instincts. Courses may be different for each student writer. Students should consult with faculty advisers to determine the related courses that best inform their creative work.
WRIT UN1100 BEGINNING FICTION WORKSHOP. 3.00 points .
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
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
WRIT 1100 | 001/15112 | Th 6:10pm - 8:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Ronald Robertson | 3.00 | 17/15 |
WRIT 1100 | 002/15113 | M 10:10am - 12:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Emily Christine Johnson | 3.00 | 14/15 |
WRIT 1100 | 003/15163 | T 6:10pm - 8:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Emily Gutierrez | 3.00 | 13/15 |
WRIT 1100 | 004/15164 | M 2:10pm - 4:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Alexis Hutchinson | 3.00 | 13/15 |
WRIT 1100 | 005/15165 | Th 10:10am - 12:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Luciana Siracusano | 3.00 | 14/15 |
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
WRIT 1100 | 001/18712 | M 2:10pm - 4:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Celine Ipek | 3.00 | 4/15 |
WRIT 1100 | 002/18713 | W 4:10pm - 6:00pm 212a Lewisohn Hall | Caroline Johnson | 3.00 | 10/15 |
WRIT 1100 | 003/18714 | W 2:10pm - 4:00pm 106b Lewisohn Hall | Mattie Govan | 3.00 | 6/15 |
WRIT 1100 | 004/18715 | Th 4:10pm - 6:00pm 114 Knox Hall | Gabrielle McAree | 3.00 | 0/15 |
WRIT 1100 | 005/18716 | T 6:10pm - 8:00pm 212a Lewisohn Hall | Ellen Garard | 3.00 | 8/15 |
WRIT UN2100 INTERMEDIATE FICTION WORKSHOP. 3.00 points .
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
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 2100 | 001/15117 | Th 2:10pm - 4:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Joss Lake | 3.00 | 11/15 |
WRIT 2100 | 002/15118 | Th 4:10pm - 6:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Omer Friedlander | 3.00 | 9/15 |
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
WRIT 2100 | 001/13546 | Th 2:10pm - 4:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Heidi Julavits | 3.00 | 0/15 |
WRIT 2100 | 002/13547 | T 2:10pm - 4:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Sophie Kemp | 3.00 | 0/15 |
WRIT UN3100 ADVANCED FICTION WORKSHOP. 3.00 points .
Prerequisites: The department's permission required through writing sample. Please go to 609 Kent for submission schedule and registration guidelines or see http://www.arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate. 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
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 3100 | 001/15126 | Th 4:10pm - 6:00pm 507 Philosophy Hall | Rebecca Schiff | 3.00 | 13/15 |
WRIT 3100 | 002/15127 | M 10:10am - 12:00pm 507 Philosophy Hall | Marie Lee | 3.00 | 15/15 |
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
WRIT 3100 | 001/13550 | Th 12:10pm - 2:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Hannah Assadi | 3.00 | 0/15 |
WRIT 3100 | 002/13551 | W 10:10am - 12:00pm 317 Hamilton Hall | Victor Lavalle | 3.00 | 0/15 |
WRIT UN3101 SENIOR FICTION WORKSHOP,Senior Fiction Workshop. 4.00,4 points .
Prerequisites: The department's permission required through writing sample. Please go to 609 Kent for submission schedule and registration guidelines or see http://www.arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate. Prerequisites: The department's permission required through writing sample. Please go to 609 Kent for submission schedule and registration guidelines or see http://www.arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate. 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.,
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.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
WRIT 3101 | 001/15128 | W 2:10pm - 4:00pm Sat Alfred Lerner Hall | Samuel Lipsyte | 4 | 13/15 |
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
WRIT 3101 | 001/13552 | T 10:10am - 12:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Rivka Galchen | 4 | 0/12 |
WRIT UN2110 APPROACHES TO THE SHORT STORY. 3.00 points .
Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. The modern short story has gone through many transformations, and the innovations of its practitioners have often pointed the way for prose fiction as a whole. The short story has been seized upon and refreshed by diverse cultures and aesthetic affiliations, so that perhaps the only stable definition of the form remains the famous one advanced by Poe, one of its early masters, as a work of fiction that can be read in one sitting. Still, common elements of the form have emerged over the last century and this course will study them, including Point of View, Plot, Character, Setting and Theme. John Hawkes once famously called these last four elements the "enemies of the novel," and many short story writers have seen them as hindrances as well. Hawkes later recanted, though some writers would still agree with his earlier assessment, and this course will examine the successful strategies of great writers across the spectrum of short story practice, from traditional approaches to more radical solutions, keeping in mind how one period's revolution -Hemingway, for example - becomes a later era's mainstream or "commonsense" storytelling mode. By reading the work of major writers from a writer's perspective, we will examine the myriad techniques employed for what is finally a common goal: to make readers feel. Short writing exercises will help us explore the exhilarating subtleties of these elements and how the effects created by their manipulation or even outright absence power our most compelling fictions
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 2110 | 001/15119 | Th 12:10pm - 2:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Ronald Robertson | 3.00 | 16/15 |
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
WRIT 2110 | 001/18724 | Th 10:10am - 12:00pm Room TBA | Celine Ipek | 3.00 | 8/15 |
WRIT UN3128 How to Write Funny. 3.00 points .
"Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die." --Mel Brooks "Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the End." --Sid Caesar "Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it." --E.B. White "What is comedy? Comedy is the art of making people laugh without making them puke." --Steve Martin "Patty Marx is the best teacher at Columbia University." --Patty Marx One of the above quotations is false. Find out which one in this humor-writing workshop, where you will read, listen to, and watch comedic samples from well-known and lesser-known humorists. How could you not have fun in a class where we watch and critique the sketches of Monty Python, Nichols and May, Mr. Show, Mitchell & Webb, Key and Peele, French and Saunders, Derrick Comedy, Beyond the Fringe, Dave Chappelle, Bob and Ray, Mel Brooks, Amy Schumer, and SNL, to name just a few? The crux of our time, though, will be devoted to writing. Students will be expected to complete weekly writing assignments; additionally, there will be in-class assignments geared to strategies for crafting surprise (the kind that results in a laugh as opposed to, say, a heart attack or divorce). Toward this end, we will study the use of irony, irreverence, hyperbole, misdirection, subtext, wordplay, formulas such as the rule of three and paraprosdokians (look it up), and repetition, and repetition
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 3128 | 001/15131 | T 2:10pm - 4:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Patricia Marx | 3.00 | 14/15 |
WRIT UN3125 APOCALYPSES NOW. 3.00 points .
From ancient myths of the world’s destruction to cinematic works that envision a post-apocalyptic reality, zealots of all kinds have sought an understanding of “the end of the world as we know it.” But while apocalyptic predictions have, so far, failed to deliver a real glimpse of that end, in fiction they abound. In this course, we will explore the narrative mechanisms by which post-apocalyptic works create projections of our own world that are believably imperiled, realistically degraded, and designed to move us to feel differently and act differently within the world we inhabit. We will consider ways in which which authors craft immersive storylines that maintain a vital allegorical relationship to the problems of the present, and discuss recent trends in contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction. How has the genre responded to our changing conception of peril? Is literary apocalyptic fiction effective as a vehicle for persuasion and for showing threats in a new light? Ultimately, we will inquire into the possibility of thinking beyond our present moment and, by doing so, altering our fate.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
WRIT 3125 | 001/13553 | W 4:10pm - 6:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Molly McGhee | 3.00 | 15/15 |
WRIT W3830 Fiction Seminar: Voices & Visions of Childhood. 3 points .
This course focuses on literature written for adults, NOT children's books or young-adult literature.
Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required.
Flannery O'Connor famously said, "Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days." A child's or youth's journey-- whether through ordinary, universal rites of passage, or through extraordinary adventure or trauma-- compels an adult reader (and writer) to (re)inhabit the world as both naif and nature's savant. Through the knowing/unknowing eye of the child or adolescent, the writer can explore adult topics prismatically and poignantly -- "from the bottom up" -- via humor, terror, innocence, wonder, or all of the above. In this course, we will read both long and short form examples of childhood and youth stories, examining in particular the relationships between narrator and character, character and world (setting), character and language and narrator and reader (i.e. "reliability" of narrator). Students will write two papers. Short scene-based writing assignments will challenge student writers to both mine their own memories for material and imagine voices/experiences far from their own.
