Class Catalog

Instructor: Liza Birnbaum. How can we delve deeper into texts that feel mysterious, thorny, or complex? In this class, we’ll experiment with hands-on practices—annotation, structural mapping, and more—that open up new understandings of what’s on the page and what might come next.

Instructor: Meredith Arena. "Deglazing" is using an acid to dilute sediment from fats left in a pan to make a gravy or sauce. Sometimes we've worked on something too long or can't figure out what the piece wants to be. Sometimes we need to "deglaze" our work and start with a new sauce as our guide.

Instructor: Kimberly Dark. Memories aren’t enough to make a memoir. In this generative workshop, we’ll open a number of creative doorways (and windows and portholes and tunnels) into discovering meaning and discuss how and why they work.

Instructor: Kimberly Lee. This exploratory workshop is designed to help writers determine their personal thematic by distinguishing which topics resonate most. We’ll engage with imaginative prompts, including an exercise in which participants will analyze their film favorites.

Instructor: Michele L. Simms-Burton. Avoid the pitfalls of stereotypes by practicing seeing diverse people in their full humanity. Examine examples of writing that successfully present unique, fully drawn, non-stereotypical characters.

Instructor: Minda Honey. Learn to hop across multiple timelines by flashing forward and back to show the connection between the personal and larger cultural narratives at play.

Through guided and practical exercises, this course will give you the confidence to turn your art into a long-term, successful business.

This asynchronous course features online workbooks, including ten essential templates in Word and Excel to kickstart your writing life, and resources professional writers use to get published.

Instructors: Allison Ellis, Amy Bowers. Delve deep into the lore and canon of witches, examining themes such as feminism, domesticity, power, and social change. Students can expect to craft their own witchy narratives and generate new stories, essays, or longer scenes.

Instructor: Nicole Hardy. Focusing on structure, narrative voice, and scene, students will draft, workshop, and revise first person essays. Participants will receive one-on-one editorial advice and leave with a polished essay.

Instructor: Becca Yenser. Explore the fundamentals of flash (both fiction and nonfiction) while reading, generating writing, and workshopping with peers.

Instructor: Darien Hsu Gee. We’ll explore the roles of women in our lives and how they’ve shaped us by generating micro narratives of 300 words or less.

Instructor: Gabriela Denise Frank. In this generative course, we’ll experiment with different models and create image/text hybrids, concrete poems, and docupoetic essays. 

Instructor: Sabra Boyd. In this hybrid course, students will workshop a draft, craft pitches for publication, and strategize finding an editor. We will also discuss the politics and ethics of food writing.

Instructor: Kristi Coulter. This class will give you new skills for navigating the creative, ethical, and personal issues that arise when other people become characters in our own stories.

Instructor: Claudia Castro Luna. In this class, we will engage with a variety of texts (letters, essays, mostly poetry) to examine our relationships to our arboreal neighbor: how they inspire, heal, protect, anchor, and orient us—and what we in turn offer them.

Instructor: Liza Birnbaum. In this reading-focused course, we'll take an in-depth look at work by six poets, and explore how their craft decisions might influence and inspire our own writing across genres.

Instructor: Gabriela Denise Frank. Explore the myriad forms of flash essays, discussing sample works and generating new writing inspired by the winter season.

Instructor: Theo Nestor. Students will read and discuss example columns with a focus on structure, with writing prompts to begin their own Modern Love essays.

Instructor: Christine Hemp. Delve into the possibilities and opportunities of a compelling essay, generating work in and outside of class with a focus on language, humor, and form.

Instructor: Deborah Woodard. With weekly prompts, instructor feedback, and discussion, students will examine the stories of Lydia Davis.

Instructor: Nhatt Nichols. Students will create works of graphic journalism, documentary comic, and visual poetry and leave with the skills to create nonfiction comics that say something true about the world as they understand it.

Instructor: Kascha Semonovitch. Students will read and discuss philosophical theories and fiction that explicitly address the ethical issues of utilitarianism, deontology, virtue ethics, and theodicy.

Instructor: Sierra Nelson. Taking inspiration from science, art, and literature, students will participate in generative writing prompts using color as the prismatic approach to create a portfolio of new work.