creative writing degree reading list

Creative Writing Reading List

The writer’s reference library.

Here are some influential literary works, folktales, and myths that are great to have on hand for inspiration and reference. These are all in the public domain:

• The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
• The Poetical Works of John Milton
• Grimm’s Fairy Tales
• Andersen’s Fairy Tales
• The Arabian Nights
• The Odyssey (Pope)
• Le Morte d’Arthur I & II
• Myths & Legends of Ancient Greece & Rome
• Bulfinch’s Mythology – The Age of Fable & Legends of Charlemagne
• The Children of Odin
• The Decameron
• The Divine Comedy
• The Gulistan of Sadi
• The Swedish Fairy Book
• The Norwegian Fairy Book
• Jewish Fairy Tales and Legends
• Folk Tales from the Russian
• Viking Tales
• Mongolian Traditionary Tales
• Indian Fairy Tales
• Celtic Fairy Tales
• English Fairy Tales I  & II
• Korean Folk Tales

You may also want to browse the  Project Gutenberg Folklore Bookshelf  and the  Mythology Bookshelf  for more  inspiration from other cultures.

Further recommendations

General writing help.

• Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
• Wild Mind  by Natalie Goldberg
• Daemon Voices by Philip Pullman
• Daily Rituals by Mason Currey
• The Positive Trait Thesaurus by Ackerman & Puglisi
• Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
• The Art of Brevity by Grant Faulkner

Writing Poetry

• The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry
• A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver
• Notes on Prosody by Vladimir Nabokov

Reading for Writers

• The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf
• Lectures on Literature by Vladimir Nabokov

Mythology & Legend

• The Golden Bough by Sir James George Fraser
• The Myth of the Birth of the Hero by Otto Rank
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
• Creative Mythology by Joseph Campbell
• Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola-Estés

Inspiration & Creativity

• The Road to Xanadu by John Livingstone Lowes
• The White Goddess by Robert Graves
• The Creative Mind by Margaret Boden

Text Mining

• Nabokov’s Favourite Word Is Mauve by Ben Blatt
• The Secret Life of Pronouns by James W. Pennebaker

Writers on Writers

• Three Masters: Balzac, Dickens, Dostoeffsky  by Stefan Zweig
• Representative Men: Seven Lectures  by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Writers’ Diaries & Letters

• A Writer’s Diary by Virginia Woolf
• Henry and June by Anaïs Nin
• Byron’s Letters & Journals

Theory & Criticism

• Beginning Theory by Peter Barry
• Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster

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Department of English and Comparative Literature

Reading List

The MFA Comprehensive Exam requires students to write three essays: two in the primary and one in the secondary genre. For the exam you should be prepared to cite approximately 8 works in the primary (approximately 4 per essay) and 4 works in the secondary. In order to be prepared for a variety of essay prompts, students should read widely in both genres—certainly more than the 12 works from the reading lists you will cite on your exam, perhaps 35-50 works or authors. In consultation with their thesis directors, students will devise a personalized list consisting of selections from the lists below as well as additional works of comparable literary quality that they find pertinent to their writing and/or scholarship.

You will confer with your adviser several times during the semester prior to taking the exam to develop your final version of your reading list. Only works on this personalized, advisor-approved list may be cited on the exam.

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah.

Anderson, Sherwood. Winesburg, Ohio.

Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale.

Babel, Isaac. Red Cavalry.

Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room; “Sonny’s Blues.”

Bambara, Toni Cade. Gorilla, My Love.

Barth, John. Lost in the Funhouse.

Barthelme, Donald. 60 Stories.

Beatty, Paul, The Sellout.

Bellow, Saul. Herzog; Seize the Day.

Borges, Jorge Luis. Labyrinths.

Bronte, Charlotte, Jane Eyre.

Butler, Octavia, Kindred.

Calvino, Italo. Cosmicomics.

Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber; Wise Children.

Carver, Raymond. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

Cheever, John. Stories of John Cheever.

Chekhov, Anton. Anton Chekhov’s Short Stories.

Coetzee, J.M. Waiting for The Barbarians.

Coover, Robert. Pricksongs and Descants.

Danticat, Edwidge. The Farming of the Bones.

DeLillo, Don. White Noise.

Diaz, Junot. Drown.

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations.

Doctorow, E.L. Ragtime.

Ducornet, Rikki. The Jade Cabinet.

Egan, Jennifer. A Visit from the Goon Squad.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man.

Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine; LaRose.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom; As I Lay Dying.

Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary.

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Gaitskill, Mary. Bad Behavior.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer.

Gordimer, Nadine. July’s People.

Hamson, Knut. Hunger.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Collected Stories.

Hurston, Zora Neale, Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go.

James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady.

James, Marlon. The Book of Night Women.

Johnson, Denis. Jesus’ Son.

Jones, Edward P. All Aunt Hagar’s Children; The Known World.

Joyce, James, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses.

Kafka, Franz. In the Penal Colony; The Metamorphosis.

Lahiri, Jhumpa. Interpreter of Maladies.

Lalami, Laila. The Moor’s Account.

Lee, Chang-Rae. Native Speaker.

LeGuin, Ursula. The Left Hand of Darkness; The Wind’s Twelve Quarters

Li, Yiyun. A Thousand Years of Good Prayers.

Lispector, Clarice. The Hour of the Star.

Malamud, Bernard. The Magic Barrel.

Marcom, Micheline Aharonian. Three apples fell from heaven.

McBride, James. The Good Lord Bird.

McCarthy, Cormac. Blood Meridian; The Road.

McCullers, Carson. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

McPherson, James Alan. Hue and Cry.

Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas.

Moore, Lorrie. Birds of America.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved; Song of Solomon.

Mosley, Walter. Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned.

Mueenuddin, Daniyal. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders.

Munro, Alice. Selected Stories.

Murakami, Haruki. The Elephant Vanishes; The Wind-up Bird Chronicles.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita.

Naylor, Gloria. The Women of Brewster Place.

Nguyen, Viet Thanh. The Sympathizer.

O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried.

O’Connor, Flannery. Complete Stories.

Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient.

Paley, Grace. Collected Stories.

Papadiamantis, Alexandros. The Murderess.

Phillips, Jayne Anne. Black Tickets.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Selected Short Stories.

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49.

Robinson, Marilynne. Housekeeping.

Roth, Philip. Portnoy’s Complaint.

Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children.

Russell, Karen. St Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.

Saramago, José. Blindness.

Saunders, George. Civilwarland in Bad Decline.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony.

Singer, Isaac Bashevis. The Collected Stories.

Smith, Zadie. On Beauty.

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula.

Strout, Elizabeth. Olive Kitteridge.

Tartt, Donna. The Secret History.

Thuy, Le Thi Diem. The Gangster We Are All Looking For.

Toole, John Kennedy. A Confederacy of Dunces.

Ward, Jesmyn. Salvage the Bones.

Wells, H.G. Time Machine; The War of the Worlds.

Welty, Eudora, Collected Stories.

West, Nathanael. Miss Lonelyhearts.

Wharton, Edith. Age of Innocence.

Whitehead, Colson. The Intuitionist.

Wideman, John Edgar. Sent For You Yesterday.

Williams, Joy. The Quick and the Dead.

Woolf, Virginia, Mrs. Dalloway.

Wright, Richard. Native Son.

Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire.

Ackerman, Diane, A Natural History of the Senses.

Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.

Saint Augustine. Confessions.

Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son.

Beah, Ishmael. A Long Way Gone.

Berry, Wendel. Recollected Essays.

Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods.

Capote, Truman, In Cold Blood.

Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring.

Cofe, Judith Ortiz, Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood.

Conroy, Frank. Stop-Time.

Conway, Jill Ker. The Road from Coorain.

Didion, Joan, Slouching toward Bethlehem, The White Album, The Year of Magical Thinking.

Dillard, Annie, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, An American Childhood.

Eggers, Dave. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Ehrlich, Gretel. The Solace of Open Spaces.

Fadiman, Anne. The Spirit Catches you and You Fall Down, At Large and At Small.

Grann, David. Killers of the Flower Moon.

Haley, Alex, and Malcolm X. The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast.

Hersey, John. Hiroshima.

Hillenbrand, Laura, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption.

Hubbell, Sue. A Country Year: Living the Questions.

Karr, Mary, Liar's Club: A Memoir.

Kincaid, Jamaica. My Brother, A Small Place.

Kingsolver, Barbara, High Tide in Tucson.

Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior.

Krakauer, Jon. Into Thin Air.

Least Heat Moon, William. Blue Highways.

Lewis, C.S. Surprised by Joy.

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac.

Lopez, Barry, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape.

Macdonald, Helen. H is for Hawk.

Markham, Beryl. West with the Night.

Matthiessen, Peter. The Snow Leopard.

McBride, James. The Color of Water.

McCourt, Frank, Angela's Ashes.

McFee, John. Coming into the Country.

Mailer, Norman, The Armies of the Night.

Muir, John. Mountains of California.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory.

Noah, Trevor. Born a Crime.

Norris, Kathleen. Dakota: A Spiritual Geography.

Orwell, George. A Collection of Essays.

Pirzig,Robert. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez.

Sarton, May. Journal of a Solitude.

Sedaris, David. Me Talk Pretty One Day.

Smith, Patti. Just Kids.

Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays.

Stegner, Wallace, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs.

Stein, Gertrude, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

Steinbeck, John. Travels with Charley, The Log from the Sea of Cortez.

Styron, William, Darkness Visible.

Terkel, Studs. Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression.

Thomas, Lewis. The Lives of a Cell

Thompson, Hunter S. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

Wallace, David Foster, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and  Arguments

Welty, Eudora. One Writer’s Beginnings.

White, E.B. Essays of E. B. White.

Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge: An Unnatural History of Time and Place.

Wolfe, Tom, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, The Right Stuff.

Wolff, Tobias, This Boy's Life.

Wolff, Virginia, A Room of One's Own.

Wright, Richard. Black Boy

Ai. Vice: New and Selected Poems.

Ali, Agha Shahid Rae. Partly: New and Selected Poems 2001 - 2015.

Aamons, A. R. Selected Poems.

Armantrout, Rae. Partly: New and Selected Poems 2001 - 2015.

Ashbery, John. Selected Poetry.

Auden, W.H. Selected Poems.

Balakian, Peter. Ozone Journal.

Berryman, John. Selected Poems.

Bidart, Frank. Half Light: Collected Poems 1965 - 2016.

Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems, 1927-1979.

Bukowski, Charles. Essential Bukowski Poetry.

Chin, Marilyn. Portrait of Self as Nation: New and Selected Poems.

Clifton, Lucille. Collected Poems.

Collins, Billy. Sailing Alone Around the Room, New and Selected Poems.

Crane, Hart. Ed. Marc Simon. The Complete Poems.

Creeley, Robert. Selected Poems.

Cullen, Countee. Collected Poems.

Dickinson, Emily. Selected Poems.

Doty, Mark. Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems.

Dove, Rita. Selected Poems.

Dunn, Stephen, New and Selected Poems.

Edson, Russell. The Tunnel: Selected Poems of Russell Edson.

Eliot, T. S. Selected Poems.

Frost, Robert. Selected Poems.

Gilbert, Jack. Collected Poems.

Ginsberg, Allen. Selected Poetry: 1947-1995.

Gioia, Dana. 99 Poems: New and Selected.

Hacker, Marilyn. Selected Poems: 1965 - 1990.

Harjo, Joy. How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems 1975 - 2002.

Hass, Robert. The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems.

Hayes, Terrance. American Sonnets for My Once and Future Assassin.

Herrera, Juan Felipe. Half the World in Light: New and Selected Poems.

Hughes, Langston. Selected Poems.

Hugo, Richard. Making Certain It Goes On: Collected Poems.

Jackson, Major. Roll Deep: Poems.

Jeffers, Robinson. The Wild God of the World:An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers.

Justice, Donald. Collected Poems.

Kinnell, Galway. New Selected Poems.

Kizer, Carolyn. Cool, Calm, and Collected.

Koch, Kenneth. Selected Poems.

Komunyakaa, Yusef. Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems.

Kyger, Joanne. As Ever: Selected Poems.

Lee, Li-Young, Behind My Eyes.

Levertov, Denise. Collected Poems.

Levine, Philip. New Selected Poems.Lowell, Robert. Selected Poems.

Long Soldier, Layli. Whereas: Poems.

Major, Clarence. From Now On: New and Selected Poems.

Merrill, James. Selected Poems: 1946-1985.

Merwin, W. S. Migration: New and Selected Poems.

Milosz, Czeslaw. The Collected Poems, 1931-1987.

Moore, Marianne. Complete Poems.

O'Hara, Frank. The Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara.

Philips, Carl. Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986 - 2006.

Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems.

Pound, Ezra. New Selected Poems and Translations.

Rankine, Claudia. Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric.

Rexroth, Kenneth. Complete Poems.

Rich, Adrienne. Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose, Norton Critical Edition.

Roethke, Theodore. The Collected Poems.

Rukeyser, Muriel. Selected Poems.

Simic, Charles. New and Selected Poems.

Smith, Tracy K. Life On Mars: Poems.

Snyder, Gary. No Nature: New and Selected Poems.

Soto, Gary. New and Selected Poems.

Stafford, William. The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems.

Stern, Gerald. This Time: New and Selected Poems.

Stevens, Wallace. The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems.

Tate, James. Selected Poems.

Trethewey, Natasha. Monument: Poems New and Selected.

Whalen, Philip. Selected Poems.

Whitman, Walt. Selected Poems.

Williams, William Carlos. Selected Poems.

Wright, James. Above the River: Complete Poems.

Vuong, Ocean. Night Sky With Exit Wounds.

Yeats, William Butler. Collected Poems.

Young, Kevin. Blue Laws: Collected and Uncollected Poems 1995 - 2015.

Playwriting/Screenwriting

Albee, Edward. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Beckett, Waiting for Godot.

Brecht, Bertolt. The Good Woman of Setzuan.

Chekhov, Anton. The Cherry Orchard.

Hansberry, Lorraine. A Raisin in the Sun.

Ibsen, Henrik. Ghosts.

Ionesco, Eugene. The Bald Soprano.

Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman.

Molière. Tartuffe.

O'Neill, Eugene. Long Day's Journey into Night.

Pinter, Harold. The Birthday Party.

Reza, Yasmina. Art.

Sartre, Jean Paul. No Exit.

Shaw, George Bernard. Candida.

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley. The School for Scandal.

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet.

Sophocles. Oedipus Rex.

Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Valdez, Luis. Zoot Suit.

Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest.

Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire.Valdez, Luis. Zoot Suit.

Williams, Tennessee. The Glass Menagerie.

Wilson, August. Joe Turner's Come and Gone.

All About Eve.

The Bicycle Thief

Casablanca.

Citizen Kane.

The Grapes of Wrath.

North by Northwest.Rear Window.

Rules of the Game.

Seven Samurai.

Singin' in the Rain.

Stagecoach.

Wild Strawberries.

• Creative Writing Concentration

Recommended Reading

This is not, by any means, a comprehensive list, but one that covers a wide range of genres, styles, and approaches to writing craft. Some of these books will be familiar to you, others will be wholly new; all have something to offer serious young writers eager to place themselves within a long and glorious literary tradition.

Books on Craft

The craft of poetry.

• Fussell, Paul: Poetic Meter, Poetic Form
• Gudding, Gabriel “Dung in an Age of Empire: An Defense of A Defense of Poetry”; online essay
• Hirsch, Edward: How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry
• Hirschfield, Jane: Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry
• Howe, Susan: The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, My Emily Dickinson
• Koch, Kenneth: Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry
• Longenbach, James: The Resistance to Poetry
• Oliver, Mary: Rules for the Dance
• Pound, Ezra: The ABC of Reading
• Padgett, Ron, ed.: Handbook of Poetic Forms
• Shapiro, Alan: The Last Happy Occasion
• Shelley, Percy B.: In Defense of Poetry
• Rich, Adrienne: What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics
• Zukofsky, Louis: A Test of Poetry

Prose Craft

• Baxter, Charles. Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction
• Bernays, Anne. and Pamela Painter. What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers.
• Burroway: Writing Fiction
• Dillard, Annie: The Writing Life
• Gardner, John: The Art of Fiction, On Becoming a Novelist
• Gerard, Philip: Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life
• Heilbrun, Carolyn: Writing a Woman’s Life
• Hills, Rust: Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular
• Johnston, Bret Anthony: Naming the World
• King, Stephen: On Writing
• Kundera, Milan: The Art of the Novel
• Lamott, Anne: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
• Lott, Brett: Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of a Writer’s Life
• Mamet, David: Writing in Restaurants
• O’Connor, Flannery: Mystery and Manners
• Stern, Jerome: Making Shapely Fiction
• Woolf, Virginia: A Room of One’s Own
• Yeats, W.B.: Essays and Introductions
• Ashbery, John: Selected Poems (Penguin Poets)
• Becker, Robin: The Horse Fair
• Bernstein, Charles: My Way: Speeches and Poems
• Bishop, Elizabeth: Poems, Prose and Letters (LOA edition)
• Dickinson, Emily: The Poems of Emily Dickinson, (ed. by R. V. Franklin)
• Eady, Cornelius: Brutal Imagination
• Estrada, Álvaro: María Sabina: Her Life and Chants
• Fulton, Alice: Cascade Experiment: Selected Poems
• Gay, Ross: Against Which
• Gilbert, Jack: The Great Fires, Refusing Heaven
• Ginsberg, Allen: Howl
• Gluck, Louise: The Wild Iris, The Seven Ages
• Groff, David: The Theory of Devolution
• Hacker, Marilyn: Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons
• Hall, Donald: Without
• Hoagland, Tony: What Narcissus Means to Me
• Jabes, Edmond: From the Book to the Book: An Edmond Jabes Reader
• Jordan, A. Van: Quantum Lyrics: Poems
• Justice, Donald: Collected Poems
• Kenyon, Jane: Otherwise
• Koch, Kenneth: Selected Poems: American Poets Project
• Komunyakaa, Yusef: Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems
• Levertov, Denise: Selected Poems
• Levine, Philip: New Selected Poems
• Levis, Larry: The Selected Levis
• Lorde, Audre: The Selected Poems of Audre Lorde
• Matthews, Sebastian: We Generous
• Matthews, William: Search Party: Selected Poems
• Merwin, W.S.: Four Books of Poems: The Moving Target, The Lice, The Carrier of Ladders, Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment
• Nelson, Marilyn: The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems
• Olds, Sharon: Strike Sparks: Selected Poems
• Oliver, Mary: Thirst, Red Bird, or any collection
• Parker, Alan Michael: Elephants and Butterflies
• Pound, Ezra: The Cantos
• Rich, Adrienne: The Dream of a Common Language
• Roethke, Theodore: Any poetry collection
• Rosal, Patrick: Uprock, Headspin, Scramble and Dive, My American Kundiman
• Shelley, Percy B.: Poetical Works
• Simic, Charles: Sixty Poems
• Spahr, Juliana: Response
• Spicer, Jack: The Collected Books of Jack Spicer
• Stern, Gerald: This Time: New and Selected Poems
• Stevens, Wallace: Collected Poems
• Stewart, Susan: Columbarium
• Thomas, Dylan: Collected Poems
• Trethewey, Natasha: Bellocq’s Ophelia
• Voigt, Ellen Bryant: Messenger: New and Selected Poems
• Weiner, Hannah: Little Books, Indians
• Whitman, Walt: Leaves of Grass, Poetry and Prose, Library of America College Edition
• Williams, C.K.: Collected Poems
• Wilner, Eleanor: Reversing the Spell
• Winters, Anne: The Displaced of Capital
• Wright, Charles: The World of the Ten Thousand Things: Poems 1980 – 1990
• Yeats, W.B. Yeats: Collected Poems

