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Term
Time & Day Offered
Level
Credits
Course Duration

Reading and Writing Nonfiction: History of the Essay — LIT4422.01

Fall 2026
Instructor: Jenny Boully
Days & Time: TU,FR 10:30am-12:20pm
Credits: 4

This workshop course in nonfiction will ask students to generate essays in conversation with canonical essayistic works, both classical and contemporary, as well as traditional and experimental. We will read Pre-Socratic philosophers such as Heraclitus and Roman orators such as Plutarch, examine Sei Shonagon and Kenko, muse on Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, and William

Literature

Reading and Writing Nonfiction: Mourning and Grief — LIT4458.01

Spring 2023
Instructor: Jenny Boully
Credits: 4
The elegy is typically understood as a poetic form which laments the dead: how might the elegiac essay or memoir work toward or away from the poetic tradition? What might be the qualities of the prose elegy? We will read works such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief, Naja Marie Aidt’s When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back: Carl’s Book, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
Literature

Reading and Writing Nonfiction: The Interrotronic Essay: Films of Errol Morris — LIT4609.01

Fall 2025
Instructor: Jenny Boully
Days & Time: TU 2:10pm-5:50pm
Credits: 4

Errol Morris is a filmmaker who is obsessed with his obsessions: his cinematic essays veer towards subjects who themselves are consumed by their own fanaticism. In this class, we will study several films and series that center on what others may simply refer to as “eccentrics,” subjects who, despite knowing that their obsessions may ultimately lead to devastation,

Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry — LIT4313.01

Fall 2017
Instructor: Mark Wunderlich
Credits: 4
Writing poems is not about the expression of the emotions of the writer, but about creating complex, individual works of art that manipulate the emotions of the reader.  In this course we will study the effects of tone, musicality, rhetoric and prosody as they move through a chosen subject, discussing the most effective and artful ways to make poems worthy of the gift of a
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry — LIT4313.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
Students will examine the choices other writers make in their work, through reading a range of selections in contemporary and 20th-century poetry. We will also devote time to discussions of prosody, poetic form, and structure. We will then examine the choices we ourselves make in our work and turn in a new poem every week, each generated through a assignment or prompt. Students
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry — LIT4313.01

Spring 2016
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
Students will examine the choices other writers make in their work, through reading a range of selections in contemporary and 20th-century poetry. We will also devote time to discussions of prosody, poetic form, and structure. We will then examine the choices we ourselves make in our work and turn in a new poem every week, each generated through an assignment or prompt.
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry in the Age of Social Media — LIT4254.01

Fall 2014
Instructor: alex dimitrov
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
This course is a writing workshop designed to investigate, challenge, and use contemporary methods of production and distribution of poetry. Working on the page and online, we will write and read poems in relationship to online culture, popular culture, social media (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram) and platforms of communication such as texts messages, email, YouTube, etc
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Conjuring El Duende — LIT4147.01

Spring 2023
Instructor: An Duplan
Credits: 4
For Federico García Lorca, the duende was an elusive, powerful aspect of the poem. Poetry that embodies the duende carries within it the capacity to transmit life’s most tragic and enraptured states. The duende is the mark of a fully realized poetics. As poets, then, what does it mean to channel Lorca’s duende into our own writing? Is Lorca’s creative ecstasy possible for us
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: First Book, Last Book—Considering Prosodic Evolution — LIT4279.01

Spring 2017
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
We will focus on the first (or near-first) and last (or near-last) book of several authors of poetry with an intense exploration and dissection of the prosodic tools deployed in each book. We will investigate and compare/contrast the structure of the books including order of poems, sections and section titles, and how the poems themselves are written. Each author will also be
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Games and Experiments — LIT4387.01

Spring 2024
Instructor: Franny Choi
Credits: 4
As poets, we're often conducting little experiments on the page: What happens if I break the line here? Can I make this a sestina? How many rhymes is too many rhymes? In this advanced poetry workshop, we will dig into the experimental impulse and explore rigorous play as a method for expanding our artistic capabilities. We will use games, missions, kinetic activities, and
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Image and Detail — LIT4536.01

Fall 2021
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
This poetry workshop focuses on the ways writers deploy language to achieve precision, vividness, sensory richness, singularity, and emotional resonance. We will begin by developing an understanding of the difference between a detail and a visual image, and the distance between the abstract concept of a thing and the sense of the concrete thing itself. We will go on to explore
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Image and Detail — LIT4536.01

Spring 2025
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
This poetry workshop focuses on the ways writers deploy language to achieve precision, vividness, sensory richness, singularity, and emotional resonance. We will begin by developing an understanding of the difference between a detail and a visual image, and the distance between the abstract concept of a thing and the sense of the concrete thing itself. We will go on to explore
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Lyric Persona — LIT4130.01