WRIT UN3121 HOW TO BUILD A PERSON. 3.00 points .
Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Departmental approval NOT required. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Departmental approval NOT required. Character is something that good fiction supposedly cannot do without. But what is a character, and what constitutes a supposedly good or believable one? Should characters be like people we know, and if so, how exactly do we create written versions of people? This class will examine characters in all sorts of writing, historical and contemporary, with an eye toward understanding just how characters are created in fiction, and how they come to seem real to us. Well read stories and novels; we may also look at essays and biographical writing to analyze where the traces of personhood reside. Well also explore the way in which these same techniques of writing allow us to personify entities that lack traditional personhood, such as animals, computers, and other nonhuman characters. Does personhood precede narrative, or is it something we bestow on others by allowing them to tell their story or by telling a story of our own creation on their behalf? Weekly critical and creative exercises will intersect with and expand on the readings and discussions
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 3121 | 001/13554 | W 2:10pm - 4:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Mina Seckin | 3.00 | 15/15 |
WRIT UN3132 THE ECSTASY OF INFLUENCE. 3.00 points .
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
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
WRIT 3132 | 001/13555 | T 12:10pm - 2:00pm 104 Knox Hall | Adam Wilson | 3.00 | 15/15 |
WRIT UN1200 BEGINNING NONFICTION WORKSHOP. 3.00 points .
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
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
WRIT 1200 | 001/15114 | T 4:10pm - 6:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Peter Raffel | 3.00 | 13/15 |
WRIT 1200 | 002/15115 | M 2:10pm - 4:00pm 212a Lewisohn Hall | Wally Suphap | 3.00 | 14/15 |
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
WRIT 1200 | 001/18717 | Th 12:10pm - 2:00pm 963 Ext Schermerhorn Hall | Adelia Khan | 3.00 | 8/15 |
WRIT 1200 | 002/18718 | Th 6:10pm - 8:00pm 423 Kent Hall | Diana Heald | 3.00 | 6/15 |
WRIT 1200 | 003/18719 | W 6:10pm - 8:00pm 423 Kent Hall | Emma DeCamp | 3.00 | 4/15 |
WRIT UN2200 INTERMEDIATE NONFICTION WRKSHP. 3.00 points .
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
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 2200 | 001/15120 | T 12:10pm - 2:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Zohra Saed | 3.00 | 12/15 |
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
WRIT 2200 | 001/13548 | M 2:10pm - 4:00pm 608 Lewisohn Hall | Lars Horn | 3.00 | 0/15 |
WRIT UN3200 ADVANCED NONFICTION WORKSHOP. 3.00 points .
Advanced Nonfiction Workshop is for students with significant narrative and/or critical experience. Students will produce original literary nonfiction for the workshop. This workshop is reserved for accomplished nonfiction writers and maintains the highest level of creative and critical expectations. Among the many forms that creative nonfiction might assume, students may work in the following nonfiction genres: memoir, personal essay, journalism, travel writing, science writing, and/or others. In addition, students may be asked to consider the following: ethical considerations in nonfiction writing, social and cultural awareness, narrative structure, detail and description, point of view, voice, and editing and revision among other aspects of praxis. A portfolio of nonficiton will be written and revised with the critical input of the instructor and the workshop. Please visit https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate for information about registration procedures
WRIT UN3201 SENIOR NONFICTION WORKSHOP. 4.00 points .
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 3201 | 001/15129 | M 12:10pm - 2:00pm 301m Fayerweather | Lars Horn | 4.00 | 12/15 |
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
WRIT 3201 | 001/13556 | M 12:10pm - 2:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Vanessa Martir | 4.00 | 0/15 |
WRIT UN2211 TRADITIONS IN NONFICTION. 3.00 points .
Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. The seminar provides exposure to the varieties of nonfiction with readings in its principal genres: reportage, criticism and commentary, biography and history, and memoir and the personal essay. A highly plastic medium, nonfiction allows authors to portray real events and experiences through narrative, analysis, polemic or any combination thereof. Free to invent everything but the facts, great practitioners of nonfiction are faithful to reality while writing with a voice and a vision distinctively their own. To show how nonfiction is conceived and constructed, class discussions will emphasize the relationship of content to form and style, techniques for creating plot and character under the factual constraints imposed by nonfiction, the defining characteristics of each authors voice, the authors subjectivity and presence, the role of imagination and emotion, the uses of humor, and the importance of speculation and attitude. Written assignments will be opportunities to experiment in several nonfiction genres and styles
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
WRIT 2211 | 001/15121 | W 6:10pm - 8:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Peter Raffel | 3.00 | 15/15 |
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
WRIT 2211 | 001/18723 | M 4:10pm - 6:00pm 608 Lewisohn Hall | Adelia Khan | 3.00 | 5/15 |
WRIT UN3214 HYBRID NONFICTION FORMS. 3.00 points .
Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. 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
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 3214 | 001/13557 | T 12:10pm - 2:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Margo Jefferson | 3.00 | 15/15 |
WRIT UN3215 ART WRITING FOR WRITERS. 3.00 points .
Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. In this course, we will look at some of the most dynamic examples of "visual writing." To begin, we will look at writers writing about art, from the Romantic period through the present. The modes of this art writing we will consider include: the practice of ekphrasis (poems which address or derive their inspiration from a work of art); writers such as Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, John Ashbery, and Eileen Myles, who for periods of their lives worked as art critics; writers such as Etel Adnan and Alexander Kulge, who have produced literature and works of art in equal measure; as well as numerous collaborations between writers and visual artists. We will also look at artists who have written essays and poetry throughout their careers, like artists Robert Smithson, Glenn Ligon, David Wojnarowicz, Moyra Davey, Paul Chan, and Hannah Black, as well as professional critics whose work has been elevated to the status of literature, such as Hilton Als, Janet Malcolm, and Susan Sontag. Lastly, we will consider what it means to write through a “milieu” of sonic and visual artists, such as those associated with Dada, the Harlem Renaissance, the New York School, and Moscow Conceptualism. Throughout the course, students will also be prompted to write with and about current art exhibitions and events throughout the city. They will produce original works in various of the modes described above and complete a final writing project that incorporates what they have learned
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
WRIT 3215 | 001/13558 | W 12:10pm - 2:00pm 317 Hamilton Hall | Eliza Callahan | 3.00 | 15/15 |
WRIT UN3217 SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY. 3.00 points .
Writing about the natural world is one of the world's oldest literary traditions and the site of some of today's most daring literary experiments. Known loosely as "science writing" this tradition can be traced through texts in myriad and overlapping genres, including poetry, explorer's notebooks, essays, memoirs, art books, and science journalism. Taken together, these divers texts reveal a rich literary tradition in which the writer's sensibility and worldview are paramount to an investigation of the known and unknown. In this course, we will consider a wide range of texts in order to map this tradition. We will question what it means to use science as metaphor, explore how to write about science with rigor and commitment to scientific truth, and interrogate the fiction of objectivity.
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
WRIT 3217 | 001/13559 | | Meehan Crist | 3.00 | 7/15 |
WRIT UN3224 Writing the Sixties. 3.00 points .
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
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
WRIT 3224 | 001/18550 | M 6:10pm - 8:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Mark Rozzo | 3.00 | 14/15 |
WRIT UN3225 LIFE STORIES. 3.00 points .
In this seminar, we will target nonfiction that tells stories about lives: profiles, memoirs, and biographies. We will examine how the practice of this kind of nonfiction, and ideas about it, have evolved over the past 150 years. Along the way, we will ask questions about these nonfiction forms: How do reporters, memoirists, biographers, and critics make sense of their subjects? How do they create work as rich as the best novels and short stories? Can criticism explicate the inner life of a human subject? What roles do voice, point-of-view, character, dialogue, and plot—the traditional elements of fiction—play? Along the way, we’ll engage in issues of identity and race, memory and self, real persons and invented characters and we’ll get glimpses of such key publications as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books. Some writers we will consider: Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Ross, James Agee, John Hersey, Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, Gay Talese, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Janet Malcolm, Robert Caro, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. The course regularly welcomes guest speakers
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
WRIT 3225 | 001/13560 | M 6:10pm - 8:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Mark Rozzo | 3.00 | 15/15 |
WRIT UN3226 NONFICTION-ISH. 3.00 points .