Plays, Drama

• Albee, Edward: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Goat: Or Who is Sylvia?
• Durang, Christopher: Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You, The Marriage of Bette and Boo
• Fuller, Charles: A Soldier’s Play
• Guare, John: Six Degrees of Separation, The House of Blue Leaves
• Hansberry, Lorraine: A Raisin in the Sun
• Hellman, Lillian: Little Foxes, The Children’s Hour
• Henley, Beth: Crimes of the Heart
• Howe, Tina: Coastal Disturbances, Painting Churches
• Hwang, David Henry: M Butterfly
• Inge, William: Picnic, Come Back, Little Sheba
• Kushner, Tony: Angels in America
• Mamet, David: American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross
• McDonough, Martin: The Pillowman, The Beauty Queen of Leenane
• McNally, Terrence: Master Class, Love! Valour! Compassion!
• Miller, Arthur: The Crucible, Death of a Salesman
• Norman, Marsha: ‘night, Mother
• O’Neill, Eugene: Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Morning Becomes Electra
• Parks, Suzan-Lori: Topdog/Underdog
• Pinter, Harold: Betrayal, The Homecoming
• Shange, Ntozake: For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf
• Shepard, Sam: True West, Buried Child
• Stoppard, Tom: The Real Thing, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Travesties
• Strindberg, August: Miss Julie
• Vogel, Paula: How I Learned to Drive
• Wasserstein, Wendy: Uncommon Women, The Heidi Chronicles
• Williams, Tennessee: A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Summer and Smoke
• Wilson, August: Fences, Ma Rainey’s Fat Bottom, The Piano Lesson
• Wilson, Doug: I Am My Own Wife

Short Fiction

• Anderson, Sherwood: Winesburg, Ohio
• Barrett, Andrea: Servants of the Map
• Barthelme, Donald: any of his short story collections
• Bausch, Richard: The Stories of Richard Bausch
• Bloom, Amy: Come to Me
• Boyle, T.C.: T.C. Boyle Stories
• Butler, Robert Olen: A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain
• Buzatti, Dino: Restless Nights
• Bynum, Sarah Shun-lien: Madeleine is Sleeping
• Carver, Raymond: Cathedral, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
• Colwin, Laurie: The Lone Pilgrim,
• Diaz, Junot: Drown
• Dinasen, Isak: Winter Tales
• Gurganus, Alan: White People
• Haslett, Adam: You Are Not A Stranger Here
• Hempl, Amy: Reasons to Live
• Hijuelos, Oscar: The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
• Jen, Gish: Who’s Irish?
• Jin, Ha: The Bridegroom
• Johnston, Bret Anthony: Corpus Christi
• Joyce, James: The Dubliners
• Lahiri, Jhumpa: Interpreter of Maladies
• Link, Kelly: Magic for Beginners
• Malamud, Bernard: The Magic Barrel
• Millhauser, Steven: In the Penny Arcade
• McPherson, James Alan: Elbow Room
• Moore, Lorrie: Like Life, Birds of America, Self-Help
• Munro, Alice: Runaway, or any of her short story collections
• O’Brien, Tim: The Things They Carried
• O’Connor, Flannery: A Good Man is Hard to Find, Everything that Rises Must Converge
• Richter, Stacey: My Date with Satan
• Saunders, George: Civil War Land in Bad Repair
• Smiley, Jane: The Age of Grief
• Trevor, William: After Rain
• Welty, Eudora: A Curtain of Green, Collected Stories

Memoir, Essays & Other Creative Non-fiction

• Allison, Dorothy: Bastard Out of Carolina
• Baldwin, James: The Fire Next Time
• Barthes, Roland: Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
• Beard, Jo Ann: Boys of My Youth
• Brown, Claude: Manchild in the Promised Land
• Burroway, Janet: Writing Fiction
• Capote, Truman: In Cold Blood
• Daum, Megan: My Misspent Youth
• Dericotte, Toi: The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey
• Didion, Joan: The White Album, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The Year of Magical Thinking
• Dillard, Annie: The Writing Life, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
• Dinasen, Isak: Out of Africa
• Eggers, Dave: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Fadiman, Anne: Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader
• Fraser, Joelle: Territory of Men
• Grealy, Lucy: Autobiography of a Face
• Guibert, Herve: Ghost Image
• Lewis, C.S.: Surprised by Joy
• Markham, Beryl: West with the Night
• Nabokov, Vladimir: Speak, Memory
• O’Connor, Flannery: The Habit of Being
• Patchett, Ann: Truth and Beauty
• Roethke, Theodore: Straw for the Fire
• Sanders, Scott Russell: A Private History of Awe
• Scalapino : Zither & Autobiography
• Sedaris, David: Me Talk Pretty One Day, Naked
• Sontag, Susan: Against Interpretation, Illness as Metaphor
• Thomas, Lewis: Lives of a Cell, The Medusa and the Snail
• Thompson, Hunter S.: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
• Vowell, Sarah: Partly Cloudy Patriot
• Walls, Jeannette: The Glass Castle
• Williams, Terry Tempest: Refuge
• Wolff, Tobias: This Boy’s Life
• Woolf, Virginia: A Room of One’s Own
• Wright, Richard: Black Boy
• Yeats, W.B.: Autobiographies
• Atwood, Margaret: The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin
• Bechard, D.Y.: Vandal Love
• Bloom, Amy: Away
• Byatt, A.S.: Possession
• Cain, James M.: The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce
• Cary, Joyce: The Horse’s Mouth
• Chabon, Michael: The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys
• Chopin, Kate: The Awakening
• Coetzee, J.M.: Disgrace, Waiting for the Barbarians
• Colwin, Laurie: Happy All the Time
• Crace, Jim: Being Dead
• Cunningham, Michael: The Hours, A Home at the End of the World
• Dalton, John: Heaven Lake
• Danticat, Edwidge: The Farming of Bones
• DeLillo, Don: Mao II, White Noise, Underworld
• Diaz, Junot: The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• Doctorow, E.L.: Ragtime, The March
• Early, Tony: Jim the Boy
• Eugenides, Jeffrey: Middlesex, The Virgin Suicides
• Faulks, Sebastian: Birdsong
• Flagg, Fannie: Fried Green Tomatoes
• Flaubert, Gustav: Madame Bovary
• Gibbons, Kaye: Ellen Foster
• Gordimer, Nadine: The House Gun, July’s People, The Conservationist, Get a Life
• Gruen, Sarah: Water For Chocolate
• Hagedorn, Jessica: The Dogeaters
• Haruf, Kent: Plainsong
• Hosseini, Khaled: The Kite Runner
• Hulme, Keri: The Bone People
• Hurston, Zora Neale: Their Eyes were Watching God
• Jones, Edward P.: The Known World
• Kundera, Milan: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unforgettable Lightness of Being
• Kennedy, William: Ironweed (or any of the Albany Trilogy)
• Kingsolver, Barbara: The Poisonwood Bible
• Lahiri, Jhumpa: The Namesake
• Livesey, Margot: Eva Moves the Furniture, Criminals, The House on Fortune Street
• McCarthy, Cormac: The Road, Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men
• McDermott, Alice: Charming Billy, That Night
• McEwan, Ian: Atonement, The Child in Time, Enduring Love
• Miller, Henry: Tropic of Cancer
• Millhauser, Steven: Martin Dressler
• Min, Katherine: Secondhand World
• Mitchell, David: Cloud Atlas, Black Swan Green
• Morrison, Toni: Beloved, Song of Solomon
• Nabokov, Vladimir: Lolita
• Oates, Joyce Carol: Them
• O’Brien, Flann: At-Swim-Two-Birds
• Ondaatje, Michael: The English Patient
• O’Neill, Joseph: Netherland
• Patchett, Ann: Bel Canto, The Magician’s Assistant
• Petersen, Per: Out Stealing Horses
• Robinson, Marilyn: Housekeeping, Gilead
• Russo, Richard: Empire Falls
• Salter, James: A Sport and a Pastime
• Saramago, Jose: Blindness
• Saterstrom, Selah: The Pink Institution
• Schutt, Christine: Florida
• Sebold, W.G.: Austerlitz
• Sharpe, Matthew: The Sleeping Father
• Shields, Carol: The Stone Diaries
• Smith, Lee: Fair and Tender Ladies, Oral History
• Spencer, Scott: A Ship Made of Paper
• Stegner, Wallace: Angle of Repose
• Stephens, James: The Crock of Gold
• Strout, Elizabeth: Amy and Isabelle
• Styron, William: Sophie’s Choice
• Tan, Amy: The Kitchen God’s Wife
• Trevor, William: Any of his books
• Truong, Monique: The Book of Salt
• Updike, John: The Centaur, Rabbit Run
• Vonnegut, Kurt: Slaughterhouse Five
• Walker, Alice: The Color Purple
• Warren, Robert Penn: All the King’s Men
• West, Nathaniel: The Day of the Locust, Miss Lonelyhearts
• Woolf, Virginia: Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse
• Yates, Richard: Revolutionary Road

Creative Writing

Stanford’s Creative Writing Program--one of the best-known in the country--cultivates the power of individual expression within a vibrant community of writers. Many of our English majors pursue a concentration in creative writing, and the minor in Creative Writing is among the most popular minors on campus. These majors and minors participate in workshop-based courses or independent tutorials with Stegner Fellows, Stanford’s distinguished writers-in-residence.

English Major with a Creative Writing Emphasis

The English major with a Creative Writing emphasis is a fourteen-course major. These fourteen courses comprise eight English courses and six Creative Writing courses.

English majors with a Creative Writing emphasis should note the following:

All courses must be taken for a letter grade.

Courses taken abroad or at other institutions may not be counted towards the workshop requirements.

Any 190 series course (190F, 190G, etc.), 191 series course (191T, etc.), or 192 series course (192V, etc.) counts toward the 190, 191, or 192 requirement.

PWR 1 is a prerequisite for all creative writing courses.

Minor in Creative Writing

The Minor in Creative Writing offers a structured environment in which students interested in writing fiction or poetry develop their skills while receiving an introduction to literary forms. Students may choose a concentration in fiction, poetry.

In order to graduate with a minor in Creative Writing, students must complete the following three courses plus three courses in either the prose or poetry tracks. Courses counted towards the requirements for the minor may not be applied to student's major requirements. 30 units are required. All courses must be taken for a letter grade.

Prose Track

Suggested order of requirements:

English 90. Fiction Writing or English 91. Creative Nonfiction

English 146S Secret Lives of the Short Story

One 5-unit English literature elective course

English 190. Intermediate Fiction Writing or English 191. Intermediate Creative Nonfiction Writing

English 92. Reading and Writing Poetry

Another English 190, 191, 290. Advanced Fiction, 291. Advanced Nonfiction, or 198L. Levinthal Tutorial

Poetry Track

English 92.Reading and Writing Poetry

English 160. Poetry and Poetics

English 192. Intermediate Poetry Writing

Another English 192, or 292.Advanced Poetry or 198L.Levinthal Tutorial

Creative Writing minors should note the following:

To declare a Creative Writing minor, visit the Student page in Axess. To expedite your declaration, make sure to list all 6 courses you have taken or plan to take for your minor.

Any 190 series course (190F, 190G, etc.), 191series course (191T, etc.), or 192 series course (192V, etc.) counts toward the 190, 191, or 192 requirement.

For more information, visit the Stanford Creative Writing Program.

Home » Reading Lists

The CWSO Board of Directors and its advisory group seeks to offer resources that provide an introduction to the field of creative writing studies. To this end, we compiled the following reading lists that represent excellent starting points for several areas within the field of creative writing studies. 

The list is loosely organized into the following sections:

• On Artistic Practice and Aesthetic Contribution: Texts that examine the politics of craft, identity in writing, cultural / aesthetic traditions, and ways of making that challenge traditional boundaries and what it means to do creative writing. 
• Creative Writers on Representation: Books and edited collections from creative writers who examine issues of imagination, the effects and affects of racial difference, and representation as it unfolds in the practice of creative writing. 
• Reimagining the Workshop / Building Writing Communities: Texts that challenge the traditional structures of creative writing workshops and offer crucial discussions of what it means to build inclusive and socially-just writing communities.
• Creative Writing Teaching: Applied pedagogical discussions about what happens in a range of creative writing classrooms (including K-12 classrooms, higher education, etc.).
• Publishing: Anthologies of essays written by editors, authors, and artists who reflect on publishing processes and the spheres in which texts circulate.
• Multilingualism & Linguistic Justice: Theories of linguistic justice as they apply to creative writing.
• Creative Writing Methodologies: Approaches to conducting research in creative writing, including theoretical approaches.
• Creative Writing in Higher Education: Texts that historicize and locate creative writing in higher education.
• Media, Technology, and Creative Writing: Studies of literary production with an emphasis on the role of technology and media.

There are many areas of study and genres of publications in creative writing that this list does not cover, including craft textbooks meant for student audiences, etc. In the interest of finding balance, any one writer/researcher appears only once or a couple of times on this list; as such, the list does not represent the full body of work of any one theorist. We encourage those who make use of this list to seek out more readings from each author.

We expect and hope to see these lists change over time as the body of scholarship in the field of creative studies continues to grow and deepen. If you have suggestions for new additions to this list, please complete this form . 

This list was last updated in April 2021. To see the CWSO’s original reading list, now archived, follow this link.

On Artistic Practice and Aesthetic Contribution

Aldama, Frederick Luis. Formal Matters in Contemporary Latino Poetry. Palgrave McMillan, 2013. 

Alexander, Will. Singing in Magnetic Hoofbeat: Essays, Prose Texts, Interviews, and a Lecture, 1997-2007. Edited by Taylor Brady. Essay Press, 2012.

Ben-Oni, Rosebud, ed. On Poetics, Identity, and Latinidad: CantoMundo Poets Speak Out. Essay Press. 2017.

Black, Sheila, Jennifer Bartlett and Michael Northen, eds. Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Cinco Puntos Press, 2011. 

Carroll, Audrey T., ed. Musing the Margins: Essays on Craft. HumanKind Press, 2020.

Dawes, Kwame, ed. When the Rewards Can Be So Great: Essays on Writing and the Writing Life . 1849 Editions, 2016. 

Fuhrman, CMarie and Dean Rader, eds. Native Voices: Indigenous American Poetry, Craft, and Conversations . Tupelo Press, 2019. 

Galvan-Huynh, Amanda & Luisa A. Igloria, eds. Of Color: Poets’ Ways of Making An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics. Operating System, 2019.

Kitabat alkitabah Writers on Writing . Beirut: ARRAWI Publishing, 2010

Lee, Sherry Quan, ed. How Dare We! Write: A Multicultural Creative Writing Discourse. Modern History Press, 2007.

Mura, David. A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing. U of Georgia P, 2018.

Parker Rhodes, Jewell. Free Within Ourselves: Fiction Lessons for Black Authors. Main Street Books, 1999. 

Salesses, Matthew. Craft in the Real World . Catapult, 2021.

Tolbert, TC and Trace Peterson, eds. Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics . Nightboat Books, 2013. 

Washuta, Elissa and Theresa Warburton, eds. Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. University of Washington, 2019. 

Xudao Jun. Creative Writing Fifteen Lessons (Chinese Edition). Shanghai University Press, 2019. 

Creative Writers on Representation

McCullough, Laura, ed. A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race. U of Georgia P, 2015.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage, 1992.

Philip, M. NourbeSe. Frontiers: Essays and Writings on Racism and Culture. Mercury P, 1992.

Rankine, Claudia, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap, eds. The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. Fence, 2015.

Wang, Dorothy. Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Asian American Poetry. Stanford University Press, 2014.

Ziff, Bruce, and Pratima V. Rao. Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation. Rutgers University Press, 1997.

Reimagining the Workshop / Building Writing Communities

Chavez, Felicia Rose. The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom. Haymarket, 2021. 

Coles, Katharine. Blueprints: Bringing Poetry into Communities. University of Utah Press, 2011. 

Donnelly, Dianne. Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? Multilingual Matters, 2016. 

Elbow, Peter and Patricia Belanoff. Sharing and Responding. McGraw Hill, 1999. 

Leahy, Anna. Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom: The Authority Project. Multilingual Matters, 2005. 

Jones, Omi Osun Joni L., Lisa L. Moore, Sharon Bridgeforth, eds. Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia, and the Austin Project. University of Texas Press, 2010.

Muller, Lauren, and June Jordan. June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint. Taylor & Francis, 1995. 

