Class Catalog

Instructor: Molly Schaeffer. Combining generative exercises, workshops, and notable examples, we'll investigate the relationship between writers/artists and their notebooks, and ask how our notebooks can feed our creative work and even be the creative work itself.

Instructor: Michelle Peñaloza. Whether you're a beginning poet or a lover of the art, this class will introduce students week by week to elements of poetic craft.

Instructor: Beth Jusino. This class guides students through the nitty-gritty of the constantly changing self-publishing process, including pricing, distribution options, hiring freelancers, choosing a format (print? ebook? audio?), and more.

Instructor: Jaimie Li. This class will connect our intimate experiences to a broader social history, using a combination of research and in-class writing assignments, towards producing individual stories that reflect a greater sense of where we come from and who we are.

Instructor: Theo Nestor. This course covers the basics of platform building, from author websites to essay publication, blogs, email lists, and social media, and more.

Instructor: Meghan Lamb. Investigate nonfiction strategies and narrative structures—including lists, profiles, braids, and epistolaries—exploring what it means to "exaggerate" without "lying."

Instructor: Tiana Nobile. In this course, participants will read and write both traditional forms (i.e. sonnet, ghazal) and modern, experimental forms (erasure, golden shovel), with discussions and in-class workshop.

Instructor: Joyce Chen. In this class, we'll read a wide array of essays written by writers both canonical and contemporary, and use them as a vehicle into discussions about craft, voice, audience, and more.

Instructor: Peter Mountford. This daytime workshop offers regular deadlines, accountability, strong community, and high-quality feedback and peer review.

Instructor: Carolyn Abram. With in-class workshop and readings, students will discuss craft elements of creating weird stories, such as worldbuilding, genre expectations, and publication options.

Instructor: Monika Sengul-Jones. Visit your inward passages by writing a travel essay about past travels. Pack your memories, memorabilia, journal entries, library cards, and beloved dreams.

Instructor: Claudia Castro Luna. This generative class explores how trees have inspired human consciences, bodies, structures, imaginations, and work. Engage with a variety of texts—letters, essays, music, poetry, to examine our relationships to the tree societies around us.

Instructor: Melanie Figg. Explore the persona poem, particularly voice and tone, by reading writing poems written in the voices of objects, people, and nature.

Instructor: Cedar Sigo. This workshop will investigate various ways of capturing and recording details of the everyday, exploring questions of craft and creativity around voice, tone, inflection, time and chronology, rehearsal versus practice, and more.

Instructor: Christine Hemp. Cultivate your voice, tune in to the "ear" of language, and find a shape for your unique essay in this workshop for the novice and advanced writer alike.

Instructor: Susan Briante. Through readings and exercises, participants will consider the ethics of writing out of and through crisis, taking inspiration from writers confronting violence and climate change, as well as historic and contemporary oppressions, and more.

Instructor: Kate Lebo. How can a recipe tell a story? This generative class will mash up family recipe-writing traditions with poetry, flash fiction, and the personal essay to see what emerges on the other side.

Instructor: Courtenay Hameister. Explore the art of the comic personal essay with close readings, subject matter guidance, humorous writing exercises, peer feedback, and a few laughs.

Instructor: Kimberly Dark. This "crash" course on poetry explores craft elements such as form, metaphors, movement, and tropes, strategies for editing, and more with in-class writing and discussion.

Instructor: Karen Finneyfrock. Explore and hone an authentic, inventive voice for your young adult and middle grade novels.

Instructor: Kristi Coulter. This generative class explores techniques for writing vividly, precisely, and relatably about the music we love (or hate, or love to hate).

Instructor: Liza Birnbaum. This class will examine Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse in conversation with Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus, particularly in respect to character arcs, politics, and sentence-level syntax.

Instructor: Jennifer Perrine. This generative class will read nature-centered poetry, essays, and fiction by Black, Indigenous, Asian American, and Latine writers. With writing prompts derived from forest bathing, bird noticing, and more.

Instructor: Tina Tocco. This generative class offers a low-stress, supportive environment for those eager to experiment with fiction writing, with imaginative prompts such as music, sounds, images, and more.