This cross-genre 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 Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history of women and war, Lydia Davis’s “found” microfictions, Theresa Hak Cha’s genre-exploding “auto-enthnography,” Alejandro Zambra’s unabashedly literary narratives, Sigrid Nunez’s memoir “of” Susan Sontag, Emmanuel Carrére’s “nonfiction novel,” John Keene’s bold counternarratives, W. G. Sebald’s saturnine essay-portraits, Saidiya Hartman’s melding of history and literary imagination, Annie Ernaux’s collective autobiography, Sheila Heti’s alphabetized diary, Ben Mauk’s oral history about Xinjiang detention camps, and Edward St. Aubyn’s autobiographical novel about the British aristocracy and childhood trauma, among other texts. We will also examine Sharon Mashihi’s one-woman autofiction podcasts about Iranian Jewish American family. What we learn in this course we will apply to our own work, which will consist of two creative writing responses and a creative final project. Students will also learn to keep a daily writing journal
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 3226 | 001/15130 | Th 2:10pm - 4:00pm Sat Alfred Lerner Hall | James Yeh | 3.00 | 19/20 |
WRIT UN1300 BEGINNING POETRY WORKSHOP. 3.00 points .
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
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
WRIT 1300 | 001/15116 | M 4:10pm - 6:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Latif Ba | 3.00 | 15/15 |
WRIT 1300 | 002/15167 | T 6:10pm - 8:00pm 308a Lewisohn Hall | Joel Sedano | 3.00 | 13/15 |
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
WRIT 1300 | 001/18720 | Th 10:10am - 12:00pm Room TBA | Jane Crager | 3.00 | 3/15 |
WRIT 1300 | 002/18721 | M 4:10pm - 6:00pm 606 Lewisohn Hall | Sophia Mautz | 3.00 | 15/15 |
WRIT UN2300 INTERMEDIATE POETRY WORKSHOP. 3.00 points .
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
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 2300 | 001/15122 | M 4:10pm - 6:00pm 602 Lewisohn Hall | Alexander Dimitrov | 3.00 | 15/15 |
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
WRIT 2300 | 001/13549 | M 10:10am - 12:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Alexander Dimitrov | 3.00 | 0/15 |
WRIT UN3300 ADVANCED POETRY WORKSHOP. 3.00 points .
This poetry workshop is reserved for accomplished poetry writers and maintains the highest level of creative and critical expectations. 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 poetry will be written and revised with the critical input of the instructor and the workshop. Please visit https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate for information about registration procedures
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 3300 | 001/13561 | W 12:10pm - 2:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Emily Luan | 3.00 | 0/15 |
WRIT UN3301 SENIOR POETRY WORKSHOP. 4.00 points .
Prerequisites: The department's permission required through writing sample. Please go to 609 Kent for submission schedule and registration guidelines or see http://www.arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate. 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
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 3301 | 001/15132 | Th 12:10pm - 2:00pm 212a Lewisohn Hall | Emily Luan | 4.00 | 11/15 |
WRIT UN2311 TRADITIONS IN POETRY. 3.00 points .
Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. “For those, in dark, who find their own way by the light of others’ eyes.” —Lucie Brock-Broido The avenues of poetic tradition open to today’s poets are more numerous, more invigorating, and perhaps even more baffling than ever before. The routes we chose for our writing lead to destinations of our own making, and we take them at our own risk—necessarily so, as the pursuit of poetry asks each of us to light a pilgrim’s candle and follow it into the moors and lowlands, through wastes and prairies, crossing waters as we go. Go after the marshlights, the will-o-wisps who call to you in a voice you’ve longed for your whole life. These routes have been forged by those who came before you, but for that reason, none of them can hope to keep you on it entirely. You must take your steps away, brick by brick, heading confidently into the hinterland of your own distinct achievement. For the purpose of this class, we will walk these roads together, examining the works of classic and contemporary exemplars of the craft. By companioning poets from a large spread of time, we will be able to more diversely immerse ourselves in what a poetic “tradition” truly means. We will read works by Edmund Spencer, Dante, and Goethe, the Romantics—especially Keats—Dickinson, who is mother to us all, Modernists, and the great sweep of contemporary poetry that is too vast to individuate. While it is the imperative of this class to equip you with the knowledge necessary to advance in the field of poetry, this task shall be done in a Columbian manner. Consider this class an initiation, of sorts, into the vocabulary which distinguishes the writers who work under our flag, each of us bound by this language that must be passed on, and therefore changed, to you who inherit it. As I have learned the words, I have changed them, and I give them now to you so that you may pave your own way into your own ways, inspired with the first breath that brought you here, which may excite and—hopefully—frighten you. You must be troubled. This is essential
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 2311 | 001/15123 | T 4:10pm - 6:00pm 327 Uris Hall | Latif Ba | 3.00 | 17/15 |
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
WRIT 2311 | 001/18725 | Th 2:10pm - 4:00pm 414 Pupin Laboratories | Jane Crager | 3.00 | 1/15 |
WRIT UN3319 POETICS OF PLACE:AMERICAN LANDSCAPES, VO. 3.00 points .
When the American Poet Larry Levis left his home in California’s San Joaquin Valley, “all [he] needed to do,” he wrote, “was to describe [home] exactly as it had been. That [he] could not do, for that [is] impossible. And that is where poetry might begin. This course will consider how place shapes a poet’s self and work. Together we will consider a diverse range of poets and the places they write out of and into: from Philip Levines Detroit to Whitmans Manhattan, from Robert Lowells New England to James Wrights Ohio, from the Kentucky of Joe Bolton and Crystal Wilkinson to the California of Robin Blaser and Allen Ginsberg, from the Ozarks of Frank Stanford to the New Jersey of Amiri Baraka, from the Pacific Northwest of Robinson Jeffers to the Alaska of Mary Tallmountain. We will consider the debate between T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams about global versus local approaches to the poem, and together we will ask complex questions: Why is it, for example, that Jack Gilbert finds his Pittsburgh when he leaves it, while Gerald Stern finds his Pittsburgh when he keeps it close? Does something sing because you leave it or because you hold it close? Do you come to a place to find where you belong in it? Do you leave a place to find where it belongs in you? As Carolyn Kizer writes in Running Away from Home, Its never over, old church of our claustrophobia! And of course home can give us the first freedom of wanting to leave, the first prison and freedom of want. In our reflections on each “place,” we will reflect on its varied histories, its native peoples, and its inheritance of violent conquest. Our syllabus will consist, in addition to poems, of manifestos and prose writings about place, from Richard Hugos Triggering Town to Sandra Beasleys Prioritizing Place. You will be encouraged to think about everything from dialect to economics, from collectivism to individualism in poems that root themselves in particular places, and you will be encouraged to consider how those poems “transcend” their origins. You will write response papers, analytical papers, and creative pieces, and you will complete a final project that reflects on your own relationship to place
WRIT UN3322 WASTE. 3.00 points .
What if we think of writing as waste management? “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now,” said Samuel Beckett then, famously, but: What does this mean? In this course, we will explore the many ways in which artists and writers have tried to answer this question, not only with waste as a figure for thought but as the concrete and recalcitrant reality of our being. Students will be asked to keep a notebook, with the instruction to keep everything that is for them a signature of thought. In this way, a pinecone or a piece of garbage is as much “writing” as anything else. Together, we will create an archive for the semester, of everything that is produced and/or consumed under this aegis of making. This class is designed to pose questions about form and the activity of writing and, in turn, the modes and methods of production not only as writers, but as persons. In addition to our weekly readings, we will be taking field trips throughout the city, convening with Freegan.info for a trash tour and meeting with the artist in residence at the Department of Sanitation, as well as hosting visitors for additional conversations over Zoom
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 3322 | 001/18542 | Th 10:10am - 12:00pm 212a Lewisohn Hall | Lynn Xu | 3.00 | 16/15 |
WRIT UN3324 SENSORY POETICS. 3.00 points .