Nowak, Mark. Social Poetics. Coffee House Press, 2020.

Thaxton, Terry Ann. Creative Writing in the Community. Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 

Creative Writing Teaching

Adsit, Janelle. Toward an Inclusive Creative Writing: Threshold Concepts to Guide the Literary Writing Curriculum. Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 

Aldama, Frederick Luis. Latino/a Literature in the Classroom. Routledge, 2015. 

Ash, Amy, Michael Dean Clark, and Chris Drew. Imaginative Teaching through Creative Writing A Guide for Secondary Classrooms. Bloomsbury, 2021.

Berg, Danita and Lori May. Creative Composition: Inspiration and Techniques for Writing Instruction. Multilingual Matters, 2015. 

Bishop, Wendy and Hans Ostrom. Colors of a Different Horse: Rethinking Creative Writing Theory and Pedagogy. NCTE, 1994. 

Cantú-Sánchez, Margaret, Candace de León-Zepeda, and Norma Elia Cantú. Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Pedagogy and Practice for Our Classrooms and Communities. University of Arizona Press, 2020. 

España, Carla and Luz Yadira Herrera. En Comunidad: Lessons for Centering the Voices and Experiences of Bilingual Latinx Students. Heinemann, 2020. 

Lasky, Dorothea, and Dominic Luxford, and Jesse Nathan. Open the Door: How to Excite Young People about Poetry. Poetry Foundation, 2013.

Marzán, Julio, ed.  Luna, Luna: Creative Writing Ideas from Spanish, Latin American, and Latino Literature (English and Spanish Edition). Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 2000. 

McCrory, Moy, and Simon Heywood, eds. Strategies of Silence: Reflections on the Practice and Pedagogy of Creative Writing . Routledge, 2021.

Moore, Marshall and Sam Meekings. The Place and the Writer: International Intersections of Teacher Lore and Creative Writing Pedagogy. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 

Peary, Alexandria and Tom C Hunley. Creative Writing Pedagogies for the Twenty-First Centuries. Southern Illinois University Press, 2015. 

Retallack, Joan, and Juliana Spahr. Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Thomas, Lorenzo, ed. Sing the Sun Up: Creative Writing Ideas from African-American Literature . Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 1998. 

Vandermeulen, Carl. Negotiating the Personal in Creative Writing. Multilingual Matters, 2011. 

Vanderslice, Stephanie and Rebecca Manery. C an Creative Writing Really Be Taught?: Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy. Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. 

Baker, Dallas John, Donna Lee Brien, and Jen Webb, eds. Publishing and Culture. Cambridge, 2019. 

Hecq, Dominique. The Creativity Market: Creative Writing in the 21st Century. Multilingual Matters, 2012. 

Kurowski, ed., Paper Dreams: Writers and Editors on the American Literary Magazine. Atticus Books, 2013. 

Licona, Adela C. Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric. SUNY, 2013.

Miller, Prufer, and Kurowski, eds., Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century. Milkweed Editions, 2016. 

Parker Rhodes, Jewell. The African American Guide to Writing and Publishing Nonfiction. Broadway, 2002. 

Young, John, ed. Black Writers, White Publishers: Marketplace Politics in Twentieth-Century African American Literature. University Press of Mississippi, 2006. 

Multilingualism & Linguistic Justice 

Adsit, Janelle, ed. Critical Creative Writing. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 

— Anzaldúa, Gloria. “How to Tame a Wild Tongue.” 

— Cruz, Conchitina. “The Filipino Author as Producer.” 

— Harmon, Amy. “Writing Deaf: Textualizing Deaf Literature.” 

— Marmon Silko, Leslie. “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective.” 

Avineri, Netta, Laura Graham, Eric Johnson, Robin Conley Riner, and Jonathan Rosa. Language and Social Justice in Practice. Routledge, 2018. 

Baker-Bell, April. Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy. NCTE Routledge, 2020. 

Hanauer, David Ian. Poetry as Research: Exploring Second Language Poetry Writing. John Benjamins, 2010.

Lippi-Green, Rosina. English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States . Routledge, 2011. 

Piller, Ingrid. Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice. Oxford University Press, 2016. 

Young, Vershawn Ashanti and Aja Martinez. Code-Meshing as World English: Pedagogy, Policy, Performance. National Council of Teachers of English, 2011. 

Young, Vershawn Ashanti et. al. Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African American Literacy. Teachers College Press, 2014. 

Zhao, Yan. Second Language Creative Writers: Identities and Writing Processes. Multilingual Matters, 2015. 

Creative Writing Studies Research and Methodologies 

Dean, Roger T., and Hazel Smith, eds. Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh UP, 2009.

Donnelly, Dianne and Graeme Harper. Key Issues in Creative Writing. Multilingual Matters, 2012. 

Faulkner, Sandra L. Poetry as Method: Reporting Research through Verse. Routledge, 2016.

Ge Hongbing， Theory of Creative Writing (Chinese Edition)，High Education Press, 2020.

Diao Keli, The Author (Chinese Edition) , Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press,2019.

Ding Bohui, Creative Writing (Chinese Edition) , Higher Education Press, 2016.

Feng Ruchang, Creative Writing for College Students (Chinese Edition) , Higher Education Press, 2020.

Gerard, Philip. The Art of Creative Research. U Chicago P, 2017.

Haake, Katharine. What Our Speech Disrupts: Feminism and Creative Writing Studies. NCTE, 2000. 

Harper, Graeme and Jeri Kroll. Creative Writing Studies: Practice, Research and Pedagogy. Multilingual Matters, 2011. 

Harper, Graeme, ed. Critical Approaches to Creative Writing. Routledge, 2018.

Harper, Graeme, ed. New Ideas in the Writing Arts. Cambridge 2013.

Harper, Graeme, ed. Responding to Creative Writing. Cambridge UP, 2020.

Hecq, Dominique. Towards a Poetics of Creative Writing. Multilingual Matters, 2015.

Jiang Bing, Huang Jianyun, Creative Writing Practice and Course for College Students (Chinese Edition) , Jinan University Press, 2017.

Kroll, Jeri, and Graeme Harper. Research in Creative Writing . Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Lei Yong, The Research of the Creativity Theory in Creative Writing (Chinese Edition) , Shanghai University Press, 2021.

Liu Haitao, Literature and Creative Writing (Chinese Edition) , Higher Education Press, 2021.

Liu Weidong. The Fundamental Theories in Creative Writing (Chinese Edition) Shanghai University Press，2019.

Xu Daojun, Chinese Creative Writing Studies (Chinese Edition), High Education Press, 2019.

Xu Daojun, Ge Hongbing. Creative Writing: Basic Theories and Practice (Chinese Edition). Guangxi Normal University Press, 2012. 

Webb, Jen. Researching Creative Writing. Frontinus, 2015.

Webb, Jen, and Monica Carroll. Creativity in Context: How to Make a Poet. Recent Work P, 2018.

Creative Writing in Higher Education

Bennett, Eric. Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War. University of Iowa Press, 2015. 

Dawson, Paul. Creative Writing and the New Humanities . Routledge, 2004. 

Donnelly, Dianne. Establishing Creative Writing Studies as an Academic Discipline. Multilingual Matters, 2011. 

Harper, Graeme. Creative Writing and Education. Multilingual Matters, 2015. 

Mayers, Tim. (Re)Writing Craft: Composition, Creative Writing, and the Future of English Studies . University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 

McGurl, Mark. The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Harvard University Press, 2011. 

Myers, D.G. The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880. Prentice Hall, 1995. 

Vanderslice, Stephanie. Rethinking Creative Writing. The Professional and Higher Partnership, 2011. 

Vanderslice, Stephanie. Studying Creative Writing-Successfully. Frontinus, 2016.

Media, Technology, and Creative Writing

Amato, Joe and Kass Fleisher. Reforming Creative Writing Pedagogy: History as Knowledge, Knowledge as Activism (Online)

Clark, Michael Dean, Trent Hergenrader, and Joseph Rein. Creative Writing in the Digital Age: Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 

Girardi, Tamara, Abigail G. Scheg. Theories and Strategies for Teaching Creative Writing Online. Routledge, 2021.

Hungerford, Amy. Making Literature Now. Stanford UP, 2016.

Koehler, Adam. Composition, Creative Writing Studies, and the Digital Humanities. Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 

Please also see:

De-Canon: Writers of Color Discussing Craft

Felicia Rose Chavez Reading List

Conscious Style Guide

More Readings in Creative Writing Studies

What Is Missing?

Once again, if you have suggestions for new additions to this list, please complete this form . 

Choose Your Test

Sat / act prep online guides and tips, the 12 best creative writing colleges and programs.

College Info

Finding a dedicated creative writing program at a school you're excited about can be a real challenge, and that's even before you start worrying about getting in. Nonetheless, there are some great options. In order to help you find the best school for you, this list rounds up some of the best colleges for creative writing in the United States .

The Best Creative Writing Programs: Ranking Criteria

You should never take college rankings as absolute truth —not even the very official-seeming US News ones. Instead, use these kinds of lists as a jumping-off place for your own exploration of colleges. Pay attention not just to what the rankings are but to how the rankings are determined.

To help with that, I'll explain how I came up with this highly unscientific list of great creative writing colleges. I started by narrowing my search down to schools that offered a specific creative writing major. (If you don't see a school you were expecting, it's likely because they only have a minor.)

In ranking the schools, I considered five major criteria:

• #1: MFA Ranking —If a school has a great graduate creative writing program, it means you'll be taught by those same professors and the excellent graduate students they attract. Schools with strong MFA programs are also more likely to have solid alumni networks and internship opportunities. However, many schools with great undergrad programs do not offer MFAs, in which case I simply focused on the other four options.
• #2: General School Reputation —The vast majority of your classes won't be in creative writing, so it's important that other parts of the school, especially the English department, are great as well.
• #3: Extracurricular Opportunities —One of the key advantages of majoring in creative writing is that it can provide access to writing opportunities outside the classroom, so I took what kind of internship programs, author readings, and literary magazines the school offers into consideration.
• #4: Diversity of Class Options —I gave extra points to schools with a variety of genre options and specific, interesting classes.
• #5: Alumni/Prestige —This last criterion is a bit more subjective: is the school known for turning out good writers? Certainly it's less important than what kind of education you'll actually get, but having a brand-name degree (so to speak) can be helpful.

The Best Creative Writing Schools

Now, let's get to the good stuff: the list of schools! The exact numbering is always arguable, so look at it as a general trend from absolutely amazing to still super great, rather than fixating on why one school is ranked #3 and another is ranked #4.

#1: Northwestern University

Northwestern's undergrad creative writing program boasts acclaimed professors and an unparalleled track record of turning out successful writers (including Divergent author Veronica Roth and short-story writer Karen Russell).

Outside the classroom, you can work on the student-run literary journal, intern at a publication in nearby Chicago, or submit to the Department of English's yearly writing competition . The university is also home to a top journalism program , so if you want to try your hand at nonfiction as well, you'll have plenty of opportunities to do so.

#2: Columbia University

Like Northwestern, Columbia is home to both a world-class creative writing program and a top journalism school (plus one of the best English departments in the country), so you have a wide range of writing-related course options. Columbia also benefits from its location in New York City, which is bursting at the seams with publishing houses, literary journals, and talented authors.

#3: University of Iowa

The University of Iowa's big draw is the infrastructure of its graduate Writers' Workshop, which is often considered the best MFA program in the country.

As an English and Creative Writing major here, you'll take classes from great young writers and established professors alike, and get to choose from a wide range of topics. This major provides transferable skills important for a liberal arts major with a creative focus. You'll also have access to the university's impressive literary community, including frequent readings, writing prizes and scholarships, and the acclaimed literary journal The Iowa Review .

#4: Emory University

Emory is renowned for its dedicated undergrad creative writing program , which draws the very best visiting scholars and writers. Students here have the chance to attend intimate question-and-answer sessions with award-winning authors, study a range of genres, compete for writing awards and scholarships, and work closely with an adviser to complete an honors project.

#5: Oberlin College

A small liberal arts school in Ohio, Oberlin offers very different advantages than the schools above do. You'll have fewer opportunities to pursue writing in the surrounding city, but the quality of the teachers and the range of courses might make up for that. Moreover, it boasts just as impressive alumni, including actress and writer Lena Dunham.

#6: Hamilton College

Hamilton is another small college, located in upstate New York. It's known for giving students the freedom to pursue their interests and the support to help them explore topics in real depth, both inside and outside the classroom. Hamilton's creative writing program takes full advantage with small classes and lots of opportunities to intern and publish; it also has one of the best writing centers in the country.

#7: Brown University

Brown's Literary Arts program offers one of the top MFAs in the US as well as an undergraduate major . For the major, you must take four creative writing workshops and six reading-intensive courses, which span an array of departments and topics, from music and literature to Middle East studies and Egyptology.

#8: Washington University in St. Louis

Washington University has an excellent creative writing MFA program, lots of super specific class options, and a number of scholarships specifically earmarked for creative writing students. This school’s undergraduate English program also offers a concentration in creative writing that allows students to specialize in a specific genre: poetry, fiction, or creative nonfiction. If you’re interested in exploring your potential in a specific writing genre, Washington University could be a great pick for you.

#9: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

MIT might not be a school you generally associate with writing, but it actually has an excellent program that offers courses in digital media and science writing, as well as creative writing, and provides plenty of guidance on how graduates can navigate the tricky job market.

Not to mention the school is located in Cambridge, a haven for book lovers and writers of all kinds. Though it probably isn’t a good fit for students who hate science, MIT is a great place for aspiring writers who want to build writing skills that are marketable in a wide range of industries.

#10: University of Michigan

University of Michigan is one of the best state universities in the country and has a top-notch MFA program. This school’s undergrad creative writing sub-concentration requires students to submit applications for admittance to advanced creative writing courses. These applications give students crucial practice in both building a writing portfolio and articulating their interest in creative writing to an audience who will evaluate their work. If you're looking to attend a big school with a great creative writing major, this is a fantastic choice.

#11: Johns Hopkins University

Johns Hopkins is another school that's known more for engineering than it is for writing, but, like MIT, it has a dedicated writing program. As a major here, you must take not only courses in prose, poetry, and literature, but also classes on topics such as philosophy and history.

#12: Colorado College

Colorado College is a small liberal arts school known for its block plan , which allows students to focus on one class per three-and-a-half-week block. The creative writing track of the English major includes a sequence of four writing workshops and also requires students to attend every reading of the Visiting Writers Series.

Bonus School: New York University

I didn't include NYU in the main list because it doesn't have a dedicated creative writing major, but it's a great school for aspiring writers nonetheless, offering one of the most impressive creative writing faculties in the country and all the benefits of a Manhattan location.

How To Pick the Best Creative Writing School for You

Just because Northwestern is a great school for creative writing doesn't mean you should set your heart on going there. (The football fans are completely terrifying, for one thing.) So where should you go then?

Here are some questions to ask yourself when looking at creative writing programs to help you determine the best school for you:

Does It Have Courses You're Interested In?

Look at the course offerings and see whether they interest you. While you can't predict exactly what classes you'll love, you want to avoid a mismatch where what you want to study and what the program offers are completely different. For example, if you want to write sonnets but the school focuses more on teaching fiction, it probably won't be a great fit for you.

Also, don't forget to look at the English courses and creative writing workshops! In most programs, you'll be taking a lot of these, too.

What Opportunities Are There To Pursue Writing Outside of Class?

I touched on this idea in the criteria section, but it's important enough that I want to reiterate it here. Some of the best writing experience you can get is found outside the classroom, so see what kind of writing-related extracurriculars a school has before committing to it.

Great options include getting involved with the campus newspaper, working on the school's literary journal, or interning at the university press.

Who Will Be Teaching You?

Who are the professors? What kind of work have they published? Check teacher ratings on Rate My Professors (but make sure to read the actual reviews—and always take them with a grain of salt).

If you're looking at a big school, there's a good chance that a lot of your teachers will be graduate students. But that's not necessarily a bad thing: a lot of the best teachers I had in college were graduate students. Just take into consideration what kind of graduate program the school has. If there's a great creative writing MFA program, then the graduate students are likely to be better writers and more engaged teachers.

What Are the Alumni Doing Now?

If you have a sense of what you want to do after you graduate, see if any alumni of the program are pursuing that type of career. The stronger the alumni network is, the more connections you'll have when it comes time to get a job.

What About the Rest of the School?

Don't pick a school for which you like the creative writing program but dread everything else about it. Most of your time will be spent doing other things, whether hanging out in the dorms, exploring off campus, or fulfilling general education requirements.

Many schools require you to apply to the creative writing major, so make doubly sure you'll be happy with your choice even if you aren't accepted to the program.

What's Next?

Are you sure a creative writing major is the right fit for you? Read our post on the pros and cons of the major to help you decide what path to take in college.

For more general advice about choosing a college, check out our complete guide to finding the right school for you. Some major factors to consider include deciding whether you're interested in a small college or a big university , an in-state or out-of-state institution , and a public or private school .

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What to Know About Creative Writing Degrees

Many creative writing degree recipients pursue careers as authors while others work as copywriters or ghostwriters.

Tips on Creative Writing Degrees

Getty Images

Prospective writing students should think about their goals and figure out if a creative writing degree will help them achieve those goals.

Many people see something magical in a beautiful work of art, and artists of all kinds often take pride in their craftsmanship. Creative writers say they find fulfillment in the writing process.

"I believe that making art is a human need, and so to get to do that is amazing," says Andrea Lawlor, an author who this year received a Whiting Award – a national $50,000 prize that recognizes 10 excellent emerging authors each year – and who is also the Clara Willis Phillips Assistant Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

"We all are seeing more and more of the way that writing can help us understand perspectives we don't share," says Lawlor, whose recent novel "Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl" addresses the issue of gender identity.

"Writing can help us cope with hard situations," Lawlor says. "We can find people who we have something in common with even if there's nobody around us who shares our experience through writing. It's a really powerful tool for connection and social change and understanding."

Creative writing faculty, many of whom are acclaimed published authors, say that people are well-suited toward degrees in creative writing if they are highly verbal and enjoy expressing themselves.

