Class Catalog

Instructor: Shankar Narayan. Dive deep into the philosophies and practicalities of line breaks and empty space in this three-week craft intensive. Deconstruct conventional wisdom and imagine new possibilities for line breaks and space in your poetry.

Instructor: Christie Valentin-Bati. We'll focus on ideas of selfhood: how others see us, how we see ourselves, how we construct or lose ourselves. Featuring: Clarice Lispector, Virginia Woolf, Jamaica Kincaid. 

Instructor: Beth Slattery. Learn to navigate your flavor of procrastination. We’ll learn the whys behind procrastination, write together, and practice strategies to stay on track. Leave with a completed draft of a project you’ve been avoiding. 

Instructor: Mayur Chauhan. Push past the same old, stretch your creative muscles, and get back to the best part of writing: pure play. Experiment with a variety of genres and forms and leave with several drafts of fresh, playful writing.

Instructor: Joel Heng Hartse. Love a band or artist so much you’ve gotta write about it? Learn various genres of music writing, from album reviews to profiles and thinkpieces. We’ll end the course with a zine-style publication we make together. 

Instructor: Steve Almond. Why do some characters leap off the page while others just sit there, collecting dust? Study the character works of masters like Joyce Carol Oates, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison and learn to make your own characters POP! 

Instructor: Rachel Sobel. Struggling to write? Learn to plan and finish projects, cultivate a regular writing habit, and improve your writing in a way that works for you! Leave with a sustainable weekly writing practice and tools to get unstuck. 

Instructor: Deborah Woodard. Confront the grotesque and bizarre preoccupations found in our everyday lives. We’ll study the work of Franz Kafka and Rachel Karyo, then find new ways to explore the weird and uncanny in our own writing.

Instructor: Meghan Lamb. Explore bodily interventions—including often-taboo subjects of sex, aging, illness, bodily change, and bodily difference—through reading, discussion, and generative writing. 

Instructor: Carolyn Abram. Come one, come all! This workshop is a haven for writers whose work doesn’t fit neatly into “traditional” literary molds. Get feedback on your strangest, most surreal stories in this supportive workshop environment. 

Instructor: Jeanine Walker. Learn specific techniques for reading and giving feedback on others’ work, as well as approaches to revise your own work. Leave with feedback on three poems and the tools to hone your writing craft beyond the classroom. 

Instructor: Jasmine Griffin. Perfect for genre-curious writers, this class invites you to experiment with the multitude of genres under the spec fic umbrella: paranormal, horror, magical realism, fabulism, surrealism, absurdism, and more. 

Instructor: Wancy Cho. In this 16-week workshop, we’ll look back on our own extraordinary experiences and practice bringing them to the page. This class includes short weekly readings and discussions but will primarily focus on workshopping.

Instructor: Sally Ashton. Let’s read through the 2024 edition of Best American Poetry together! We’ll discuss our faves and the parts we don’t get. We'll also have optional writing prompts. Readers of all levels welcome – bring a curious mind! 

Instructor: Anastacia-Reneé. Perfect for new and emerging poets, this intensive will introduce you to the poetry genre. Through close reading and workshopping, you’ll learn poetry fundamentals in a supportive cohort environment. 

Instructor: Shankar Narayan. Dive into the rich space of writings about the forest—from scientific papers to ancient poetry, from global mythology to spells—to inspire our own creative practices. Leave with new pieces, ideas, and community.

Instructor: Theo Nestor. Need to market your book but unsure of how to build your audience? Learn easy and manageable ways to approach email lists, social media, and websites. You'll leave with concrete skills to put into practice right away. 

Instructor: Ruth Joffre. Calling all sci-fi, fantasy, horror, and/or the beautifully weird in-between writers: Ready to buckle down on your WIP? This intensive cohort will give you the structure, support, and community you’ll need to get writing!

Instructor: Elizabeth Villamán. Take your character from flat and forced to complex, authentic, and unforgettable in this craft-focused class. We’ll explore the emotional and psychological transformations that drive our characters—and our narrative.

Instructor: Kaelie Giffel. This class introduces students to recent feminist memoir and life-writing. You'll learn the basics of memoir’s generic conventions, how feminists have used the genre, and its political value. 

Instructor: Carolyne Wright. Explore the relationship between public events and personal transformations: over six weeks, we’ll study works that bear witness to social and political change, then reflect on urgent social contexts of our own.  

Instructor: Olivia Cheng. Explore the role of disgust in contemporary short fiction and how it can be used to reveal deeper truths about life. Leave with new techniques to incorporate the icky, unsettling, and grotesque into your own work.

Instructor: Monika Sengul-Jones. Pack your memories, memorabilia, journal entries, library cards, and beloved dreams. We’ll spend six weeks dissecting various structures of travel essays while writing our own. 

Instructor: Ansley Clark. Explore eroticism through the lens of pleasure and resistance in this six-week generative writing class. We’ll study erotic poems and short stories from contemporary writers, then write some poems of our own.