“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist” —Vladimir Nabokov “Every word was once an animal.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson How do writers use words to bring whole worlds to life in the senses? Sensory Poetics is a semester-long exploration of how this formal question has propelled the last 150 years of formally innovative poetry, manifestos and essays on craft. Here, we will read by critically and creatively responding to these texts with a single goal in mind: Borrow their methods to compose a dossier of writing that brings just one thing to life in the senses—any one thing—of your individual choosing. To that end, the semester is divided into 3 Labs that each isolate a different register of sensemaking: Sound, Image, and Line. For example, in the Sound Lab unit, you’ll respond to poems and essays by acoustic-centered poets like John Cage, Kamau Brathwaite and Gertrude Stein, transcribing the sound of your one thing, and writing a metered sonnet based on models from different periods and artistic contexts. To capture the look and logic of your one thing, further in you’ll read Surrealists like Aimé and Suzanne Césaire (for Image Lab), Kathy Acker’s cut-ups, and the psychedelic prose poems of Georges Perec and Yoko Ono (for Line Lab). Throughout, we’ll also read Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, a book that is similarly a dossier of one thing written a hundred different ways. Class time focuses on close-reading and analyzing poems together. At the end of each of the three Labs, you’ll submit a portfolio which showcases and reflects on your favorite creative/critical writing generated during the unit. So, no matter how boring or inflexible your one thing may appear to you at any point, your only limits beyond this constraint—make a dossier on one thing—will merely be the finite plasticity of your own imagination, which luckily, readings in this course are curated to expand. This is a place to encounter, practice and experiment with new and exciting forms that broaden your repertoire for articulating your obsessions in ways that bring them to life in the ears, eyes and minds of your audience. Writers of all majors and levels welcome
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 3324 | 001/18899 | T 12:10pm - 2:00pm 411 Kent Hall | Holly Melgard | 3.00 | 14/15 |
WRIT UN3365 21STC AM POETRY & ITS CONCERNS. 3.00 points .
The lyric has often been conceived of as timeless in its content and inwardly-directed in its mode of address, yet so many poems with lasting claim on our attention point unmistakably outward, addressing the particulars of their times. This course will examine the ways in which an array of 21st poets have embraced, indicted, and anatomized their cultural and historical contexts, diagnosing society’s ailments, indulging in its obsessions, and sharing its concerns. Engaging with such topics as race, class, war, death, trauma, feminism, pop culture and sexuality, how do poets adapt poetic form to provide meaningful and relevant insights without losing them to beauty, ambiguity, and music? How is pop star Rihanna a vehicle for discussing feminism and isolation? What does it mean to write about Black masculinity after Ferguson? In a time when poetry’s cultural relevancy is continually debated in academia and in the media, how can today’s poets use their art to hold a mirror to modern living? This class will explore how writers address present-day topics in light of their own subjectivity, how their works reflect larger cultural trends and currents, and how critics as well as poets themselves have reflected on poetry’s, and the poet’s, changing social role. In studying how these writers complicate traditional notions of what poetry should and shouldn’t do, both in terms of content and of form, students will investigate their own writing practices, fortify their poetic voices, and create new works that engage directly and confidently with the world in which they are written
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 3365 | 001/15125 | M 6:10pm - 8:00pm 401 Hamilton Hall | Quincy Jones | 3.00 | 18/20 |
WRIT UN3321 Ecopoetics. 3.00 points .
“There are things / We live among ‘and to see them / Is to know ourselves.’” George Oppen, “Of Being Numerous” In this class we will read poetry like writers that inhabit an imperiled planet, understanding our poems as being in direct conversation both with the environment as well as writers past and present with similar concerns and techniques. Given the imminent ecological crises we are facing, the poems we read will center themes of place, ecology, interspecies dependence, the role of humans in the destruction of the planet, and the “necropastoral” (to borrow a term from Joyelle McSweeney), among others. We will read works by poets and writers such as (but not limited to) John Ashbery, Harryette Mullen, Asiya Wadud, Wendy Xu, Ross Gay, Simone Kearney, Kim Hyesoon, Marcella Durand, Arthur Rimbaud, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Muriel Rukeyser, George Oppen, Terrance Hayes, Juliana Spahr, and W.S. Merwin—reading several full collections as well as individual poems and essays by scholars in the field. Through close readings, in-class exercises, discussions, and creative/critical writings, we will invest in and investigate facets of the dynamic lyric that is aware of its environs (sound, image, line), while also exploring traditional poetic forms like the Haibun, ode, prose poem, and elegy. Additionally, we will seek inspiration in outside mediums such as film, visual art, and music, as well as, of course, the natural world. As a class, we will explore the highly individual nature of writing processes and talk about building writing practices that are generative as well as sustainable
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 3321 | 001/13562 | M 12:10pm - 2:00pm 317 Hamilton Hall | Samantha Zighelboim | 3.00 | 15/15 |
WRIT UN3010 SHORT PROSE FORMS. 3.00 points .
Note: This seminar has a workshop component.
Prerequisites: No Prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. Prerequisites: No Prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. Flash fiction, micro-naratives and the short-short have become exciting areas of exploration for contemporary writers. This course will examine how these literary fragments have captured the imagination of writers internationally and at home. The larger question the class seeks to answer, both on a collective and individual level, is: How can we craft a working definition of those elements endemic to short prose as a genre? Does the form exceed classification? What aspects of both crafts -- prose and poetry -- does this genre inhabit, expand upon, reinvent, reject, subvert? Short Prose Forms incorporates aspects of both literary seminar and the creative workshop. Class-time will be devoted alternatingly to examinations of published pieces and modified discussions of student work. Our reading chart the course from the genres emergence, examining the prose poem in 19th-century France through the works of Mallarme, Baudelaire, Max Jacob and Rimbaud. Well examine aspects of poetry -- the attention to the lyrical, the use of compression, musicality, sonic resonances and wit -- and attempt to understand how these writers took, as Russell Edson describes, experience [and] made it into an artifact with the logic of a dream. The class will conclude with a portfolio at the end of the term, in which students will submit a compendium of final drafts of three of four short prose pieces, samples of several exercises, selescted responses to readings, and a short personal manifesto on the short prose form
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 3010 | 001/15124 | W 4:10pm - 6:00pm 317 Hamilton Hall | Alan Ziegler | 3.00 | 12/20 |
WRIT UN3011 TRANSLATION SEMINAR. 3.00 points .
Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Students do not need to demonstrate bilingual ability to take this course. Department approval NOT needed. Corequisites: This course is open to undergraduate & graduate students. Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Students do not need to demonstrate bilingual ability to take this course. Department approval NOT needed. Corequisites: This course is open to undergraduate & graduate students. This course will explore broad-ranging questions pertaining to the historical, cultural, and political significance of translation while analyzing the various challenges confronted by the arts foremost practitioners. We will read and discuss texts by writers and theorists such as Benjamin, Derrida, Borges, Steiner, Dryden, Nabokov, Schleiermacher, Goethe, Spivak, Jakobson, and Venuti. As readers and practitioners of translation, we will train our ears to detect the visibility of invisibility of the translators craft; through short writing experiments, we will discover how to identify and capture the nuances that traverse literary styles, historical periods and cultures. The course will culminate in a final project that may either be a critical analysis or an original translation accompanied by a translators note of introduction
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 3011 | 001/15125 | W 2:10pm - 4:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Bonnie Chau | 3.00 | 10/15 |
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
WRIT 3011 | 001/18722 | T 4:10pm - 6:00pm 608 Lewisohn Hall | Bonnie Chau | 3.00 | 2/15 |
WRIT UN3018 Inhabiting Form: Writing the Body. 3.00 points .