"Creative imaginative types who have stories burning inside them and who gravitate toward stories and language might want to pursue a degree in creative writing," Jessica Bane Robert, who teaches Introduction to Creative Writing at Clark University in Massachusetts, wrote in an email. "Through formal study you will hone your voice, gain confidence, find a support system for what can otherwise be a lonely endeavor."

Read the guide below to gain more insight into what it means to pursue a creative writing education, how writing impacts society and whether it is prudent to invest in a creative writing degree. Learn about the difference between degree-based and non-degree creative writing programs, how to craft a solid application to a top-notch creative writing program and how to figure out which program is the best fit.

Why Creative Writing Matters and Reasons to Study It

Creative writers say a common misconception about their job is that their work is frivolous and impractical, but they emphasize that creative writing is an extremely effective way to convey messages that are hard to share in any other way.

Kelly Caldwell, dean of faculty at Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City, says prospective writing students are often discouraged from taking writing courses because of concerns about whether a writing life is somehow unattainable or "unrealistic."

Although creative writers are sometimes unable to financially support themselves entirely on the basis of their creative projects, Caldwell says, they often juggle that work with other types of jobs and lead successful careers.

She says that many students in her introductory creative writing class were previously forbidden by parents to study creative writing. "You have to give yourself permission for the simple reason that you want to do it," she suggests.

Creative writing faculty acknowledge that a formal academic credential in creative writing is not needed in order to get writing published. However, they suggest, creative writing programs help aspiring authors develop their writing skills and allow space and time to complete long-term writing projects.

Working writers often juggle multiple projects at once and sometimes have more than one gig, which can make it difficult to finish an especially ambitious undertaking such as a novel, a play for the screen or stage, or a well-assembled collection of poems, short stories or essays. Grants and fellowships for authors are often designed to ensure that those authors can afford to concentrate on their writing.

Samuel Ace, a published poet and a visiting lecturer in poetry at Mount Holyoke, says his goal is to show students how to write in an authentic way that conveys real feeling. "It helps students to become more direct, not to bury their thoughts under a cascade of academic language, to be more forthright," he says.

Tips on Choosing Between a Non-Degree or Degree-Based Creative Writing Program

Experts note that someone needs to be ready to get immersed in the writing process and devote significant time to writing projects before pursuing a creative writing degree. Prospective writing students should not sign up for a degree program until they have reached that sense of preparedness, warns Kim Todd, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota College of Liberal Arts and director of its creative writing program.

She says prospective writing students need to think about their personal goals and figure out if a creative writing degree will help them achieve those goals.

Aspiring writers who are not ready to invest in a creative writing degree program may want to sign up for a one-off writing class or begin participating in an informal writing workshop so they can test their level of interest in the field, Todd suggests.

How to Choose and Apply to a Creative Writing Program

In many cases, the most important component of an application to a writing program is the writing portfolio, writing program experts say. Prospective writing students need to think about which pieces of writing they include in their portfolio and need to be especially mindful about which item they put at the beginning of their portfolio. They should have a trusted mentor critique the portfolio before they submit it, experts suggest.

Because creative writing often involves self-expression, it is important for aspiring writing students to find a program where they feel comfortable expressing their true identity.

This is particularly pertinent to aspiring authors who are members of minority groups, including people of color or LGBTQ individuals, says Lawlor, who identifies as queer, transgender and nonbinary.

How to Use a Creative Writing Degree

Creative writing program professors and alumni say creative writing programs cultivate a variety of in-demand skills, including the ability to communicate effectively.

"While yes, many creative writers are idealists and dreamers, these are also typically highly flexible and competent people with a range of personal strengths. And a good creative writing program helps them understand their particular strengths and marketability and translate these for potential employers, alongside the more traditional craft development work," Melissa Ridley Elmes, an assistant professor of English at Lindenwood University in Missouri, wrote in an email.

Elmes – an author who writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction – says creative writing programs force students to develop personal discipline because they have to consistently produce a significant amount of writing. In addition, participating in writing workshops requires writing students "to give and receive constructive feedback," Elmes says.

Cindy Childress, who has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana—Lafayatte and did a creative writing dissertation where she submitted poetry, says creative writing grads are well-equipped for good-paying positions as advertising and marketing copywriters, speechwriters, grant writers and ghostwriters.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median annual compensation for writers and authors was $63,200 as of May 2019.

"I think the Internet, and writing communities online and in social media, have been very helpful for debunking the idea that if you publish a New York Times Bestseller you will have 'made it' and can quit your day job and write full time," Elmes explains. "Unless you are independently wealthy, the odds are very much against you in this regard."

Childress emphasizes that creative writing degree recipients have "skills that are absolutely transferable to the real world." For example, the same storytelling techniques that copywriters use to shape public perceptions about a commercial brand are often taught in introductory creative writing courses, she says. The ability to tell a good story does not necessarily come easily to people who haven't been trained on how to do it, she explains.

Childress says she was able to translate her creative writing education into a lucrative career and start her own ghostwriting and book editing company, where she earns a six-figure salary. She says her background in poetry taught her how to be pithy.

"Anything that we want to write nowadays, particularly for social media, is going to have to be immediately understood, so there is a sense of immediacy," she says."The language has to be crisp and direct and exact, and really those are exactly the same kind of ways you would describe a successful poem."

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• Bodleian Libraries
• Oxford LibGuides
• Creative Writing

Creative Writing: Books

• Free Online Resources
• Introduction

The majority of books held by the Bodleian Libraries, in both physical and electronic formats, can be searched via SOLO . On this page you will find recommended books, guidance on how to search for and access print and ebooks, and libraries in the University that might be relevant for your studies and research.

Physical books

• Rewley House Continuing Education Library
• English Faculty Library
• Other Collections

Use the tabs above to explore the key texts and libraries for students of Creative Writing. Access to collections and borrowing privileges are subject to conditions; please check individual library websites for further information.

Help with books

For those wishing to learn more about searching for physical collections in Oxford, we recommend the following:

• SOLO: Search Oxford Libraries Online guide A guide for students and researchers at the University of Oxford, or those visiting, who seek support in using the Bodleian Libraries resource discovery tool, SOLO.
• Bodleian Libraries Special Collections Information about special collections at the Bodleian Libraries and how to access them.
• Bodleian Libraries theses and dissertations Links to information on accessing the Bodleian Libraries collections of Oxford, UK, US and other international theses.

Below you will find key texts for Creative Writing. The links will take you through to SOLO where you can find out how to access the books.

• Rewley House Continuing Education Library The Rewley House Continuing Education Library supports the teaching, learning and research of the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education. The library holds books on reading lists for courses taught at the Department, including the Diploma and Masters courses in Creative Writing. Most of these books are available to borrow.

Browsing the library's print collections can help you find relevant resources as the books are shelved in subject order, so you'll find related books shelved together.

In the literature sections, each genre is subdivided by period and then author surname. Critical and biographical works about an author are shelved immediately following works by the author.

• English Faculty Library The primary purpose of the library's collections is to support the teaching and study English language and literature at Oxford, with coverage from medieval to post-colonial literatures in English. Less frequently used books are stored offsite and need to be requested to a reading room via SOLO. See the link below for information on locating books within the EFL.
• Finding English faculty Library items A guide to how books are organised within the English Faculty Library

A number of other libraries may be of relevance to those studying Creative Writing.

• Bodleian Library The Bodleian Library is the University's largest library, and holds the main research collection for English literature and language. Most material is stored off-site and can be called to a reading room via SOLO. There is an open-shelf collection for English held in the Upper Reading Room, consisting largely of standard editions of the works of renowned authors from the Anglo-Saxon period onwards, major bibliographical and reference works and series.
• Radcliffe Camera The Radcliffe Camera is part of the central Bodleian Library complex, and linked to the Old Bodleian Library underground, via the Gladstone Link. There is an open-shelf collection for English in the Upper Camera, in support of teaching.

Electronic books (ebooks)

• Ebook Collections
• Free Resources
• Study skills
• Reference Books

Ebooks are digital versions of written works. Broadly speaking they come in two forms: they are either 'born digital' or are digital reproductions of printed books. See the tabs above for details of different ebook resources relevant to those studying Creative Writing.

Many ebooks have enhanced functionality, such as connectivity with reference management software, the ability to annotate and accessibility features.

Members of Oxford University can use ebooks that the Bodleian Libraries have purchased for free. Search for them on SOLO . They can be read on a desktop computer, laptop, tablet, e-reader or mobile phone; you just need your Oxford Single Sign On to access them. Individually purchased ebooks are all searchable on SOLO, but not all purchased ebook collections are, so it is important to visit the websites of ebook collections too. Look at the 'ebook collections' tab above.

Note, some ebooks have restrictive access and usage terms, for example they can only be read by one person at a time.

Some books are acquired via 'electronic Legal Deposit'. These must be read on a library desktop computer in one of the Bodleian Libraries. Further information on how to identify and access electronic Legal Deposit items on SOLO is at the link below.

• Electronic Legal Deposit guide

Help with ebooks

The links below are provided for those wishing to learn more about ebooks.

• Ebooks guide A guide intended for students and staff using, or likely to use, ebooks in the course of their studies and research.
• Online and Remote Access Information on accessing Bodleian Libraries content remotely.
• University of Oxford E-resources Blog The e-resources team use this blog to help keep you informed of news and changes in the world of ejournals and databases.

Below you will find key texts available as ebooks for Creative Writing. 

You will need your Oxford Single Sign On to access the ebooks if you are not on the University network.

The following is a list of ebook collections applicable to those studying Creative Writing at Oxford. Not all ebook collections are available on SOLO, so it is important to visit ebook collection websites to expand your search. You can browse and search across all ebooks on the provider's website and encounter titles of interest you may not have otherwise found.

The ebook collections have been selected by the Bodleian Libraries and you are able to access them for free because of institutional subscriptions to the content. You will need your Oxford Single Sign On to access the collections if you are not on the University network.

The Bodleian Libraries have access to over 2,000 e-books on the Bloomsbury Collections platform, including research publications in the following series and subject areas: Ancient Commentators on Aristotle; Ancient Philosophy; Applied Linguistics; Biblical Studies; C.H. Beck · Hart · Nomos; Christian Doctrines; Christology; Classical Literature; Classical Studies & Archaeology; Competition Law; Constitutional and Administrative Law; Continental Philosophy; Criminal Law and Justice; Economics; Education Around the World; Family and Social Law; Hart Publishing; History; History of the Transatlantic Slave Trade Landmark Texts; Intellectual Property Law; International Critical Commentary; International Relations; Legal Philosophy; Literary Criticism; Middle East; Pauline Studies; Philosophy; Religious Studies; Second Language Acquisition; Theology; Zed Books Sexuality and Gender Studies Archive; Zed Books Economics Archive; Zed Books Sexuality and Gender Studies 2017-2020.

Please note we do not have access to all books on this platform.

Cambridge Collections Online offers subject or theme based collections of content within a richly functional, fully cross-searchable online environment. The Complete Cambridge Companions is available as a complete collection and as two sub-collections comprising the Cambridge Companions in Literature and Classics and the Cambridge Companions in Philosophy, Religion and Culture. Each collection is updated with new Companions on publication.

• Contemporary World Drama Full text playscripts from playwrights around the world. more... less... This collection examines the richness and diversity of contemporary theatre and drama from a global context. It includes new work from established and up-and-coming contemporary playwrights from around the world. At completion, the collection will include 1,000 contemporary plays, from 2000 to present day. Purchase of this resource was funded by the Drue Heinz Fund.

Alternative names: Arden Shakespeare ; Nick Hern books  

Drama Online provides access to the searchable full-text of thousands of plays, drawn from the Methuen Drama, Arden Shakespeare, Faber, Nick Hern, Aurora Metro and Oberon Books lists to form a collection of the most studied, performed and critically acclaimed plays from Aeschylus to the present day. Over 100 critical and contextual works are also included, as well as biographical and bibliographical information for each playwright. The collection will be regularly updated with the latest works from new and established writers. This resource includes access to video recordings of Shakespeare performances from the Globe, the RSC and the Donmar, and performances from the National Theatre.

Please note: Oxford has access to most but not all content.

Purchase of the National Theatre Collection 1 was partly funded by the Drue Heinz Fund.

Ebsco's ebook collection is a collection of e-books purchased by Oxford librarians. Currently there are over 2,000 purchased books ('Our Collection') as well as over 3000 free e-books.

Access to each e-book is limited to one or, more commonly, two simultaneous users, depending on the individual book licence.

New books are being purchased on a regular basis.

Deatils on accessing the ebooks on this platform are at: http://ox.libguides.com/ld.php?content_id=19854712 .

• Oxford Scholarship Online Academic works published by Oxford University Press. Organised by subject including a Literature section. more... less... Alternative name: OSO. Contains scholarly books, published by Oxford University Press, in the humanities, sciences, medicine and social sciences online. The full texts of over 1,000 key Oxford titles in Biology, History, Mathematics, Philosophy, Public Health and Epidemiology, Business and Management, Law, Music, Physics, Religion, Classical Studies, Linguistics, Neuroscience, Political Science, Social Work, Economics and Finance, Literature, Palliative Care, Psychology and Sociology are now available - together with specially-commissioned book and chapter abstracts and keywords. At least 200 new books will be added each year as part of the annual subscription.
• ProQuest Ebook Central Ebooks from scholarly sources, including University Presses. Subject categories include Fiction, Juvenile Fiction, Literature, and Publishing. more... less... Alternative names: Ebook Central ; Ebook Library (EBL) ; ebrary

Oxford Academic includes over 40,000 academic ebooks from Oxford University Press and other university presses, including:

• American University in Cairo Press
• British Academy
• University of California Press
• University of Chicago Press
• Columbia University Press
• Cornell University Press
• Edinburgh University Press
• University Press of Florida
• Fordham University Press
• University of Hawai‘i Press
• Hong Kong University Press
• University of Illinois Press
• University Press of Kentucky
• Liverpool University Press
• Manchester University Press
• University of Minnesota Press
• University Press of Mississippi
• University of North Carolina Press
• Policy Press
• Princeton University Press
• Stanford University Press
• Yale University Press

Includes medical ebooks previously available through the Oxford Medicine Online platform. To access medicine content, select "Subject" -> "Medicine and Health".

• Very Short Introductions Concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects. Expert authors combine facts, analysis, new insights, and enthusiasm to make often challenging topics highly readable more... less... Very Short Introductions offer concise and original introductions to a wide range of subjects.
• What Everyone Needs to Know Concise introductions to current events and issues. more... less... Alternative name: WENTK What Everyone Needs to Know is a series of over 100 books from Oxford University Press that concisely introduce current events, issues, and countries, spanning across popular topics and disciplines including Politics, Economics, Sciences, and Religion. The books are written by experts in their fields in a straight-forward question-and-answer format.

A number of eresources, including ebook collections, are freely available online and listed below.

Some of these resources are listed on SOLO but not all, so it is important to visit the websites to expand your search. You do not need your Oxford Single Sign On to access them. These are different to the ebooks purchased by the Bodleian Libraries for which you need your Single Sign On for access.

• Google Books Full text of many out of copyright books, and selected previews of books which are still in copyright.
• Google Scholar Used to search for scholarly literature including articles, theses, abstracts and books from a variety of publishers.
• Project Gutenberg Project Gutenberg provides access to over 60,000 out of copyright books. These will be mainly older publications.
• Digital Book Index Provides links to more than 165,000 full-text digital books from more than 1800 commercial and non-commercial publishers, universities, and various private sites. More than 140,000 of these books, texts, and documents are available free.
• Internet Archive A non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
• Many Books A library of close to 50,000 free ebooks, with a selection of classic poltical and philosophical texts.
• Open Book Publishers Open Book Publishers is one of the biggest independent open access academic publishers of monographs in the UK.
• Open Textbook Library Supported by the Open Education Network, the Open Textbook Library offers over 800 etextbooks that are licensed by authors and publishers to be freely used and adapted. Download, edit and distribute them at no cost.
• Planet Ebook Classic literature, downloadable in various formats compatible with e-readers.

You will find study skills resources compiled by Bodleian Libraries staff available on Oxford Reading List Online (ORLO).

You will need your Oxford Single Sign On credentials to access the list.

• Study skills resources This list gives a sample of available books, documents and videos on study skills that you may find helpful.

A selection of dictionaries, thesauri and encyclopedias useful to those studying Creative Writing.

You will need your Oxford Single Sign On to access the collections if you are not on the University network.

Oxford Reference Online brings together over 450 reference works published by Oxford University Press into a single cross-searchable resource. It includes English and bilingual dictionaries, English grammar and usage guides, quotations and subject-specific reference works.

It is updated regularly with new titles, new editions, new entries, full-colour maps and illustrations, timelines, weblinks, and bibliographies.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang is the largest historical dictionary of English slang. Written by Jonathon Green over 17 years from 1993, it reached the printed page in 2010 in a three-volume set containing nearly 100,000 entries supported by over 400,000 citations from c. AD 1000 to the present day. The main focus of the dictionary is the coverage of over 500 years of slang from c. 1500 onwards. On this website the dictionary is now available in updated online form for the first time, complete with advanced search tools enabling search by definition and history, and an expanded bibliography of slang sources from the early modern period to the present day. Since the print edition, nearly 60,000 quotations have been added, supporting 5,000 new senses in 2,500 new entries and sub-entries, of which around half are new slang terms from the last five years.

Note that this is a free version with no access to protected content.

Recommend a book

If the Bodleian Libraries don't have the print or ebook you are looking for, you can make a recommendation by completing the form below ( Oxford Single-Sign On required).

• Recommend a purchase

Inter-library loans

If the Bodleian Libraries don't have the book you are looking for, we may be able to source it through Oxford's inter-library loan service.

• Inter-library Loans Service Online Form Use this form to request material not held by the Bodleian Libraries. Please check Oxford collections on SOLO and ensure that the item is not in stock, either in print or electronically.

Why are some books not available electronically?

There are a number of reasons why the Bodleian Libraries may be unable to provide electronic access to a resource. The ebooks guide explains some of these reasons:

• Why isn't there an ebook?
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Major: Creative Writing

Which colleges offer a major in creative writing.