Fall 2019
Instructor: Anna Maria Hong
Credits: 4
Lyric poems express the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of a single, first-person speaker, often aligned with the poet themselves. Persona poems or dramatic monologues invoke the mask of another figure—fictional character, animal, plant, object, or person—to convey idea, emotion, and voice. Reading a diverse array of poems by poets from different eras, nations, and
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Poetics and Perception — LIT4356.01

Spring 2015
Instructor: Dan Chelotti
Credits: 4
In this intensive poetry writing workshop, we will study essays, poetic theories, and manifestos that argue for varying models of perception and approaches to perception on the page. We will begin with 19th century poets such as Dickinson and Wordsworth and as the semester progresses, we will read increasingly more contemporary work: poets to be read may include Lorine
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Poet’s Proof—Existential, Ephemeral, Ethereal, Empirical, and Other Evidences — LIT4377.01

Spring 2022
Instructor: Jenny Boully
Credits: 4
In her 1983 essay, “A Poet’s Prose,” Susan Sontag set out to demarcate what exactly marks exemplary prose written by poets. Similarly, in this course, we will aim to demarcate “A Poet’s Proof;” that is, we will attempt to name and showcase the very many intangible evidences that a poet brings forth in making manifest in language those otherwise hazy, hidden, and invisible
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Refusals and Mythic Transformations — LIT4532.01

Spring 2021
Instructor: Jenny Boully
Credits: 4
What happens when a poem no longer behaves, when an orderly book of verse begins to display signs of the disorderly? In this course, we will examine poetry books that begin well behaved only to enter into the realm of rebellion. The poet seems to have derailed from their tidiness, their perfected planned lines. The outcome is often explosive, both formally and linguistically,
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: the Art of Revision — LIT4239.01

Spring 2019
Instructor: Natalie Scenters-Zapico
Credits: 4
Kevin Young writes about the haunting qualities of revision in The Grey Album, “…I have been thinking about the idea of a shadow book—a book that we don’t have, but know of, a book that may haunt the very book we have in our hands.” Every writer must become enamored with the art of revision, and become familiar with the many shadows, or potential iterations, of any poem. In
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: The Poet's Toolkit — LIT4251.01

Fall 2013
Instructor: Monica Youn
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
In this course, students will hone and sharpen their poetic craft through an extensive focus on the materials and techniques of their art form. Starting from the basic building block of the poem - the individual word or sound, students will engage in a series of exercises that are designed to deepen their appreciation of structure, craft, and form. We will devote special
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Reading and Writing Poetry: Word Choice and Linebreak — LIT4292.01

Fall 2026
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Days & Time: TH 1:40pm-5:20pm
Credits: 4

This workshop-based creative writing course starts with the premise that every time we put a word down on a page or break a line at a particular point, we are making a choice of genuine consequence. The process of writing a poem is ultimately a sequence of these seemingly small choices and the particular arrangement of words and lines in our poems is more responsible for how

Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Word Choice and Linebreak — LIT4292.01

Fall 2020
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
This workshop-based poetry course starts with the premise that every time we put a word down on a page or break a line at a particular point, we are making a choice of genuine consequence. The process of writing a poem is ultimately a sequence of these seemingly small choices and the particular arrangement of words and lines in our poems is more responsible for how the poems
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Word Choice and Linebreak — LIT4292.01

Fall 2023
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
This workshop-based creative writing course starts with the premise that every time we put a word down on a page or break a line at a particular point, we are making a choice of genuine consequence. The process of writing a poem is ultimately a sequence of these seemingly small choices and the particular arrangement of words and lines in our poems is more responsible for how
Literature

Reading and Writing Poetry: Word Choice and Linebreak — LIT4276.01

Fall 2018
Instructor: Michael Dumanis
Credits: 4
This workshop-based poetry course starts with the premise that every time we put a word down on a page or break a line at a particular point, we are making a choice of genuine consequence. The process of writing a poem is ultimately a sequence of these seemingly small choices and the particular arrangement of words and lines in our poems is more responsible for how the poems
Literature

Reading and Writing Short Stories — LIT4219.01

Fall 2014
Instructor: benjamin anastas
Days & Time: TBA
Credits: 4
This is a course for fiction writers on how to write a short story, a genre we'll define using the formula first proposed by Edgar Allan Poe: a work of fiction that can be read in one sitting. Students can expect to read about forty stories over the semester from a wide range of periods and traditions; write frequent exercises to begin the term; and produce two complete stories
Literature

Reading and Writing Short Stories — LIT4211.01

Spring 2014
Instructor: Rebecca Godwin
Credits: 4
We'll read some 40 stories in this class-mostly contemporary, although we will include a few glorious others-and look for what makes them, well, stories. That's part one. Part two is writing: first bits and pieces, scenes and dialogue and narrative explorations, and then a couple of polished stories to discuss in workshops and revise. Intensive engagement in reading, writing,
Literature