The body is our most immediate encounter with the world, the vessel through which we experience our entire lives: pleasure, pain, beauty, horror, limitation, freedom, fragility and empowerment. In this course, we will pursue critical and creative inquiries into invocations and manifestations of the body in multiple genres of literature and in several capacities. We will look at how writers make space for—or take up space with—bodies in their work. The etymology of the word “text” is from the Latin textus, meaning “tissue.” Along these lines, we will consider the text itself as a body. Discussions around body politics, race, gender, ability, illness, death, metamorphosis, monstrosity and pleasure will be parallel to the consideration of how a text might function itself as a body in space and time. We will consider such questions as: What is the connective tissue of a story or a poem? What is the nervous system of a lyric essay? How is formal constraint similar to societal ideals about beauty and acceptability of certain bodies? How do words and language function at the cellular level to build the body of a text? How can we make room to honor, in our writing, bodies that have otherwise been marginalized? We will also consider non-human bodies (animals & organisms) and embodiments of the supernatural (ghosts, gods & specters) in our inquiries. Students will process and explore these ideas in both creative and analytical writings throughout the semester, deepening their understanding of embodiment both on and off the page
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 3018 | 001/15456 | M 12:10pm - 2:00pm 511 Kent Hall | Samantha Zighelboim | 3.00 | 14/15 |
WRIT UN3031 INTRO TO AUDIO STORYTELLING. 3.00 points .
It’s one thing to tell a story with the pen. It’s another to transfix your audience with your voice. In this class, we will explore principles of audio narrative. Oral storytellers arguably understand suspense, humor and showmanship in ways only a live performer can. Even if you are a diehard writer of visually-consumed text, you may find, once the class is over, that you have learned techniques that can translate across borders: your written work may benefit. Alternatively, you may discover that audio is the medium for you. We will consider sound from the ground up – from folkloric oral traditions, to raw, naturally captured sound stories, to seemingly straightforward radio news segments, to highly polished narrative podcasts. While this class involves a fair amount of reading, much of what we will be studying and discussing is audio material. Some is as lo-fi as can be, and some is operatic in scope, benefitting from large production budgets and teams of artists. At the same time that we study these works, each student will also complete small audio production exercises of their own; as a final project, students will be expected to produce a trailer, or “sizzle” for a hypothetical multi-episode show. This class is meant for beginners to the audio tradition. There are some tech requirements: a recording device (most phones will suffice), workable set of headphones, and computer. You’ll also need to download the free audio editing software Audacity
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 3031 | 001/15460 | W 12:10pm - 2:00pm 311 Fayerweather | Mallika Rao | 3.00 | 15/20 |
WRIT UN3036 THE AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE. 3.00 points .
What is an aesthetic experience and what does it tell us about art or about ourselves? An aesthetic experience might be best initially defined as a subjective and often profound encounter with an object, artwork, or phenomenon that elicits a heightened sense of beauty, appreciation, or emotional response. It involves a deep engagement with the sensory, emotional, and intellectual aspects of the object of appreciation. Aesthetic experiences typically involve a sense of pleasure, contemplation, or emotional resonance, and they often transcend practical or utilitarian considerations. These experiences can encompass a wide range of phenomena, literature, natural landscapes, and even everyday objects when perceived with a heightened sense of awareness and appreciation. Aesthetic experiences are highly personal and can vary from person to person based on individual preferences, cultural backgrounds, and emotional responses. For me, an aesthetic experience is both mysterious and confounding—I’m impacted physically as much as it might mentally or emotionally. In the throes of an aesthetic experience, I might feel the small hairs on my arms or on the back of my neck stand up. I might feel nearly ill from a racing heart or my stomach turning. I might feel energized by new thoughts prompted by the experience or feel my heart swell in appreciation and awe. I might also feel a deep sense of recognition—one that connects me to the art object and its maker in a way that transcends time and place. But why do I feel this? Where does this feeling come from? What is really happening?? In this class, we’ll study this question on two levels: 1. A ‘theoretical’ level. Theorists, critics, and philosophers have long tried to understand what it means to have an aesthetic experience. Plato likened this experience to madness, Kant to the sublime; Tolstoy argued the aesthetic experience was a form of communication only accessible through engagement in art. Historians place aesthetic experience within the context of time and culture. We’ll study and discuss theories that have tried to define this mysterious phenomenon. 2. A ‘practical’ level. We’ll also read the work of writers who have puzzled through this question of the aesthetic experience by writing about their connection to a work or body of work by another artist. Often this involves a search to understand the self via the work of another artist. Books: Required books available at Book Culture on 112th Street and Broadway or in course reserves at Butler Library. Several readings will be available for free via our courseworks page. They are indicated on the syllabus as (CW)
Course Number | Section/Call Number | Times/Location | Instructor | Points | Enrollment |
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WRIT 3036 | 001/18897 | W 10:10am - 12:00pm Mpr River Side Church | Chloe Jones | 3.00 | 13/15 |
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About the author.
Reedsy's editorial team is a diverse group of industry experts devoted to helping authors write and publish beautiful books.
Savannah is a senior editor with Reedsy and a published writer whose work has appeared on Slate, Kirkus, and BookTrib. Her short fiction has appeared in the Owl Canyon Press anthology, "No Bars and a Dead Battery".
Rebecca van Laer is a writer, editor, and the author of two books, including the novella How to Adjust to the Dark. Her work has been featured in literary magazines such as AGNI, Breadcrumbs, and TriQuarterly.
A lot falls under the term ‘creative writing’: poetry, short fiction, plays, novels, personal essays, and songs, to name just a few. By virtue of the creativity that characterizes it, creative writing is an extremely versatile art. So instead of defining what creative writing is , it may be easier to understand what it does by looking at examples that demonstrate the sheer range of styles and genres under its vast umbrella.
To that end, we’ve collected a non-exhaustive list of works across multiple formats that have inspired the writers here at Reedsy. With 20 different works to explore, we hope they will inspire you, too.
People have been writing creatively for almost as long as we have been able to hold pens. Just think of long-form epic poems like The Odyssey or, later, the Cantar de Mio Cid — some of the earliest recorded writings of their kind.
Poetry is also a great place to start if you want to dip your own pen into the inkwell of creative writing. It can be as short or long as you want (you don’t have to write an epic of Homeric proportions), encourages you to build your observation skills, and often speaks from a single point of view .
Here are a few examples:
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
This classic poem by Romantic poet Percy Shelley (also known as Mary Shelley’s husband) is all about legacy. What do we leave behind? How will we be remembered? The great king Ozymandias built himself a massive statue, proclaiming his might, but the irony is that his statue doesn’t survive the ravages of time. By framing this poem as told to him by a “traveller from an antique land,” Shelley effectively turns this into a story. Along with the careful use of juxtaposition to create irony, this poem accomplishes a lot in just a few lines.
A direction. An object. My love, it needs a place to rest. Say anything. I’m listening. I’m ready to believe. Even lies, I don’t care.
Poetry is cherished for its ability to evoke strong emotions from the reader using very few words which is exactly what Dorianne Laux does in “ Trying to Raise the Dead .” With vivid imagery that underscores the painful yearning of the narrator, she transports us to a private nighttime scene as the narrator sneaks away from a party to pray to someone they’ve lost. We ache for their loss and how badly they want their lost loved one to acknowledge them in some way. It’s truly a masterclass on how writing can be used to portray emotions.
If you find yourself inspired to try out some poetry — and maybe even get it published — check out these poetry layouts that can elevate your verse!
Poetry’s closely related cousin, song lyrics are another great way to flex your creative writing muscles. You not only have to find the perfect rhyme scheme but also match it to the rhythm of the music. This can be a great challenge for an experienced poet or the musically inclined.
To see how music can add something extra to your poetry, check out these two examples:
You say I took the name in vain I don't even know the name But if I did, well, really, what's it to ya? There's a blaze of light in every word It doesn't matter which you heard The holy or the broken Hallelujah
Metaphors are commonplace in almost every kind of creative writing, but will often take center stage in shorter works like poetry and songs. At the slightest mention, they invite the listener to bring their emotional or cultural experience to the piece, allowing the writer to express more with fewer words while also giving it a deeper meaning. If a whole song is couched in metaphor, you might even be able to find multiple meanings to it, like in Leonard Cohen’s “ Hallelujah .” While Cohen’s Biblical references create a song that, on the surface, seems like it’s about a struggle with religion, the ambiguity of the lyrics has allowed it to be seen as a song about a complicated romantic relationship.