Creative Writing majors weave a rich tapestry of storytelling, exploring forms such as poetry, personal essays, memoirs, short stories, scriptwriting, novels, literary journalism, and even video games. It could be a favorite line in a movie, play, or book that lures an audience in and changes their world. 

Telling a story can shed light on societal issues that would otherwise receive little or no attention. By evoking emotion, the story and its characters captivate the reader. People become invested in the story, the impact of the problem on the characters’ lives, and the outcome. Creative writing humanizes experiences in a way that may foster compassion for others. A compelling creative writer draws readers in so that they become engaged in the story.

Your imagination, mindset, and self-expression will be challenged and sharpened as a creative writing major. You’ll explore multiple creative writing forms. Creative writing challenges you to dig deep and learn about yourself and others. 

What does a student majoring in Creative Writing study? 

To develop their skills, creative writing majors will take courses in historical and contemporary literature and participate in writing workshops. Such courses or workshops include, among others: 

• American Literature
• Introduction to Creative Writing
• Reading and Writing Poetry
• Playwriting
• Screenwriting

What can I do with a Creative Writing degree?

You’ll develop a greater appreciation and understanding of various creative writing genres. Your research, writing, and creative thinking skills are desirable in  jobs such as the following:

• Poets, Lyricists and Creative Writers
• Advertising and Promotions Managers
• Art Directors
• Fundraisers
• Producers and Directors

Specializations for a Creative Writing major are:

• Film and Television Writing
• Photojournalism
• Creative Nonfiction

What are the requirements for a Creative Writing degree? 

The degree requirements at your college or university will consist of specific credits needed for major and elective courses in creative writing. You’ll participate in many writing workshops and apply the critiques of your work from peers and faculty to hone your creative writing skills.   

Explore Creative Writing Careers

Arts and humanities majors and degrees, related ap courses, find colleges with a creative writing major.

• Best Colleges
• Application Advice

• Hidden Gem Colleges

The 10 Best Creative Writing MFA Programs in the US

The talent is there. 

But the next generation of great American writers needs a collegial place to hone their craft. 

They need a place to explore the writer’s role in a wider community. 

They really need guidance about how and when to publish. 

All these things can be found in a solid Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree program. This degree offers access to mentors, to colleagues, and to a future in the writing world. 

A good MFA program gives new writers a precious few years to focus completely on their work, an ideal space away from the noise and pressure of the fast-paced modern world. 

We’ve found ten of the best ones, all of which provide the support, the creative stimulation, and the tranquility necessary to foster a mature writer.

We looked at graduate departments from all regions, public and private, all sizes, searching for the ten most inspiring Creative Writing MFA programs. 

Each of these ten institutions has assembled stellar faculties, developed student-focused paths of study, and provide robust support for writers accepted into their degree programs. 

To be considered for inclusion in this list, these MFA programs all must be fully-funded degrees, as recognized by Read The Workshop .

Creative Writing education has broadened and expanded over recent years, and no single method or plan fits for all students. 

Today, MFA programs across the country give budding short story writers and poets a variety of options for study. For future novelists, screenwriters – even viral bloggers – the search for the perfect setting for their next phase of development starts with these outstanding institutions, all of which have developed thoughtful and particular approaches to study.

So where will the next Salinger scribble his stories on the steps of the student center, or the next Angelou reading her poems in the local bookstore’s student-run poetry night? At one of these ten programs.

Here are 10 of the best creative writing MFA programs in the US.

University of Oregon (Eugene, OR)

Starting off the list is one of the oldest and most venerated Creative Writing programs in the country, the MFA at the University of Oregon. 

Longtime mentor, teacher, and award-winning poet Garrett Hongo directs the program, modeling its studio-based approach to one-on-one instruction in the English college system. 

Oregon’s MFA embraces its reputation for rigor. Besides attending workshops and tutorials, students take classes in more formal poetics and literature.  

A classic college town, Eugene provides an ideal backdrop for the writers’ community within Oregon’s MFA students and faculty.  

Tsunami Books , a local bookseller with national caché, hosts student-run readings featuring writers from the program. 

Graduates garner an impressive range of critical acclaim; Yale Younger Poet winner Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Cave Canem Prize winner and Guggenheim fellow Major Jackson, and PEN-Hemingway Award winner Chang-Rae Lee are noteworthy alumni. 

With its appealing setting and impressive reputation, Oregon’s MFA program attracts top writers as visiting faculty, including recent guests Elizabeth McCracken, David Mura, and Li-young Lee.

The individual approach defines the Oregon MFA experience; a key feature of the program’s first year is the customized reading list each MFA student creates with their faculty guide. 

Weekly meetings focus not only on the student’s writing, but also on the extended discovery of voice through directed reading. 

Accepting only ten new students a year—five in poetry and five in fiction— the University of Oregon’s MFA ensures a close-knit community with plenty of individual coaching and guidance.

Cornell University (Ithaca, NY)

Cornell University’s MFA program takes the long view on life as a writer, incorporating practical editorial training and teaching experience into its two-year program.

Incoming MFA students choose their own faculty committee of at least two faculty members, providing consistent advice as they move through a mixture of workshop and literature classes. 

Students in the program’s first year benefit from editorial training as readers and editors for Epoch , the program’s prestigious literary journal.

Teaching experience grounds the Cornell program. MFA students design and teach writing-centered undergraduate seminars on a variety of topics, and they remain in Ithaca during the summer to teach in programs for undergraduates. 

Cornell even allows MFA graduates to stay on as lecturers at Cornell for a period of time while they are on the job search. Cornell also offers a joint MFA/Ph.D. program through the Creative Writing and English departments.

Endowments fund several acclaimed reading series, drawing internationally known authors to campus for workshops and work sessions with MFA students. 

Recent visiting readers include Salman Rushdie, Sandra Cisneros, Billy Collins, Margaret Atwood, Ada Limón, and others. 

Arizona State University (Tempe, AZ)

Arizona State’s MFA in Creative Writing spans three years, giving students ample time to practice their craft, develop a voice, and begin to find a place in the post-graduation literary world. 

Coursework balances writing and literature classes equally, with courses in craft and one-on-one mentoring alongside courses in literature, theory, or even electives in topics like fine press printing, bookmaking, or publishing. 

While students follow a path in either poetry or fiction, they are encouraged to take courses across the genres.

Teaching is also a focus in Arizona State’s MFA program, with funding coming from teaching assistantships in the school’s English department. Other exciting teaching opportunities include teaching abroad in locations around the world, funded through grants and internships.

The Virginia C. Piper Center for Creative Writing, affiliated with the program, offers Arizona State MFA students professional development in formal and informal ways. 

The Distinguished Writers Series and Desert Nights, Rising Stars Conference bring world-class writers to campus, allowing students to interact with some of the greatest in the profession. Acclaimed writer and poet Alberto Ríos directs the Piper Center.

Arizona State transitions students to the world after graduation through internships with publishers like Four Way Books. 

Its commitment to the student experience and its history of producing acclaimed writers—recent examples include Tayari Jones (Oprah’s Book Club, 2018; Women’s Prize for Fiction, 2019), Venita Blackburn ( Prairie Schooner Book Prize, 2018), and Hugh Martin ( Iowa Review Jeff Sharlet Award for Veterans)—make Arizona State University’s MFA a consistent leader among degree programs.

University of Texas at Austin (Austin, TX)

The University of Texas at Austin’s MFA program, the Michener Center for Writers, maintains one of the most vibrant, exciting, active literary faculties of any MFA program.

Denis Johnson D.A. Powell, Geoff Dyer, Natasha Trethewey, Margot Livesey, Ben Fountain: the list of recent guest faculty boasts some of the biggest names in current literature.

This three-year program fully funds candidates without teaching fellowships or assistantships; the goal is for students to focus entirely on their writing. 

More genre tracks at the Michener Center mean students can choose two focus areas, a primary and secondary, from Fiction, Poetry, Screenwriting, and Playwriting.

The Michener Center for Writers plays a prominent role in contemporary writing of all kinds. 

The hip, student-edited Bat City Review accepts work of all genres, visual art, cross genres, collaborative, and experimental pieces.  

Recent events for illustrious alumni include New Yorker publications, an Oprah Book Club selection, a screenwriting prize, and a 2021 Pulitzer (for visiting faculty member Mitchell Jackson). 

In this program, students are right in the middle of all the action of contemporary American literature.

Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis, MO)

The MFA in Creative Writing at Washington University in St. Louis is a program on the move: applicants have almost doubled here in the last five years. 

Maybe this sudden growth of interest comes from recent rising star alumni on the literary scene, like Paul Tran, Miranda Popkey, and National Book Award winner Justin Phillip Reed.

Or maybe it’s the high profile Washington University’s MFA program commands, with its rotating faculty post through the Hurst Visiting Professor program and its active distinguished reader series. 

Superstar figures like Alison Bechdel and George Saunders have recently held visiting professorships, maintaining an energetic atmosphere program-wide.

Washington University’s MFA program sustains a reputation for the quality of the mentorship experience. 

With only five new students in each genre annually, MFA candidates form close cohorts among their peers and enjoy attentive support and mentorship from an engaged and vigorous faculty. 

Three genre tracks are available to students: fiction, poetry, and the increasingly relevant and popular creative nonfiction.

Another attractive feature of this program: first-year students are fully funded, but not expected to take on a teaching role until their second year. 

A generous stipend, coupled with St. Louis’s low cost of living, gives MFA candidates at Washington University the space to develop in a low-stress but stimulating creative environment.

Indiana University (Bloomington, IN)

It’s one of the first and biggest choices students face when choosing an MFA program: two-year or three-year? 

Indiana University makes a compelling case for its three-year program, in which the third year of support allows students an extended period of time to focus on the thesis, usually a novel or book-length collection.

One of the older programs on the list, Indiana’s MFA dates back to 1948. 

Its past instructors and alumni read like the index to an American Literature textbook. 

How many places can you take classes in the same place Robert Frost once taught, not to mention the program that granted its first creative writing Master’s degree to David Wagoner? Even today, the program’s integrity and reputation draw faculty like Ross Gay and Kevin Young.

Indiana’s Creative Writing program houses two more literary institutions, the Indiana Review, and the Indiana University Writers’ Conference. 

Students make up the editorial staff of this lauded literary magazine, in some cases for course credit or a stipend. An MFA candidate serves each year as assistant director of the much-celebrated and highly attended conference . 

These two facets of Indiana’s program give graduate students access to visiting writers, professional experience, and a taste of the writing life beyond academia.

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Ann Arbor, MI)

The University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program cultivates its students with a combination of workshop-driven course work and vigorous programming on and off-campus. Inventive new voices in fiction and poetry consistently emerge from this two-year program.

The campus hosts multiple readings, events, and contests, anchored by the Zell Visiting Writers Series. The Hopgood Awards offer annual prize money to Michigan creative writing students . 

The department cultivates relationships with organizations and events around Detroit, so whether it’s introducing writers at Literati bookstore or organizing writing retreats in conjunction with local arts organizations, MFA candidates find opportunities to cultivate a community role and public persona as a writer.

What happens after graduation tells the big story of this program. Michigan produces heavy hitters in the literary world, like Celeste Ng, Jesmyn Ward, Elizabeth Kostova, Nate Marshall, Paisley Rekdal, and Laura Kasischke. 

Their alumni place their works with venerable houses like Penguin and Harper Collins, longtime literary favorites Graywolf and Copper Canyon, and the new vanguard like McSweeney’s, Fence, and Ugly Duckling Presse.

University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN)

Structure combined with personal attention and mentorship characterizes the University of Minnesota’s Creative Writing MFA, starting with its unique program requirements. 

In addition to course work and a final thesis, Minnesota’s MFA candidates assemble a book list of personally significant works on literary craft, compose a long-form essay on their writing process, and defend their thesis works with reading in front of an audience.

Literary journal Great River Review and events like the First Book reading series and Mill City Reading series do their part to expand the student experience beyond the focus on the internal. 

The Edelstein-Keller Visiting Writer Series draws exceptional, culturally relevant writers like Chuck Klosterman and Claudia Rankine for readings and student conversations. 

Writer and retired University of Minnesota instructor Charles Baxter established the program’s Hunger Relief benefit , aiding Minnesota’s Second Harvest Heartland organization. 

Emblematic of the program’s vision of the writer in service to humanity, this annual contest and reading bring together distinguished writers, students, faculty, and community members in favor of a greater goal.

Brown University (Providence, RI)

One of the top institutions on any list, Brown University features an elegantly-constructed Literary Arts Program, with students choosing one workshop and one elective per semester. 

The electives can be taken from any department at Brown; especially popular choices include Studio Art and other coursework through the affiliated Rhode Island School of Design. The final semester consists of thesis construction under the supervision of the candidate’s faculty advisor.

Brown is the only MFA program to feature, in addition to poetry and fiction tracks, the Digital/Cross Disciplinary track . 

This track attracts multidisciplinary writers who need the support offered by Brown’s collaboration among music, visual art, computer science, theater and performance studies, and other departments. 

The interaction with the Rhode Island School of Design also allows those artists interested in new forms of media to explore and develop their practice, inventing new forms of art and communication.

Brown’s Literary Arts Program focuses on creating an atmosphere where students can refine their artistic visions, supported by like-minded faculty who provide the time and materials necessary to innovate. 

Not only has the program produced trailblazing writers like Percival Everett and Otessa Moshfegh, but works composed by alumni incorporating dance, music, media, and theater have been performed around the world, from the stage at Kennedy Center to National Public Radio.

University of Iowa (Iowa City, IA)

When most people hear “MFA in Creative Writing,” it’s the Iowa Writers’ Workshop they imagine. 

The informal name of the University of Iowa’s Program in Creative Writing, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop was the first to offer an MFA, back in 1936. 

One of the first diplomas went to renowned writer Wallace Stegner, who later founded the MFA program at Stanford.

 It’s hard to argue with seventeen Pulitzer Prize winners and six U.S. Poets Laureate. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop is the root system of the MFA tree.

The two-year program balances writing courses with coursework in other graduate departments at the university. In addition to the book-length thesis, a written exam is part of the student’s last semester.

Because the program represents the quintessential idea of a writing program, it attracts its faculty positions, reading series, events, and workshops the brightest lights of the literary world. 

The program’s flagship literary magazine, the Iowa Review , is a lofty goal for writers at all stages of their career. 

At the Writers’ Workshop, tracks include not only fiction, poetry, playwriting, and nonfiction, but also Spanish creative writing and literary translation. Their reading series in association with Prairie Lights bookstore streams online and is heard around the world.

Iowa’s program came into being in answer to the central question posed to each one of these schools: can writing be taught? 

The answer for a group of intrepid, creative souls in 1936 was, actually, “maybe not.” 

But they believed it could be cultivated; each one of these institutions proves it can be, in many ways, for those willing to commit the time and imagination.

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Creative Writing - Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

The MFA in creative writing is a three-year degree program that values literary study, innovation and writing that tests the limits of conventional forms.

The program challenges students to write in a variety of genres and to study literature from the point of view of a working writer. Recent graduates have become not only published authors of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays and screenplays, but also journalists, editors, publishers, and college-level and secondary-level teachers.

The degree program culminates in the submission and oral defense of a creative thesis in poetry or fiction. Students may develop custom programs in nonfiction and scriptwriting with available faculty with secondary interests in those genres.

Requirements

Required coursework, language requirement.

Students earning the creative writing MFA must complete a foreign language requirement, either before or after enrolling at CU Boulder, prior to the semester in which they intend to graduate. The language requirement can be met in one of the following ways:

• Complete a fourth-semester (second-semester sophomore) college language course with a grade of C or better. Completion of only freshman-level language courses does not qualify as evidence of competence.
• Take the foreign language proficiency exam administered each semester by the English department. In some cases, students may be asked to make independent arrangements for such an exam. 
• Present other evidence of competency in a foreign language to the associate chair for graduate studies. In most cases, this evidence consists of native or near-native command of a language; a written exam may be administered to confirm such fluency.

General Requirements

All students must complete a thesis as part of the degree requirements. The thesis should be a book of poetry, short stories, literary/creative nonfiction or a substantial portion of a novel, play or screenplay. It may also be a combination of these genres. The thesis should be at least 70 pages in length, though most students write between 70 and 150 pages. The bulk of work used in a thesis should have been written while the student was enrolled in the creative writing MFA program, and it should be in a form acceptable to the committee. The thesis must include an abstract (1 to 3 pages) that states the writer's aims and explains how the thesis reflects those aims.

Students take a total of 9 thesis hours in one or more semesters. The student should select a committee of three faculty (the advisor, who is a faculty member in the Creative Writing Department; one other creative writing faculty member; and a faculty member in literary studies) during the semester prior to that in which they will defend the thesis. A rough draft of the thesis should be made available to the advisor prior to the thesis defense so that problems may be discussed at an early enough date to enable the student to work on them. The advisor will work with the student to advise them on manuscript length, suggestions for improvement and general compilation. The advisor and the student will also agree on a reading list about which the student may be questioned at the defense.

See the index in the  Graduate Student Handbook  for the MFA-CRWR Thesis Action Item Checklist, which includes deadlines and a suggested schedule.

A thesis defense must take place before the semester's deadline for completing defenses (see the Graduate School's website for a list of semester deadlines). A student must give their completed thesis to their entire committee and file a Master's Examination Report at least two weeks in advance of the defense. The defense is an oral examination of the thesis that lasts about an hour. All committee members must be present in person or via teleconference. A positive vote from at least two of the committee members is required to pass. A student who fails the defense may not reattempt it for at least three months, and not until any work prescribed by the committee has been completed. The student may retake the examination only once; the second exam covers the same material and includes the same committee members as the first.

Thesis Submission and Format

The final draft of the MFA thesis must be submitted to the Graduate School by the applicable deadline and must comply with the Graduate School's specifications for theses and dissertations as described on the Graduate School's Master Graduation Information - Thesis Plan webpage. Students must include all stipulated parts of the thesis (e.g., title page, signature page, abstract, table of contents, bibliography) and are encouraged to ask the Graduate School to check the format of the thesis before they submit the final copy ( [email protected] ).