If Heaven and Hell decide that they both are satisfied Illuminate the no's on their vacancy signs If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks Then I'll follow you into the dark
You can think of song lyrics as poetry set to music. They manage to do many of the same things their literary counterparts do — including tugging on your heartstrings. Death Cab for Cutie’s incredibly popular indie rock ballad is about the singer’s deep devotion to his lover. While some might find the song a bit too dark and macabre, its melancholy tune and poignant lyrics remind us that love can endure beyond death.
From the short form of poetry, we move into the world of drama — also known as the play. This form is as old as the poem, stretching back to the works of ancient Greek playwrights like Sophocles, who adapted the myths of their day into dramatic form. The stage play (and the more modern screenplay) gives the words on the page a literal human voice, bringing life to a story and its characters entirely through dialogue.
Interested to see what that looks like? Take a look at these examples:
“I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.”
Arthur Miller acts as a bridge between the classic and the new, creating 20th century tragedies that take place in living rooms and backyard instead of royal courts, so we had to include his breakout hit on this list. Set in the backyard of an all-American family in the summer of 1946, this tragedy manages to communicate family tensions in an unimaginable scale, building up to an intense climax reminiscent of classical drama.
💡 Read more about Arthur Miller and classical influences in our breakdown of Freytag’s pyramid .
“Well, then this system sucks. What...one in a million gets to live in paradise and everyone else is tortured for eternity? Come on! I mean, I wasn't freaking Gandhi, but I was okay. I was a medium person. I should get to spend eternity in a medium place! Like Cincinnati. Everyone who wasn't perfect but wasn't terrible should get to spend eternity in Cincinnati.”
A screenplay, especially a TV pilot, is like a mini-play, but with the extra job of convincing an audience that they want to watch a hundred more episodes of the show. Blending moral philosophy with comedy, The Good Place is a fun hang-out show set in the afterlife that asks some big questions about what it means to be good.
It follows Eleanor Shellstrop, an incredibly imperfect woman from Arizona who wakes up in ‘The Good Place’ and realizes that there’s been a cosmic mixup. Determined not to lose her place in paradise, she recruits her “soulmate,” a former ethics professor, to teach her philosophy with the hope that she can learn to be a good person and keep up her charade of being an upstanding citizen. The pilot does a superb job of setting up the stakes, the story, and the characters, while smuggling in deep philosophical ideas.
Our first foray into nonfiction on this list is the personal essay. As its name suggests, these stories are in some way autobiographical — concerned with the author’s life and experiences. But don’t be fooled by the realistic component. These essays can take any shape or form, from comics to diary entries to recipes and anything else you can imagine. Typically zeroing in on a single issue, they allow you to explore your life and prove that the personal can be universal.
Here are a couple of fantastic examples:
There was so much to learn and practice, but I began to see the prose in verse and the verse in prose. Patterns surfaced in poems, stories, and plays. There was music in sentences and paragraphs. I could hear the silences in a sentence. All this schooling was like getting x-ray vision and animal-like hearing.
This deeply honest personal essay by Pachinko author Min Jin Lee is an account of her eleven-year struggle to publish her first novel . Like all good writing, it is intensely focused on personal emotional details. While grounded in the specifics of the author's personal journey, it embodies an experience that is absolutely universal: that of difficulty and adversity met by eventual success.
These images, though, aren’t meant to be about me. They’re meant to represent a cyclist on the landscape, anybody — you, perhaps.
Roff Smith’s gorgeous photo essay for the NYT is a testament to the power of creatively combining visuals with text. Here, photographs of Smith atop a bike are far from simply ornamental. They’re integral to the ruminative mood of the essay, as essential as the writing. Though Smith places his work at the crosscurrents of various aesthetic influences (such as the painter Edward Hopper), what stands out the most in this taciturn, thoughtful piece of writing is his use of the second person to address the reader directly. Suddenly, the writer steps out of the body of the essay and makes eye contact with the reader. The reader is now part of the story as a second character, finally entering the picture.
The short story is the happy medium of fiction writing. These bite-sized narratives can be devoured in a single sitting and still leave you reeling. Sometimes viewed as a stepping stone to novel writing, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Short story writing is an art all its own. The limited length means every word counts and there’s no better way to see that than with these two examples:
At Starbucks, I remembered a reading Zhen had given, a reading organized by the program’s faculty. I had not wanted to go but did. In the bar, he read, "I wrote this in a Starbucks in Shanghai. On the bank of the Huangpu." It wasn’t an aside or introduction. It was two lines of the poem. I was in a Starbucks and I wasn’t writing any poems. I wasn’t writing anything.
This short story is a delightfully metafictional tale about the struggles of being a writer in New York. From paying the bills to facing criticism in a writing workshop and envying more productive writers, Paul Dalla Rosa’s story is a clever satire of the tribulations involved in the writing profession, and all the contradictions embodied by systemic creativity (as famously laid out in Mark McGurl’s The Program Era ). What’s more, this story is an excellent example of something that often happens in creative writing: a writer casting light on the private thoughts or moments of doubt we don’t admit to or openly talk about.
I tell him they’d been there a month at least, and he looks concerned. He has my tongue on a tissue paper and is gripping its sides with his pointer and thumb. My tongue has never spent much time outside of my mouth, and I imagine it as a walrus basking in the rays of the dental light. My walrus is not well.
A winner of Reedsy’s weekly Prompts writing contest, ‘ Flowering Walrus ’ is a story that balances the trivial and the serious well. In the pauses between its excellent, natural dialogue , the story manages to scatter the fear and sadness of bad medical news, as the protagonist hides his worries from his wife and daughter. Rich in subtext, these silences grow and resonate with the readers.
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Perhaps the thing that first comes to mind when talking about creative writing, novels are a form of fiction that many people know and love but writers sometimes find intimidating. The good news is that novels are nothing but one word put after another, like any other piece of writing, but expanded and put into a flowing narrative. Piece of cake, right?
To get an idea of the format’s breadth of scope, take a look at these two (very different) satirical novels:
I wished I was back in the convenience store where I was valued as a working member of staff and things weren’t as complicated as this. Once we donned our uniforms, we were all equals regardless of gender, age, or nationality — all simply store workers.
Keiko, a thirty-six-year-old convenience store employee, finds comfort and happiness in the strict, uneventful routine of the shop’s daily operations. A funny, satirical, but simultaneously unnerving examination of the social structures we take for granted, Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman is deeply original and lingers with the reader long after they’ve put it down.
The hard, gritty truth of the matter is that I hardly ever think about race. Those times when I did think about it a lot I did so because of my guilt for not thinking about it.
Erasure is a truly accomplished satire of the publishing industry’s tendency to essentialize African American authors and their writing. Everett’s protagonist is a writer whose work doesn’t fit with what publishers expect from him — work that describes the “African American experience” — so he writes a parody novel about life in the ghetto. The publishers go crazy for it and, to the protagonist’s horror, it becomes the next big thing. This sophisticated novel is both ironic and tender, leaving its readers with much food for thought.
Creative nonfiction is pretty broad: it applies to anything that does not claim to be fictional (although the rise of autofiction has definitely blurred the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction). It encompasses everything from personal essays and memoirs to humor writing, and they range in length from blog posts to full-length books. The defining characteristic of this massive genre is that it takes the world or the author’s experience and turns it into a narrative that a reader can follow along with.
Here, we want to focus on novel-length works that dig deep into their respective topics. While very different, these two examples truly show the breadth and depth of possibility of creative nonfiction:
Men’s bodies litter my family history. The pain of the women they left behind pulls them from the beyond, makes them appear as ghosts. In death, they transcend the circumstances of this place that I love and hate all at once and become supernatural.
Writer Jesmyn Ward recounts the deaths of five men from her rural Mississippi community in as many years. In her award-winning memoir , she delves into the lives of the friends and family she lost and tries to find some sense among the tragedy. Working backwards across five years, she questions why this had to happen over and over again, and slowly unveils the long history of racism and poverty that rules rural Black communities. Moving and emotionally raw, Men We Reaped is an indictment of a cruel system and the story of a woman's grief and rage as she tries to navigate it.
He believed that wine could reshape someone’s life. That’s why he preferred buying bottles to splurging on sweaters. Sweaters were things. Bottles of wine, said Morgan, “are ways that my humanity will be changed.”
In this work of immersive journalism , Bianca Bosker leaves behind her life as a tech journalist to explore the world of wine. Becoming a “cork dork” takes her everywhere from New York’s most refined restaurants to science labs while she learns what it takes to be a sommelier and a true wine obsessive. This funny and entertaining trip through the past and present of wine-making and tasting is sure to leave you better informed and wishing you, too, could leave your life behind for one devoted to wine.
Once relegated to the “funny pages”, the past forty years of comics history have proven it to be a serious medium. Comics have transformed from the early days of Jack Kirby’s superheroes into a medium where almost every genre is represented. Humorous one-shots in the Sunday papers stand alongside illustrated memoirs, horror, fantasy, and just about anything else you can imagine. This type of visual storytelling lets the writer and artist get creative with perspective, tone, and so much more. For two very different, though equally entertaining, examples, check these out:
"Life is like topography, Hobbes. There are summits of happiness and success, flat stretches of boring routine and valleys of frustration and failure."
This beloved comic strip follows Calvin, a rambunctious six-year-old boy, and his stuffed tiger/imaginary friend, Hobbes. They get into all kinds of hijinks at school and at home, and muse on the world in the way only a six-year-old and an anthropomorphic tiger can. As laugh-out-loud funny as it is, Calvin & Hobbes ’ popularity persists as much for its whimsy as its use of humor to comment on life, childhood, adulthood, and everything in between.
"I shall tell you where we are. We're in the most extreme and utter region of the human mind. A dim, subconscious underworld. A radiant abyss where men meet themselves. Hell, Netley. We're in Hell."
Comics aren't just the realm of superheroes and one-joke strips, as Alan Moore proves in this serialized graphic novel released between 1989 and 1998. A meticulously researched alternative history of Victorian London’s Ripper killings, this macabre story pulls no punches. Fact and fiction blend into a world where the Royal Family is involved in a dark conspiracy and Freemasons lurk on the sidelines. It’s a surreal mad-cap adventure that’s unsettling in the best way possible.
Probably the least expected entry on this list, we thought that video games and RPGs also deserved a mention — and some well-earned recognition for the intricate storytelling that goes into creating them.
Essentially gamified adventure stories, without attention to plot, characters, and a narrative arc, these games would lose a lot of their charm, so let’s look at two examples where the creative writing really shines through:
"It was a triumph of invention over nature, and will almost certainly disappear into the dust once more in the next fifty years."
Named Time Magazine ’s game of the year in 2014, this narrative adventure is based on Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne. The player is cast as the novel’s narrator, Passpartout, and tasked with circumnavigating the globe in service of their employer, Phileas Fogg. Set in an alternate steampunk Victorian era, the game uses its globe-trotting to comment on the colonialist fantasies inherent in the original novel and its time period. On a storytelling level, the choose-your-own-adventure style means no two players’ journeys will be the same. This innovative approach to a classic novel shows the potential of video games as a storytelling medium, truly making the player part of the story.
"If we lived forever, maybe we'd have time to understand things. But as it is, I think the best we can do is try to open our eyes, and appreciate how strange and brief all of this is."
This video game casts the player as 17-year-old Edith Finch. Returning to her family’s home on an island in the Pacific northwest, Edith explores the vast house and tries to figure out why she’s the only one of her family left alive. The story of each family member is revealed as you make your way through the house, slowly unpacking the tragic fate of the Finches. Eerie and immersive, this first-person exploration game uses the medium to tell a series of truly unique tales.
Fun and breezy on the surface, humor is often recognized as one of the trickiest forms of creative writing. After all, while you can see the artistic value in a piece of prose that you don’t necessarily enjoy, if a joke isn’t funny, you could say that it’s objectively failed.
With that said, it’s far from an impossible task, and many have succeeded in bringing smiles to their readers’ faces through their writing. Here are two examples:
“Is it true you don’t have desks?” your grandmother will ask. You will nod again and crack open a can of Country Time Lemonade. “My stars,” she will say, “it must be so wonderful to not have a traditional office and instead share a bistro-esque coworking space.”
Satire and parody make up a whole subgenre of creative writing, and websites like McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and The Onion consistently hit the mark with their parodies of magazine publishing and news media. This particular example finds humor in the divide between traditional family expectations and contemporary, ‘trendy’ work cultures. Playing on the inherent silliness of today’s tech-forward middle-class jobs, this witty piece imagines a scenario where the writer’s family fully understands what they do — and are enthralled to hear more. “‘Now is it true,’ your uncle will whisper, ‘that you’ve got a potential investment from one of the founders of I Can Haz Cheezburger?’”
I’m not a foodie, I never have been, and I know, in my heart, I never will be.
Highlighting what she sees as an unbearable social obsession with food , in this comic Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell takes a hilarious stand against the importance of food. From the writer’s courageous thesis (“I think there are more exciting things to talk about, and focus on in life, than what’s for dinner”) to the amusing appearance of family members and the narrator’s partner, ‘Not a Foodie’ demonstrates that even a seemingly mundane pet peeve can be approached creatively — and even reveal something profound about life.
We hope this list inspires you with your own writing. If there’s one thing you take away from this post, let it be that there is no limit to what you can write about or how you can write about it.
In the next part of this guide, we'll drill down into the fascinating world of creative nonfiction.
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Creative writing & literature, why study creative writing & literature.
A Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in creative writing offers a way for students to write compellingly about the issues at the “deep heart’s core” of their – and our – experience. Through workshops in the practice of craft, majors develop their capacity for expression and persuasion, seeking the voice and form of expression that best connects what they have to say with their audience. In literature courses, they learn to read like a writer and to contextualize their own work. The capstone project, a book-length manuscript, teaches self-reliance: students learn to apply their skills and carry a creative vision through to completion. The major’s interdisciplinary aspects and project-driven structure promote creative thinking about students’ own interests and burgeoning competencies, about the nature of truth, and about the time and place in which their imaginations live.
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Admission to the BFA in Creative Writing requires a statement of purpose, writing sample and letter of recommendation submitted directly to the program.
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Our Creative Writing program, one of the first of its kind in Canada, immerses you in every aspect of the writing life, from the development of ideas to the publication of finished works. As a Creative Writing student, you’ll learn to approach literature from a writer’s point of view as you develop your own craft under the guidance of published writers and fellow students.
Whether it’s through prose, poetry, or drama, our workshops help you find your voice and your subject. Creative writing students also have the opportunity to supplement their regular courses with master classes conducted by internationally renowned writers during the Writers Read at Concordia series. Concordia has hosted writers such as Julian Barnes, Dionne Brand, CAConrad, Roxane Gay, Renee Gladman, Jorie Graham, Ben Lerner, Daniel David Moses, Fred Moten, Claudia Rankine, George Saunders, A.E. Stallings, and Colm Tóibín.
Montreal’s vibrant English-language literary scene offers a showcase for the work of student writers as well as published authors. The skills acquired in our Creative Writing program can help prepare you for a professional life as a writer, editor, or publisher in print or in electronic media. The Honours in English and Creative Writing is a gateway to graduate study in literature or to further study in creative writing.
Up to $4000 for undergraduate programs.
A Bachelor of Arts degree takes a minimum of three or four years (90 – 120 credits) of full-time study, depending on your academic background .
*Honours is a highly concentrated program, ideal for students planning to continue to graduate studies. If you are interested in Honours, speak with your program advisor in your first year of study at Concordia. Students applying to the University are able to apply to the major or specialization.