Candidacy and Diploma Applications for MFA

Students must submit their Candidacy Application for an Advanced Degree by the stipulated deadline, which is generally the third or fourth week of classes in the semester in which the student plans to graduate. The candidacy application confirms that all degree requirements will have been completed by the end of the semester. Return all forms to the graduate program assistant for signatures and submission to the Graduate School.

All students planning to graduate must apply online to graduate. This step must be completed regardless of whether the student plans to attend the commencement ceremony. See the Graduation section for more information.

MFA students have four years from the semester in which they are admitted and begin coursework to complete all degree requirements. To continue past four years, students must file a petition for an extension of the time limit with the dean of the Graduate School. Such petitions must first be submitted for endorsement to the English Department's associate chair for creative writing. Extensions may be granted for up to one year.

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Contacts | Major in Creative Writing | Program Requirements | Optional BA Thesis | Program Honors | Summary of Requirements | Advising | Courses Outside the Department Taken for Program Credit | Double Majors in English Language and Literature and Creative Writing | Grading | Sample Plan of Study for the Major | Minor in English and Creative Writing | Summary of Requirements for the Minor Program in English and Creative Writing | Minor to Major | Sample Plan of Study for the Minor | Enrolling in Creative Writing Courses | Faculty and Visiting Lecturers | Creative Writing Courses

Department Website: http://creativewriting.uchicago.edu

The Program in Creative Writing takes a comprehensive approach to the study of contemporary literature, criticism, and theory from a writer’s perspective. In our courses, students work with established poets and prose writers to explore the fundamental practices of creative writing. The program is committed to interdisciplinary inquiry, academic rigor, and study of the elements of creative writing that underlie all genres.

The Program in Creative Writing offers workshops and seminars in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, as well as a number of translation workshops. The major seminars—including technical seminars and fundamentals in creative writing—are designed to build a critical and aesthetic foundation for students working in each genre. Students can pursue their creative writing interests within the formal requirements of the major or through a minor in English and Creative Writing. (The minor is open to undergraduate students not majoring in English language and literature.) Students who do not wish to pursue a formal degree plan in creative writing will have access to courses that satisfy the general education requirement in the arts and open-entry "beginning" workshops. Our workshops and technical seminars are cross-listed with graduate numbers and are open to students in the graduate and professional schools.

Major in Creative Writing

Students who graduate with a bachelor of arts in creative writing will be skilled writers in a major literary genre and have a theoretically informed understanding of the aesthetic, historical, social, and political context of a range of contemporary writing. Students in the major will focus their studies in fiction, poetry, or nonfiction.

The organization of the major recognizes the value of workshop courses but incorporates that model into a comprehensive educational architecture. The creative writing major furthers students’ knowledge of historical and contemporary literary practice, introduces them to aesthetic and literary theory, sharpens their critical attention, and fosters their creative enthusiasm. Students are prepared to succeed in a range of fields within the public and private sectors through a multi-faceted, forward-thinking pedagogy centered on peer critique and craft.

Program Requirements

The Program in Creative Writing requires a total of 12 courses (1200 units) as described below. Students planning to complete the major must meet with the director of undergraduate studies or the student affairs administrator to file a major worksheet by the end of Autumn Quarter of their third year.

Students contemplating a major or minor in creative writing may choose to take one or two creative writing courses toward the general education requirement in the arts. These courses will not count toward major requirements, but they offer an opportunity for students to consider the program while satisfying a general education requirement. See  Enrolling in Creative Writing Courses  for additional details.

Primary Genre

Students are asked to declare a primary genre track either when they first declare the major or immediately following completion of the Fundamentals course. The primary genre track options include Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry. Students should complete a beginning workshop, two technical seminars, an advanced workshop, and one literary genre course. Students may also complete an optional thesis workshop within the primary genre. Students may change the genre track at any time by notifying the Director of Undergraduate Studies.

One (1) Fundamentals in Creative Writing Course  CRWR 17000 to CRWR 17999

Fundamentals in Creative Writing is a cross-genre, one-quarter seminar taken by all students in the major and minor. Every section of the course focuses on a current debate relevant to all forms of literary practice, such as mimesis, empathy, and testimony. This course introduces students to a group of core texts from each major literary genre. Fundamentals courses are restricted to students who have declared the major or minor, as they aim to develop cohort solidarity, promote a culture of articulate exchange, and induct students into a reflection on practice that will serve their artistic and professional development. Majors should take Fundamentals in Creative Writing and Beginning Workshop before enrolling in an Advanced Workshop. 

One (1) Beginning Workshop Fiction: CRWR 10206; Poetry: CRWR 10306; Nonfiction: CRWR 10406

Students in the major must complete one beginning workshop in the student’s primary genre. Successful completion of a beginning workshop is a prerequisite for enrollment in an advanced workshop in the same genre. Students may enroll in more than one beginning workshop. However, students who complete a beginning workshop in one genre and then complete a beginning workshop in another genre may count only the beginning workshop in their primary genre towards the major. Beginning workshops are intended for students who may or may not have previous writing experience, but are interested in gaining experience in a particular genre. These workshops focus on the fundamentals of craft and feature workshops of student writing.

Two (2) Technical Seminars Fiction: CRWR 20200 to CRWR 20299; Poetry: CRWR 20301 to CRWR 20399; Nonfiction: CRWR 20400 to CRWR 20499; Hybrid: CRWR 20701 to CRWR 20799

Students in the major must take two technical seminars in their primary genre (fiction, poetry, or nonfiction); during some quarters, the program may also offer hybrid technical seminars. Majors may petition to substitute one technical seminar in their primary genre with a technical seminar in a different genre, or with a hybrid technical seminar. Students should reach out to the director of undergraduate studies or student affairs administrator with questions on this petition process or hybrid technical seminars. 

The aim of technical seminars is to expand students’ technical resources through analysis of contemporary literature and practice-based training in elements of craft. Students submit papers that address technical questions, chiefly with reference to contemporary texts. For example, poetry students may write on “the line,” where fiction students write on “point of view.” Technical seminars may also count as electives in the minor.

Two (2) Advanced Workshops Fiction: CRWR 22100 to CRWR 22299; Poetry: CRWR 23100 to CRWR 23299; Nonfiction: CRWR 24001 to CRWR 24199; Hybrid: CRWR 27300 to 27499

Students in the major must complete two advanced workshops, at least one of which must be in the student’s primary genre. Majors may petition to substitute one advanced workshop in their primary genre with a hybrid advanced workshop when applicable. Students should reach out to the director of undergraduate studies or student affairs administrator with questions on this petition process or hybrid advanced workshops.

The advanced workshop is a critical pedagogical instrument of creative writing as an academic discipline. Workshop practice relies on a mutual exchange and understanding dedicated to improving students’ writing, rather than unconditional approval. Critique is the core value and activity of the workshop, and students will practice it under the guidance of the workshop instructor. Although advanced workshops begin with attention to exemplary texts, they typically focus on original student work. 

Four (4) Literature Requirements

Creative writing majors are required to take four literature courses offered by other departments. These courses can be focused on the literature of any language, but one must focus on the student’s primary genre; one must center on literary theory; one must involve the study of literature written before the twentieth century; and the final one can be any general literature course. 

The literary genre course should serve as an introduction to key texts and debates in the history of the student’s chosen genre. This requirement can be met by an English language and literature course or a comparable course in another department. Courses such as  ENGL 10403  Genre Fundamentals: Poetry: Rhythm and Myth,  CMST 27207 Film Criticism , or  ENGL 11004  History of the Novel may be eligible. 

The director of undergraduate studies will offer guidance and approve all qualifying courses. Specific courses that satisfy the distribution element of this requirement will be listed at  creativewriting.uchicago.edu . A literature course can potentially satisfy more than one requirement, e.g., both theory and literary genre, but a student can only use the course to fulfill one of the requirements.

Two (2) Background Electives

Students should take two courses outside of the Program in Creative Writing to support their creative projects or theses. Depending on a student's interests, elective courses can be offered by programs ranging from cinema and media studies to biological sciences. One creative writing translation workshop may also be approved as a background elective. Students may not use the same course to fulfill a background elective and a literature requirement. 

Optional BA Thesis

Students have the option to complete a BA thesis/project in their fourth year and should declare intent by the end of Winter Quarter of their third year. Majors who complete a BA thesis/project and meet GPA requirements are eligible for consideration for honors. In Spring Quarter of the third year, students who opt into the BA thesis/project will be assigned a writing and research advisor who will mentor student reading and research throughout the completion of the creative writing thesis. Students, in conversation with the writing and research advisors, will complete a preliminary project proposal during the Spring Quarter of their third year. The preliminary proposal will then be submitted to the student affairs administrator.

Over the Summer Quarter students will craft a reading journal centered on a field list of readings; chosen texts will be based upon work, conversations, etc., students will have begun with their writing and research advisors. In Autumn Quarter, students and writing and research advisors will work together to adapt the reading journal into an annotated bibliography, a focus reading list, and a précis/project plan (summary of student writing plan and goals for the BA thesis/project).

In Winter Quarter, students will continue meeting with their writing and research advisor and must also enroll in the appropriate thesis/major projects workshop in their primary genre ( CRWR 29200 Thesis/Major Projects: Fiction ,  CRWR 29300 Thesis/Major Projects: Poetry , CRWR 29400 Thesis/Major Projects: Nonfiction , or CRWR 29500 Thesis/Major Projects: Fiction/Nonfiction ). The thesis/major projects workshop is only offered during Winter Quarter. Students must complete the thesis/major projects workshop to submit a thesis project for consideration for honors.

The instructor for the thesis/major projects workshop will also serve as the faculty advisor for the BA thesis.

Students writing a BA thesis/project will work closely with their faculty advisor and peers in their thesis/major projects workshop and will receive course credit as well as a final grade for the course. In consultation with their faculty advisor and writing and research advisor, students will revise and submit a near-final draft of the BA thesis by the end of the second week of Spring Quarter. Students will submit the final version of their BA thesis to their writing and research advisor, faculty advisor, student affairs administrator, and the director of undergraduate studies by the beginning of the fifth week of Spring Quarter. 

Students graduating in other quarters must consult with the director of undergraduate studies about an appropriate timeline before the end of Autumn Quarter of their third year. 

Program Honors

The faculty in the program will award program honors based on their assessment of BA theses and the assessment of writing and research advisors. Students must complete all assignments set by writing and research advisors to be considered for honors. To be eligible, students must have a major GPA of at least 3.6 and overall GPA of 3.25. Honors will be awarded only to exceptional projects from a given cohort.

Summary of Requirements

Students considering the major should email the director of undergraduate studies or student affairs administrator as early as possible to discuss program requirements and individual plans of study. To declare the major and receive priority in application-based CRWR courses, students must confer with the director of undergraduate studies or student affairs administrator to file a major worksheet with the Program in Creative Writing. Declaration of the major will then be formalized through  my.uchicago.edu . To join the major, students must officially declare via a worksheet on file with the program before the end of Autumn Quarter of the third year of study. Students will need to regularly provide documentation of any approvals for the major to their academic advisors.

Courses Outside the Department Taken for Program Credit

Students double majoring in creative writing and another major (with the exception of English language and literature) can count a maximum of three courses towards both majors (pending approval from both departments). Ordinarily, two of these courses will be background electives. Substitutions for a further course will be subject to approval, but students may not substitute non-literature courses to meet a literature requirement. 

Double Majors in English Language and Literature and Creative Writing

Students who pursue a double major in creative writing and English language and literature, may count up to four courses towards both majors. These four courses typically include the four literature requirements, but in some cases one of the slots might be filled by a creative writing course (with director of undergraduate studies approval). However, the two required background electives should be taken outside of the Department of English Language and Literature. 

English language and literature majors may count up to four creative writing courses towards the major in English as electives without a petition. However, when students are pursuing a double major in English language and literature and creative writing, they must observe the shared four-course maximum. Double majors must then count any eligible creative writing courses beyond the four-course cap towards their English language and literature major.

Students in the program must receive quality grades (not pass/fail) in all courses counting toward the major or minor. Non-majors and non-minors may take creative writing courses for pass/fail grading with consent of the instructor. Students must request this consent by the end of week three of the quarter; otherwise pass/fail must be approved by the program director. 

Sample Plan of Study for the Major

Minor in english and creative writing.

Students who are not English language and literature or creative writing majors may complete a minor in English and Creative Writing. The minor requires six courses (600 units). At least three of the required courses must be creative writing courses, with at least one being a beginning workshop, at least one being an advanced workshop, and at least one being a fundamentals course. Three of the remaining required courses may be taken in either the Department of English Language and Literature or the Program in Creative Writing; these courses may include technical seminars or arts general education courses. General education courses cannot be used for the minor if they are already counted toward the general education requirement in the arts. In some cases, literature courses outside of English language and literature and creative writing may count towards the minor, subject to the director of undergraduate studies’ approval. 

Students who elect the minor program in English and Creative Writing must meet with the student affairs administrator for creative writing before the end of Spring Quarter of their third year to declare their intention to complete the minor. Students choose courses in consultation with the administrator. The administrator's approval for the minor program should be submitted to a student's academic advisor on the Consent to Complete a Minor Program form, available from the College adviser or online, by the deadline above.

Students completing the minor will be given enrollment preference for advanced workshops and some priority for technical seminars. They must follow all relevant admission procedures described at the  Creative Writing  website. For details, see  Enrolling in Creative Writing Courses .

Courses in the minor (1) may not be double counted with the student's major(s) or with other minors and (2) may not be counted toward general education requirements. Courses in the minor must be taken for quality grades (not pass/fail) and bear University of Chicago course numbers.

Summary of Requirements for the Minor Program in English and Creative Writing

Minor to major.

Student circumstances change, and a transfer between the major and minor programs may be desirable to students who begin a course of study in either program. Workshop courses and a fundamentals course may count toward the minor. Students should consult with their academic advisor if considering such a transfer and must update their planned program of study with the student affairs administrator or director of undergraduate studies in creative writing.

Sample Plan of Study for the Minor

Enrolling in creative writing courses.

General education courses and beginning workshops are open to all students via the standard pre-registration process. Our consent-based courses prioritize students in the major, the minor, and the Creative Writing Option of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH). Note: Students who have not yet met with the director of undergraduate studies or student affairs administrator to begin a worksheet are not considered formally declared and therefore are not guaranteed priority in course enrollment.

For more information on creative writing courses and opportunities, visit the  Creative Writing  website.

Creative Writing Courses for the General Education Requirement in the Arts

These multi-genre courses are introductions to topics in creative writing and satisfy the general education requirement in the arts in the College. General education courses are generally taught under two headings—"Reading as a Writer" and "Intro to Genres"—and will feature class critiques of students’ creative work. They are open to all undergraduate students during pre-registration. These courses do not count towards the major in creative writing, but students may use these courses to satisfy the creative writing minor’s elective requirements if they are not already counted toward the students' general education requirement in the arts.

Fundamentals in Creative Writing Courses

These courses focus on a current debate relevant to all forms of literary practice and aim to develop cohort solidarity, promote a culture of exchange, and induct students into a reflection on practice that will service their artistic and professional development. They are open to declared majors only, except in circumstances approved by the director of undergraduate studies. Majors should take a Fundamentals course and a Beginning Workshop before enrolling in Advanced Workshops. 

Beginning Workshops

These courses are intended for students who may or may not have writing experience, but are interested in gaining experience in a particular genre. Courses will focus on the fundamentals of craft and feature workshops of student writing. Open to all undergraduate students during pre-registration.

Technical Seminars

The aim of the technical seminars is to expand students’ technical resources through analysis of contemporary literature and practice-based training in elements of craft. 

Advanced Workshops

These workshops are intended for students with experience in a particular genre. Advanced workshops will focus on class critiques of student writing with accompanying readings from exemplary literary texts. Priority is given to students in the major, minor, or the MAPH Creative Writing Option . 

Optional Thesis/Major Projects

The thesis/major projects course is optional for minors. While it is not required to complete the minor, students are welcome to opt in to the course. This course will revolve around workshops of student writing and concentrate on the larger form students have chosen for their creative thesis. Priority is given to students in the major, minor, or the MAPH Creative Writing Option .

Faculty and Visiting Lecturers

For a current listing of Creative Writing faculty, visit the  Creative Writing  website.

Creative Writing Courses

CRWR 10206. Beginning Fiction Workshop. 100 Units.

Beginning Workshops are intended for students who may or may not have previous writing experience, but are interested in gaining experience in a particular genre. These workshops focus on the fundamentals of craft and feature workshops of student writing. See the course description for this particular workshop section in the notes below.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter Prerequisite(s): During pre-registration, this course is open only to declared Creative Writing Majors and declared Minors in English and Creative Writing, as well as graduate students. During add/drop the course will be instructor consent and open to all students in the College. Please contact the instructor to be added to the waitlist for the option to enroll during add/drop. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 30206

CRWR 10306. Beginning Poetry Workshop. 100 Units.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter Prerequisite(s): During pre-registration, this course is open only to declared Creative Writing Majors and declared Minors in English and Creative Writing, as well as graduate students. During add/drop the course will be instructor consent and open to all students in the College. Please contact the instructor to be added to the waitlist for the option to enroll during add/drop. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 30306

CRWR 10406. Beginning Nonfiction Workshop. 100 Units.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter Prerequisite(s): During pre-registration, this course is open only to declared Creative Writing Majors and declared Minors in English and Creative Writing, as well as graduate students. During add/drop the course will be instructor consent and open to all students in the College. Please contact the instructor to be added to the waitlist for the option to enroll during add/drop. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 30406

CRWR 10606. Beginning Translation Workshop. 100 Units.

Beginning Workshops are intended for students who may or may not have previous experience, but are interested in gaining experience in translation. See the course description for this particular workshop section in the notes below.