United States students : A U.S. Federal Student Aid-eligible version of this program is offered. This version meets all U.S. regulations (such as no co-operative education or e-courses) for eligible programs.
Minimum cut-off averages and course requirements.
English proficiency Some applicants may be required to write an English language proficiency test with the following minimum scores:
Minimum cut-off averages should be used as indicators. The cut-off data may change depending on the applicant pool. Applicants who meet the stated minimum requirements are not guaranteed admission to these programs.
March 1 is the deadline to apply for fall term entry. International students are encouraged to apply by February 1 to allow sufficient time for CAQ and study permit application processing.
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Not all programs are available for winter term entry. Please check program availability for the term, before you start your application.
We reserve the right to close admission to a program at any time after the official deadline without prior notice.
Graduates of the program have the knowledge and skill for any career that values critical thinking and superior communication skills, including a professional life as a writer, editor or publisher. You will also be prepared to undertake graduate studies in either English or Creative Writing.
Many graduates have fulfilling writing careers.
Major in Creative Writing Minor in Professional Writing
How Concordia’s creative writing program helped Jade Adams find her own path.
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Immerse yourself in the writing life – and develop a cultural vocabulary – by looking at the human condition through many literary modes, while studying works which include aspects of psychology, history, and philosophy.
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Immerse yourself in the words of past poets or contemporary thinkers. With every turn of the page you have the opportunity to imagine and reflect on lives and worlds different from your own experience, and challenge your assumptions about the meaning of morality and the world from new and unanticipated perspectives.
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Stanford Continuing Studies' online creative writing courses make it easy to take courses taught by instructors from Stanford's writing community. Thanks to the flexibility of the online format, these courses can be taken anywhere, anytime—a plus for students who lead busy lives or for whom regular travel to the Stanford campus is not ...
Title: Creative Writing. Definition: A program that focuses on the process and techniques of original composition in various literary forms such as the short story, poetry, the novel, and others. Includes instruction in technical and editorial skills, criticism, and the marketing of finished manuscripts. Action: Moved from - to -.
A: A rubric for creative writing is a scoring tool used to assess and evaluate written works based on specific criteria. It outlines the expectations and benchmarks for various aspects of the writing, such as plot development, characterization, language use, and overall impact.
This article examines creative writing (CW) as a place-based methodology for doing and analysing fieldwork. Drawing insights from CW scholarship and workshops as part of a collaborative project, we contribute new empirically-informed insights from peer researchers about the significance of leveraging emotional connections, detailed attention to lived experiences, and the researcher's ...
Creative writing lecturers: Beginning in 2025-26, two new lectureships (renewable for a maximum duration of three years) will be available to outgoing Jones lecturers. These positions will allow ...
To associate your repository with the creative-writing topic, visit your repo's landing page and select "manage topics." GitHub is where people build software. More than 100 million people use GitHub to discover, fork, and contribute to over 420 million projects.
8 Tips for Getting Started With Creative Writing. Outside the world of business writing and hard journalism lies an entire realm of creative writing. Whether you're brand-new to the craft, a nonfiction writer looking to experiment, or a casual creative writer wanting to turn into a published author, honing your creative writing skills is key ...
Implemented in one code library. In this paper, we evaluate the creative fiction writing abilities of a fine-tuned small language model (SLM), BART Large, and compare its performance to humans and two large language models (LLMs): GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o.
Bachelor of Arts in English - Creative Writing Major Code: ENGL Concentration Code: CRWR Curriculum Guide Course CR Course CR Freshman Year: First Semester Freshman Year: Second Semester FRST 101 (SS) 1 ENGL 100 (WC) 3 ENGL 226 3 PHIL 102 (MLAR) 3 Social /Behavioral Science (SBS) 3 ENGL 105 3 Semester Total 16 ...
Boosting Creative Writing Skills Through Coding. Usually, coding is connected with topics such as math and logic, but coding is not limited to helping only with those subjects. To code, you must write. Although you are not writing in English, the fundamental skills you need to write well are the same. One writer turned coder explained it this way;
Curriculum documents have been neatly laid out, yet in practice, it is challenging, and teachers struggle to find effective ways of teaching and assessing creative writing skills. Objectives: The purpose of this study was to examine the challenges that teachers experience in implementing the creative writing curriculum in Grade 3.
The Creative Writing Program is an interdisciplinary minor program offered by the Office of Undergraduate and Interdisciplinary Studies in the Division of Undergraduate Studies in the College of Letters & Science. ... Code Title Units; AFRICAM C143B: Research-to-Performance Laboratory: 3: AFRICAM C143C: Black Theatre Workshop: 3: AFRICAM 150B:
Steve Huynh transitioned from creative writing to programming, landing a contract role at Amazon. He faced an eight-year struggle to get promoted from senior to principal engineer. Huynh achieved his goal in 2020 and later grew his total compensation at Amazon to $528,000. A friend used his ...
2. The Evaluation of Creative Writing at MA Level (UK) Jenny Newman 24 3. The Creative Writing MFA Stephanie Vanderslice 37 4. Creative Writing and Critical Theory Lauri Ramey 42 5.Literary Genres David Rain 54 6. The Writer as Artist Steven Earnshaw 65 7. The Future of Creative Writing Paul Dawson 78 Section Two - The Craft of Writing Prose 8.
Creative writing is writing meant to evoke emotion in a reader by communicating a theme. In storytelling (including literature, movies, graphic novels, creative nonfiction, and many video games), the theme is the central meaning the work communicates. Take the movie (and the novel upon which it's based) Jaws, for instance.
The Creative Writing Certificate is a program concentration that seeks to expose learners to a variety of creative writing genres, including poetry, creative nonfiction, drama, fiction, and screenwriting. Four tracks are offered in the program: ... Code Title Credits; Program Requirements: ENGLI 2250: Introduction to Creative Writing: 3 ...
DSS fosters the use of digital content and transformative technology in scholarship and academic activities. We provide consultative and technical support for a wide range of tools and platforms. We work with the campus community to publish, promote, and preserve the digital products of research through consultation, teaching, and systems administration.
LEARNING COMPETENCY CODE Quarter I 1. Creative Writing 1.1. Imaginative writing vs. technical / academic / other forms of writing 1.2. Sensory experience 1.3. Language a. Imagery b. Figures of speech c. Diction 1.4. Sample works of well -known local and foreign writers The learners have an understandng of… 2. experiences imagery, diction,
The Creative Writing Program in The School of the Arts combines intensive writing workshops with seminars that study literature from a writer's perspective. Students develop and hone their literary technique in workshops. ... Code Title Points; These seminars offer close examination of literary techniques such as plot, point of view, tone ...
A creative writing task where the input is 4 random sentences and the output should be a coherent passage with 4 paragraphs that end in the 4 input sentences respectively. Such a task is open-ended and exploratory, and challenges creative thinking as well as high-level planning. ... Papers With Code is a free resource with all data licensed ...
Creative Writing Notebook; Creative Voices Podcast; Fall '19 Fiction Writers; Dialogue; Need help with the Commons? Email us at [email protected] so we can respond to your questions and requests. Please email from your CUNY email address if possible. Or visit our help site for more information:
A lot falls under the term 'creative writing': poetry, short fiction, plays, novels, personal essays, and songs, to name just a few. By virtue of the creativity that characterizes it, creative writing is an extremely versatile art. So instead of defining what creative writing is, it may be easier to understand what it does by looking at ...
A Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in creative writing offers a way for students to write compellingly about the issues at the "deep heart's core" of their - and our - experience. Through workshops in the practice of craft, majors develop their capacity for expression and persuasion, seeking the voice and form of expression that best ...
Honours in English and Creative Writing (66 credits)* Major in Creative Writing (42 credits) Minor in Creative Writing (24 credits) *Honours is a highly concentrated program, ideal for students planning to continue to graduate studies. If you are interested in Honours, speak with your program advisor in your first year of study at Concordia.
pennacool powered by Flow Creative Writing Competition! Write a report/narrative piece and get feedback from an official SEA grader! Students, compete to win hamper prizes today! Please note only the top 50 students on the scoreboard with QUALITY submissions will receive feedback from an SEA grader.