Instructor(s): Jason Grunebaum     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. To participate in this class, students should have intermediate proficiency in a foreign language. Note(s): Beginning Translation Workshop: It’s been said that in an ideal world, all writers would be translators, and all translators would be writers. In addition to the joy of enlarging the conversation of literature by bringing new voices into another language, the practice of literary translation forces us as writers to examine the materials and tools of our craft. In this workshop, we will critique each other’s translations of prose, poetry, or drama into English, as well as explore various creative strategies and approaches to translation by a variety of practitioners that touch on various aspects of the "radical recontextualization" that constitute the decision-making work of literary translation. Through these processes, you will formulate your own strategies to both literary translation and creative writing. We will also have the opportunity to have conversations via Zoom with some of the translators we’ll be reading. Students should have at least an intermediate proficiency in a foreign language to take this workshop. Equivalent Course(s): GRMN 10606, CRWR 30606, SALC 30706, GRMN 30606, SALC 10606

CRWR 12124. Reading as a Writer: Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty. 100 Units.

In this core course, students will investigate the complicated relationship between truth and art by reading and writing works "based on a true story." In poetry and prose, we will explore the lines between fiction and nonfiction, beauty and horror, as well as utterance and silence. Writers will develop critical responses to course readings, then explore those perspectives through creative work of their own. Readings include work by Jeffery Renard Allen, Ari Banias, Scott Blackwood, Brenda Hillman, Harold Pinter, and Claudia Rankine.

Instructor(s): Garin Cycholl     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through classes.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Note(s): This course meets the general education requirement in the arts.

CRWR 12133. Intro to Genres: Writing and Social Change. 100 Units.

In this course, we will explore the embattled, yet perpetually alive relationship between writing and activism by reading canonical and emergent works of fiction, narrative prose, and poetry that not only represent social ills, but seek to address and even spur social justice in some way. Students will be encouraged to choose an issue that they feel passionate about on which to research and respond for the entire quarter-and will be asked to produce short works in a range of genres in relation to that issue. Works studied will include the poetry of Percy Shelley, the short stories of John Keene, the essays of Anne Boyer, the graphic novels of Nick Drnaso, and the document-based poetry of Layli Long Soldier.

Instructor(s): Jennifer Scappettone     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.UChicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Satisfies the College Arts Core requirement.

CRWR 12138. Intro to Genres: Evil Incarnate. 100 Units.

Some of the most compelling pieces of writing across all genre deal with, and often feature, deeply problematic central adversarial characters without which the poem, story, or essay would have no forward motion, and no cause to exist. From Capote's In Cold Blood to Milton's Paradise Lost, from Bulgakov's Master and Margarita to Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem and Sabato's The Tunnel, literature returns again and again to the question of evil and the concept of opposition. This course is designed to explore this question alongside authors who have devoted their lives to understanding the role of evil in literature, its necessity, its appeal, its frivolity and its betrayal. The course will be divided into three section, each section devoted to a specific genre during which two to three texts will be explored, discussed and analyzed in class, and at the end of which one brief analysis paper will be due. One creative piece, in any of the three major genres, exploring the said topic will be due at the end of the course.

Instructor(s): Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins; contact the instructor for a spot in the class or on the waiting list. Note(s): Satisfies the College Arts/Music/Drama Core requirement.

CRWR 12141. Intro to Genres: Drawing on Graphic Novels. 100 Units.

Like film, comics are a language, and there's much to be learned from studying them, even if we have no intention of 'writing' them. Comics tell two or more stories simultaneously, one via image, the other via text, and these parallel stories can not only complement but also contradict one another, creating subtexts and effects that words alone can't. Or can they? Our goal will be to draw, both literally and metaphorically, on the structures and techniques of the form. While it's aimed at the aspiring graphic novelist (or graphic essayist, or poet), it's equally appropriate for those of us who work strictly with words (or images). What comics techniques can any artist emulate, approximate, or otherwise aspire to, and how can these lead us to a deeper understanding of the possibilities of point of view, tone, structure and style? We'll learn the basics of the medium via Ivan Brunetti's book Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, as well as Syllabus, by Lynda Barry. Readings include the scholar David Kunzle on the origins of the form, the first avant-garde of George Herriman, Frank King, and Lyonel Feininger, finishing with contemporaries like Chris Ware, Emil Ferris and Alison Bechdel. Assignments include weekly creative and critical assignments, culminating in a final portfolio and paper.

Instructor(s): Dan Raeburn     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): MAAD 22141

CRWR 12143. Reading as a Writer: Embodied Language. 100 Units.

Embodied Language. This course studies how writers engage the senses to shape language into something actually felt and not just comprehended. We'll track the sensual life of words-what they do to the mouth, to the ear, their musical kinships with one another-and learn how these qualities combine to generate mood and atmosphere. Alongside writing that renders embodiment and the physical world, we'll read writing that makes abstraction feel concrete. Our weekly readings will guide our ongoing inquiry into questions such as: what constitutes an image? How does writing enact feeling? How do the sensory elements of a piece intensify or erode or expand its subject, and to what end? Texts will include poetry and prose by Sei Shōnagon, Francis Ponge, Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Gwendolyn Brooks, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Wanda Coleman, Vasko Popa, Lorine Niedecker, Ai, Durga Chew-Bose, Shane McCrae, Jenny Zhang, Justin Torres, James Baldwin, Deborah Eisenberg, and many others. Each member of the class will be asked to write weekly critical and creative responses, to give one presentation, and to produce a final project at the end of the quarter.

Instructor(s): Margaret Ross      Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins; contact the instructor for a spot in the class or on the waiting list. Note(s): This course meets the general education requirement in the arts.

CRWR 12145. Reading as a Writer: Re-Vision. 100 Units.

To revise a piece of writing isn't merely to polish it. Revision is transformation and yields an alternate reality. A new view, a re-vision. This course will start by tracking compositional process, looking at brilliant and disastrous drafts to compare the aesthetic and political consequences of different choices on the page. We'll then study poems, essays, and stories that refute themselves and self-revise as they unfold, dramatizing mixed feelings and changing minds. We'll end by considering erasure poetry as a form of critical revision. Our conversations will inspire weekly writing exercises and invite you to experiment with various creative revision strategies. Students will be asked to lead one presentation and to share their writing for group discussion.

Instructor(s): Margaret Ross      Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

CRWR 12146. London vs. Nature: Writing Utopia and Dystopia in the Urban Landscape [Creative Writing Arts Core: R. 100 Units.

In this Arts Core course, students will be introduced to a range of the utopian and dystopian fantasies that writers have produced in response to the metropolis of London as the imperial epicenter of manufactured ecologies, from the late nineteenth century through the present day. They will study early responses to modernism and modernization in the city by figures like William Blake, Frederick Engels, Henry James, Ezra Pound, and Virginia Woolf before moving on to contemporary writers such as R. Murray Schafer, who apprehends the city through "earwitnessing" of noise pollution, and Bhanu Kapil, who recalls the race riots of the 1970s against the backdrop of the Nestle factory on the site of King Henry VIII's hunting grounds. Students will be exposed first-hand to how London is read by writers confronting planetary and political crisis through meetings with living publishers, authors, and art collectives like the Museum of Walking, grappling with the continual metamorphosis of the landscape-and through a sequence of on-site visits and psychogeographical experiments, they will have the opportunity to respond to the city in their own writing across a range of genres. (Arts Core)

Instructor(s): Jennifer Scappettone     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Acceptance to the London Study Abroad Program. Equivalent Course(s): ARCH 14146

CRWR 12147. Intro to Genres: The River's Running Course. 100 Units.

Rivers move--over land, through history, among peoples--and they make: landscapes and civilizations. They are the boundaries on our maps, the dividers of nations, of families, of the living and the dead, but they are also the arteries that connect us. They are meditative, meandering journeys and implacable, surging power. They are metaphors but also so plainly, corporeally themselves. In this course, we will encounter creative work about rivers, real and imaginary, from the Styx to the Amazon. Through poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama, we will consider what rivers are, what they mean to us, and how they are represented in art and literature. Rivers will be the topic and inspiration for our own creative writing, too. The goal for this course is to further your understanding of creative writing genres and the techniques that creative writers employ to produce meaningful work in each of those genres. You will also practice those techniques yourselves as write your own creative work in each genre. Our weekly sessions will involve a mixture of discussions, brief lectures, student presentations, mini-workshops and in-class exercises. Most weeks, you will be responsible for a creative and/or critical response (300-500 words) to the reading, and the quarter will culminate in a final project (7-10 pages) in the genre of your choice, inspired by the Chicago River.

Instructor(s): Stephanie Soileau     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CHST 12147, ENST 22147

CRWR 12148. Intro to Genres: Speculative Women. 100 Units.

Intro to Genres: Speculative Women Despite common misconceptions, women have been at the forefront of the speculative genre from its earliest inceptions. They have not merely defied the limitations and restraints of literature as defined by their contemporary society, but invented whole worlds and genres which continue to influence writers and writing as a whole today-from Mary Shelley's 1818 publication of "Frankenstein" to Virginia Woolf's 1928 publication of "Orlando," and even Margaret Cavendish's 1666 novel, "The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World." This course will be a brief foray into the strange and yet familiar worlds of various women across the history of speculative writing, ranging from Mary Shelley to Ursula K. Leguin, from Lady Cavendish to Margaret Atwood, from Alice Walker to Octavia E. Butler.

Instructor(s): Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins; contact the instructor for a spot in the class or on the waiting list. Note(s): Satisfies the College Arts/Music/Drama Core requirement. Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 22148

CRWR 12150. Intro to Genres: Writing for TV: The Writers' Room. 100 Units.

In this course, you'll learn the craft of writing for television by collaboratively developing a pilot script for an original television series set in the South Side of Chicago. Modeled on the "writers' room," we'll research and develop the concept, characters, the outline, and create a plan for the series. In addition to being introduced to the fundamentals of storytelling through lectures, discussions, screenings, and script analysis, you'll also learn to work collaboratively with a team, constructing a daily agenda, brainstorming, researching, pitching, discussing ideas, and composing in screenwriting format. By the end of this hands-on course, you will be armed with a set of techniques and skills that will support your professional development as a writer.

Instructor(s): Julie Iromuanya     Terms Offered: Summer TBD. September Term 2022

CRWR 12151. Intro to Genres: The Gothic Lens. 100 Units.

The Gothic is arguably the most evocative of all storytelling genres. As haunting as it is seductive in its ambiguities and luridly symbolic tropes, no form more powerfully captures our encounters with the irrational and the inexplicable, whether in nature, in others, or in ourselves. In this Arts Core course, we will approach the genre through all its forbidding yet intimate qualities. As we read Gothic fiction from different eras and cultures, from both a reader's perspective and a writer's perspective (the why/how/who of the author's decisions), we'll cover concepts like the sublime, the uncanny, and abjection, examining the work's sociopolitical layers but aiming our brightest light on its psychological underpinnings. We'll ask ourselves: in what ways does the Gothic mirror the most vulnerable and obscure aspects of the self? What might these extraordinary stories of transgression, violence, or supernatural conflict reveal about the horrors of ordinary life, the vagaries of our hidden desires, anxieties, and pathologies? Our focus on the psychological and evocative nature of the genre, especially from a writer's point of view, will also help us write our Gothic Scenes, where everyone will apply their own intimate "gothic lens" to memorable encounters from their recent past. (Arts Core)

Instructor(s): Vu Tran     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Note(s): This course meets the general education requirement in the arts.

CRWR 12153. Reading as a Writer: The Walker in the City. 100 Units.

Flâneur: from French, "to stroll, loaf, saunter"; probably from Old Norse flana, "to wander aimlessly"; Norwegian flana, "to gad about. The image of the poet as flâneur -- a metropolitan artist in motion -- emerged as an archetype of romantic and modernist literature. We will consider the walking poet in interaction with race, mobility and disability, gender and queerness, class, migration, ecology, and other embodied experiences. Texts will include work by Kathy Ferguson, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Walter Benjamin, William Blake, Judith Butler, Sunaura Taylor, June Jordan, Walt Whitman, and others. Students will lead one presentation during the quarter and keep a notebook/sketchbook.

Instructor(s): Anna Torres     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Acceptance to the London Study Abroad Program

CRWR 12154. Reading as a Writer: Brevity. 100 Units.

This course will consider brevity as an artistic mode curiously capable of articulating the unspeakable, the abyssal, the endless. Reading very brief works from a long list of writers, we will ask: when is less more? When is less less? What is minimalism? What is the impact of the fragment? Can a sentence be a narrative? Can a word comprise a poem? Our readings will include short poems, short essays, and short short stories by Yannis Ritsos, francine j. harris, Aram Saroyan, Richard Wright, Cecilia Vicuña, Kobayashi Issa, Renee Gladman, Robert Creeley, Alejandra Pizarnik, Lucille Clifton, Lydia Davis, Jamaica Kincaid, Yi Sang, Anne Carson, Franz Kafka, Prageeta Sharma, Venita Blackburn, Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, and others. Students will be asked to lead one presentation and to write critical and creative responses for group discussion.

Instructor(s): Margaret Ross     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

CRWR 12156. Fundamentals: A Gathering of Flowers: The Anthology. 100 Units.

In 1925, The New Negro: An Interpretation, a collection of poems, short stories, and essays was published-it ushered a new era, what was then called the New Negro Renaissance. An artistic and literary movement with the objective to subvert what Alain Locke called the "Old Negro," by providing a corrective and aspirational image of contemporary Negro life, was borne. Around forty years later, Black Arts: An Anthology galvanized the Black Arts Movement, what Larry Neal called the "aesthetic and spiritual sister" of the Black Power Movement. The Best American Short Stories and the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women are two more examples of anthologies, one to cultivate the genre and the other to recover the literature of marginalized women writers. In this course, we'll examine anthologies, a word derived from the Greek for "a gathering of flowers." As we study these "flowers," we'll discern the objectives that shape their construction, as well as what was put in and what was left out. In short essays and exercises, we'll also investigate the social, cultural, and political contexts that influenced these objectives, as well as the resultant literary and cultural implications. For your final, you'll design your own literary anthology.

Instructor(s): Julie Iromuanya     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through classes.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

CRWR 12159. Reading as a Writer: The Bad Girls Club. 100 Units.

Jezebels, witches, femme fatales, nasty women, sirens, madwomen, and murderesses: the world over, these women of many names-whom we'll collectively refer to as the Bad Girls Club-have alternately inspired the disdain and delight of multitudes. Whether jailed, expelled, excommunicated, or burned at the stake, their (anti)heroic antics have challenged, critiqued, or, some might say, corrupted the laws, mores, and sensibilities of societies. If it is true that polite, well-behaved women rarely make history, then what do impolite, badly-behaved women teach us about the construction of (his) story? In this course, we'll examine literature from around the world featuring members of the Bad Girls Club, who in opposing complimentary constructions of femininity, femaleness, and power invite introspection on the gendered nature of story and storytelling. In short critical papers, we'll analyze the tropes, features, and conventions of literature featuring these bad characters, and in short exercises, you'll write stories, poems, and essays inspired by them.

Instructor(s): Julie Iromuanya     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 12159

CRWR 12160. Reading as a Writer: Exploring the Weird. 100 Units.

In 1917 the Russian critic Viktor Shklovsky coined the word 'ostranenie,'-translating roughly as 'defamiliarization'-to illustrate a concept that asks the writer or artist to see the everyday in new and unfamiliar ways. In fiction writing this means avoiding cliché while cultivating elements of surprise, the unexpected, the strange. It means the author offering a new perspective on something familiar, something surprising and, often, yes, a little weird. So what does it mean to follow the weird as a fiction or creative non-fiction writer? As a poet? How can we indulge that strange, uncanny, often suppressed side of ourselves in a way that not only serves a work of literary art but opens it up to new possibilities? This class will look at ways writers use defamiliarization and other techniques to create unexpected and sometimes jarring effects and will encourage students to take similar risks in their own writing. Students will view read various works of fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, view films, and read critical and craft- oriented texts. They will write short weekly reading responses and some creative exercises as well. Each student will also be expected to make a brief presentation and turn in a final paper for the class.

Instructor(s): Augustus Rose     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list.

CRWR 12163. Reading as a Writer: Obscenities. 100 Units.

Obscenity" is a term for what is repulsive, abhorrent, excessive, or taboo in a society; and yet many artworks once considered to be obscene are now celebrated as landmarks of world literature, from the ancient poetry of Sappho to modern novels like Ulysses. In this course, we will study literary works that have been banned or censored as "obscene" to examine our own perspectives, attitudes, and assumptions as literary artists. How does obscenity shape our understanding of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, or public and private speech? What are the uses of obscenity in constructing new possibilities for literary expression? Authors studied will include Toni Morrison, Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Vladimir Nabokov, Hilda Hilst, and Allen Ginsburg; and we will supplement these readings with works of literary theory, psychoanalysis, and case law. Students will produce their own original poetry, fiction, and nonfiction to reimagine what is permissible-and possible-in language and society for contemporary literary artists.

Instructor(s): Chicu Reddy     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): PARR 33000

CRWR 12164. Reading as a Writer: Good Translation. 100 Units.

The past few years have seen a proliferation of major awards for works of contemporary world literature that have been translated into English (among them the International Booker Prize, the National Book Award for Translated Literature, and the National Book Critics Circle Book in Translation Prize). While such awards certainly elevate translation as a mode of writing comparable to that of other literary arts, they also raise important questions about the production, circulation, and reception of translated literature in the Anglosphere. In this course, we will read a number of recent award-winning books in English translation (both poetry and prose), considering how these books traveled from origin to translation, and how we as readers engage with them - as translations and as literary texts. How are translations made? How do we evaluate books that have two writers: author and translator? What larger forces (social, aesthetic, commercial, political) are at work when deciding which translated books will hold value for Anglophone readers? We'll explore these questions through weekly readings and discussions, student presentations, critical analyses and creative responses. As a final project, students will develop their own evaluative rubrics from which to award a prize to one of the translations we've read.

Instructor(s): Annie Janusch     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins.

CRWR 12165. Intro to Genres: Short Form Screenwriting. 100 Units.

This course explores short form screenwriting, as distinct from feature-length or episodic screenwriting. In addition to studying the essential elements of a screenplay, we will read, view, and discuss approaches to scripting brief documentary, poetic, and fictional time-based works. This work will prepare us for in- and out-of-class writing exercises in these modes, which students will often discuss in a workshop environment. Students will respond in creative and critical ways to the screenings and readings; present on a specific time-based work or creator; and write in the short screenwriting formats under study, culminating in a final creative project.

Instructor(s): Nick Twemlow     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Note(s): This course meets the general education requirement in the arts.

CRWR 17003. Fundamentals in Creative Writing: Truth. 100 Units.

In this class we'll study how writers define and make use of truth--whatever that is. In some cases it's the truth, singular; in others a truth, only one among many. Some writers tell it straight, others slant. Some, like Tim O'Brien, advocate story-truth, the idea that fiction tells deeper truths than facts. To get at the heart of these and other unanswerable questions we'll read writers who've written about one event in two or more modes. Nick Flynn's poems about his father, for example, which he's also set down as comic strips as well as in prose. Jeanette Winterson's first novel as well as her memoir, sixteen years later, about what she'd been too afraid to say in it. Karl Marlantes' novel about the Vietnam war, then his essays about the events he'd fictionalized. Through weekly responses, creative exercises, and longer analytic essays you'll begin to figure out your own writerly truths, as well as the differences-and intersections-between them.

Instructor(s): Dan Raeburn     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): This is class is restricted to students who have declared a major in Creative Writing or a minor in English and Creative Writing. Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins.

CRWR 17007. Fundamentals in Creative Writing: The Grammar of Narrative. 100 Units.

Storytelling goes nearly as far back as human consciousness, while the ways in which we tell stories has been expanding ever since. This class will look at several different forms of narrative-fiction, creative non-fiction, narrative poetry, and film-and explore the "grammar" of these different genres, what they share and where they differ and how their particular strengths influence the ways in which they most effectively communicate. How does film (a visual medium) tell a story differently than does fiction (which asks us to project our own imagined version of the story), differently than creative non-fiction, (which must always rely on facts), differently than poetry (which condenses the story to its essences)? How do these different genres and mediums influence the stories they tell and the effects they achieve? Readings will include primary texts as well as critical and fundamentals texts in each genre. Students will complete weekly reading responses, as well as creative exercises. A paper focusing on a specific element derived from the class will be due at the end of the course.

Instructor(s): Augustus Rose     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Students must be a declared Creative Writing major or Minor in English and Creative Writing to enroll. Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins.

CRWR 17012. Fundamentals in Creative Writing: Creative Research/The Numinous Particulars. 100 Units.

According to Philip Gerard, "Creative research is both a process and a habit of mind, an alertness to the human story as it lurks in unlikely places." Creative writers may lean on research to sharpen the authenticity of their work; to liberate themselves from the confines of their personal experience; to mine existing stories and histories for details, plot, settings, characters; to generate new ideas and approaches to language, theme and story. The creative writer/researcher is on the hunt for the numinous particulars, the mysteries and human stories lurking in the finest grains of detail. In this course, we will explore the research methods used by creative writers and consider questions that range from the logistical (eg. How do I find what I need in an archive?) to the ethical (eg. How do I conscientiously write from a point of view outside my own experience?) to the aesthetic (eg. How do I incorporate all these researched details without waterlogging the poem/story/essay?). We will read poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction that relies heavily on research and hear from established writers about the challenges of conducting and writing from research. Assignments will include reading responses, creative writing and research exercises, short essays and presentations.

Instructor(s): Stephanie Soileau     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Students must be a declared Creative Writing major or Minor in English and Creative Writing to enroll. Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

CRWR 17013. Fundamentals in Creative Writing: Touchstones. 100 Units.

Most passionate readers and writers have literary touchstones --those texts we return to again and again for personal or aesthetic influence and inspiration. When we are asked what book we would want with us if we were stranded on a desert isle, our touchstones are the ones that leap immediately to mind. Some texts are fairly ubiquitous touchstones: The Great Gatsby, Harry Potter and the [take your pick], The Bell Jar, Little Women, Letters to a Young Poet, Leaves of Grass. Others are quirkier, more idiosyncratic. What -- if any -- qualities do these touchstones share, within and across genres? What lessons about writing craft can be drawn from them? In this course, we'll read texts that are commonly cited as touchstones, along with fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction that students bring to the table -- their own literary touchstones. In that sense, our reading list will be collaborative, and students will be expected to contribute content as well as an analytical presentation on the craft issues raised by their selections. Our assignments will include reading responses, creative writing exercises, short essays and presentations.

Instructor(s): Stephanie Soileau     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Students must be a declared Creative Writing major to enroll during preregistration. Contact instructor to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

CRWR 17014. Fundamentals in Creative Writing: A Gathering of Flowers. 100 Units.

Instructor(s): Julie Iromuanya     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Students must be a declared Creative Writing major to enroll during preregistration. Contact instructor to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

CRWR 17015. Fundamentals in Creative Writing: Sincerity (and Irony) 100 Units.

What does it mean for a piece of writing to be "sincere"? How do we know a (character, poem, "I," essay) is "sincere"? What does it mean to make that judgment, and what does it commit us to? How does that judgment change a reader's orientation to the object? We will approach these questions obliquely first, by thinking about how irony works. Are irony and sincerity opposites? We'll look at a range of contemporary and historical objects in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. This will include essays by Kierkegaard, Oscar Wilde, Wayne Booth, Jonathan Swift, and R. Magill Jr., fiction by Vladimir Nabokov, Joanna Ruocco, and Kathy Acker, and poetry by Chelsey Minnis, Jenny Zhang, Amiri Baraka, and others. We'll also consider certain internet objects and think about their relationship to sincerity (and irony). This course will give students a more nuanced and historically grounded handle on these questions, and will help them develop a style of writing that's able to more intentionally (and interestingly) choose its tonal legibilities.

Instructor(s): Kirsten Ihns     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): This is class is restricted to students who have declared a major in Creative Writing or a minor in English and Creative Writing. Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins.

CRWR 17016. Fundamentals in Creative Writing: The Frame Narrative. 100 Units.

In this course, students will engage in a close examination of the various permutations of the frame narrative device across time and genre. From A Thousand and One Nights, to Hamlet, to the "Call of Cthulhu" and Watchmen, the "story within a story" construction is one of the oldest and most employed literary devices-one which can either elevate or imperil the work wherein it is utilized. Students will respond to the material in both critical and creative manners, culminating in a final analytical and creative piece that employs the craft elements discussed and unpacked in class.

Instructor(s): Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas     Terms Offered: Spring Note(s): During pre-registration, this course is open only to declared Creative Writing Majors and declared Minors in English and Creative Writing

CRWR 17017. Fundamentals in Creative Writing: Haunted Craft, the Art of the Spectral Metaphor. 100 Units.

This course will be a close examination of the use of spectral imagery as a craft element in narratives across genre and time. From Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" to Emily Carrol's A Guest in the House, to Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and Octavia Butler's Fledgling, the supernatural metaphor presents a unique stage upon which to play out questions of gender autonomy, mental health, repressed sexuality, racism and more. Students in this course will be expected to put the fantastical metaphor under a microscope and explore its potential through both creative and critical work of their own.

CRWR 20203. Technical Seminar in Fiction: Research and World-Building. 100 Units.

Writing fiction is in large part a matter of convincing worldbuilding, no matter what genre you write in. And convincing worldbuilding is about creating a seamless reality within the elements of that world: from setting, to social systems, to character dynamics, to the story or novel's conceptual conceit. And whether it be within a genre of science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, or even contemporary realism, building a convincing world takes a good deal of research. So while we look closely at the tools and methods of successful worldbuilding, we will also dig into the process of research. From how and where to mine the right details, to what to look for. We will also focus on how research can make a fertile ground for harvesting ideas and even story. Students will read various works of long and short fiction with an eye to its worldbuilding, as well as critical and craft texts. They will write short weekly reading responses and some creative exercises as well. Each student will also be expected to make a brief presentation and turn in a final paper for the class.

Instructor(s): Augustus Rose     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): During pre-registration, this course is open only to declared Creative Writing Majors and declared Minors in English and Creative Writing, as well as graduate students. During add/drop the course will be instructor consent and open to all students in the College. Please contact the instructor to be added to the waitlist for the option to enroll during add/drop. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40203

CRWR 20209. Technical Seminar in Fiction: Scenes & Seeing. 100 Units.

At the core of literary storytelling is dramatization, which enables a reader to "see" the world, characters, and incidents at play and to vicariously experience their emotional and psychological consequences in the story. The primary vehicle for dramatization in a story is the scene, which consists of many crucial parts: characterization, setting and imagery, dialogue and action, tone and atmosphere, subtext and thematic development. In this course we'll break down all these parts and examine how they can function on their own as well as interact to bring a moment or event to life. Where and how should a particular scene begin and end? How should information be organized? How might we determine a scene's goals in isolation and in support of the larger narrative of a short story, novella, or novel? And ultimately, beyond characters talking, acting, and reacting, how might we expand our traditional notions of what a scene is and what it can do? We'll consider such questions as we discuss exceptionally crafted scenes from short stories, novels, plays, and even film, TV, and podcasts, with an eye also on the differences in scene craft from genre to genre and what that can teach us specifically as fiction writers. Course assignments will include reading responses, writing exercises, short essays, and student presentations.

Instructor(s): Vu Tran     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40209

CRWR 20217. Technical Seminar in Fiction: Elements of Style. 100 Units.

What we call style is more than literary flourish. Control of a story begins with a writer's characteristic approach to the line. Style dictates and shapes immersive and impactful worlds of our creation. It's also indicative of a work's larger themes, philosophies, and aesthetic sensibility. In this class, we'll examine fiction by wordsmiths such as James Baldwin, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, and Marguerite Duras in order to contemplate the influence that elements such as diction, syntax, rhythm, and punctuation have on a writer's style.

Instructor(s): Julie Iromuanya     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40217

CRWR 20221. Technical Seminar in Fiction: Detail. 100 Units.

John Gardner said that the writer's task is to create "a vivid and continuous fictional dream." This technical seminar will focus on the role of detail in maintaining this dream. In this course we will deconstruct and rebuild our understanding of concepts like simile, showing vs. telling, and symbolism, asking what these tools do and what purpose they serve. Drawing from fiction and essays from Ottessa Moshfegh, Barbara Comyns, Zadie Smith, and others, students will practice noticing, seeing anew, and finding fresh and unexpected ways of describing. We will also examine what is worthy of detail in the first place, how detail functions outside of traditional scene, and the merits and limits of specificity, mimesis, and verisimilitude. Finally we will consider what it means to travel across a landscape of vagueness and euphemism as we search for the quality of "thisness" that James Wood claims all great details possess. In addition to assigned readings, students will be responsible for reading responses, short craft analyses, vigorous class participation, and several creative exercises and peer critiques applying these lessons.

Instructor(s): Benjamin Hoffman     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40221

CRWR 20224. Technical Seminar in Fiction: Narrative Tempo. 100 Units.

At certain moments," writes Italo Calvino of his early literary efforts, "I felt that the entire world was turning into stone." Slowness and speed govern not just the experience of writing but also the texture of our fictional worlds. And this is something we can control. Sublimely slow writers like Sebald or Duras can make time melt; spritely magicians like Aira and Rushdie seem to shuffle planes of reality with a snap of their fingers. This seminar gathers fictions that pulse on eclectic wavelengths, asking in each case how narrative tempo embodies a fiction's character. Our exercises will play with the dial of compositional speed, testing writing quick and slow; alternately, we'll try to recreate the effects of signature texts. Weekly creative and critical responses will culminate in a final project.

Instructor(s): Benjamin Lytal     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40224

CRWR 20232. Technical Seminar in Fiction: Narrative Influence. 100 Units.

T. S. Eliot once said that "good writers borrow, great writers steal." In this class we will look at modeling as a springboard for original creativity. What makes a piece of writing original? Is it possible to borrow a famous writer's story structure, theme, or even attempt their voice, yet produce something wholly original? How specifically are writers influenced and then inspired? Readings will pair writers with the influences they've talked or written about, such as Yiyun Li and Anton Chekhov; Edward P. Jones and Alice Walker; Sigrid Nunez and Elizabeth Hardwick, and George Saunders and Nikolai Gogol. Writing exercises will experiment with aspects of voice, narrative structure, point of view, tone, and use of dialog. While this is not a workshop course, come prepared to write and share work in class. Students will pursue both creative work and critical papers.

Instructor(s): Sharon Pomerantz     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40232

CRWR 20233. Technical Seminar in Fiction: Who Sees and Who Speaks? 100 Units.

Who Sees and Who Speaks? What is the nature of the encounter between a narrator and a character, and how do elements of character and plot play out in narrative points of view? Drawing on the narratological work of theorists such as Gérard Genette and Monika Fludernik and of critics such as James Wood, this technical seminar considers what point of view, perspective, and focalization can do or make possible. Readings may include stories by Jorge Luis Borges, Jamaica Kincaid, Haruki Murakami, Jenny Zhang, William Faulkner, Lorrie Moore, Jamil Jan Kochai, Italo Calvino, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Wharton, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Edwidge Danticat, Jhumpa Lahiri, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and Virginia Woolf, among others, and will introduce instances of first-person-plural and second-person narrative, as well as modes of representing speech and thought such as free indirect discourse. Over the course of the quarter, students will write short analyses and creative exercises, culminating in a final project.

Instructor(s): Sophia Veltfort     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): During pre-registration, this course is open only to declared Creative Writing Majors and declared Minors in English and Creative Writing, as well as graduate students. During add/drop the course will be instructor consent and open to all students in the College. Please contact the instructor to be added to the waitlist for the option to enroll during add/drop. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40233

CRWR 20236. Technical Seminar in Fiction: Alternative Points of View. 100 Units.

Point of view is one of our most powerful narrative tools, controlling voice, perspective, and level of access to every bit of information a reader receives. When writers are first finding their way into new fiction projects, however, it is easy to default to the two points of view we are most commonly exposed to: a traditional first person or third person that behaves predictably. In this Technical Seminar, we will mine the work of Julie Otsuka, Carmen Maria Machado, Robert Coover, Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, and other writers for strategic usage of alternative points of view, including second person, first person plural, free indirect discourse, and deliberate shifts from one point of view into another. Assignments will include short critical and creative responses, a final fiction assignment, and a final presentation.

Instructor(s): Meghan Lamb     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40236

CRWR 20309. Technical Seminar in Poetry: Generative Genres. 100 Units.

From ancient Sumerian temple hymns to 7th-century Japanese death poems to avant-garde ekphrasis in the 21st century, the history of poetry is as rich in genres as it is in forms. Why does it feel so good to write a curse? What is an ode and how is it different from an aubade? In this technical seminar we will study the origins, transcultural functions, and evolving conventions of some of the oldest-living genres of lyric poetry - the ode, the elegy, the love poem, the curse, to name a few. We will read living writers such as Alice Oswald, Danez Smith, Kim Hyesoon, and Natalie Diaz alongside historical forerunners including Aesop, Sei Shonagon, John Keats. Federico Garcia Lorca, Sylvia Plath, and Paul Celan. Students will write weekly experiments of their own in response to our readings, and for a final project they will edit a mini-anthology of a genre of their choice, including a short critical introduction.

Instructor(s): Suzanne Buffam     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40309

CRWR 20312. Technical Seminar in Poetry: Prosody. 100 Units.

PROSODY This course will be a deep dive into prosody. What is prosody? Merriam-Webster describes it as "the rhythmic and intonational aspect of language" - we might also describe it as the way poems move, and how they move their reader. Arguably one of the most important (and least visible) aspects of poetic composition, prosody can teach you to see and write differently. We'll begin with an introduction to historical metrics (the boring but necessary part), and then move on to studying more contemporary models. Readings will include a bit of scholarly work on prosody by Rosemary Gates and Boris Maslov, but mostly we'll read poems, from the 12th century to the 21st, that foreground prosody and rhythmic structure. This will be a practice-intensive class-you will be asked to produce several exercises a week, in addition to a final paper or project.

Instructor(s): Kirsten Ihns     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): During pre-registration, this course is open only to declared Creative Writing Majors and declared Minors in English and Creative Writing, as well as graduate students. During add/drop the course will be instructor consent and open to all students in the College. Please contact the instructor to be added to the waitlist for the option to enroll during add/drop. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40312

CRWR 20404. Technical Seminar in Nonfiction: Forms of the Essay. 100 Units.

The essay, derived from the French term essayer meaning "to try" or "to attempt," is not only a beloved sub-genre of creative nonfiction, but a form that yields many kinds of stories, thus many kinds of structures. Araceli Arroyo writes that the essay can "reach its height in the form of a lyric, expand in digression, coil into a list, delve into memoir, or spring into the spire of the question itself all with grace and unexhausted energy." In this course, we will analyze the essay's continuum, marked by traditional, linear narratives on one end, and at the other, everything else. In our class, we will investigate the relationship between content and form. What does it mean to be scene-driven? What happens when a narrative abandons chronology and event, propelled instead by language and image? What is gained through gaps and white space? You will leave this class with a strong grasp of content's relationship to form, prepared to participate effectively in creative writing workshops. You will also create a portfolio of short writings that can be expanded into longer pieces. Readings will include: Nox by Anne Carson; A Bestiary by Lily Hoang; Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions by Valeria Luiselli; Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine; Essayists on the Essay edited by Ned Stuckey-French

Instructor(s): Kathleen Blackburn     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40404

CRWR 20410. Technical Seminar in Nonfiction: Epistolary Form. 100 Units.

When does a body of writing become "literary"? What stories might be found inside the hastily scrawled lines of a postcard buried in the attic or an incomplete to-do list drifting down the sidewalk? Beginning with the modern epistle and epistolary novel, this cross-genre seminar orbits the space where non-literary documents give way to artistic compositions that a given set of experts would otherwise neatly categorize and deposit somewhere literature is supposed to belong. As we practice the interplay of research and imagination toward the realization of a final project, we'll examine how writers of nonfiction and documentary poetics have used everything from blueprints of a prison cell to vaudeville ephemera to frame, develop, and heighten true stories. We'll consider ethics of authority such as information access, authentication, and journalistic objectivity alongside rhetorical matters of credibility, emotional truth, and the serviceability of facts. Come play in the archives and observe the power of repurposed material.

Instructor(s): Dina Peone     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40410

CRWR 20412. Technical Seminar in Nonfiction: The writer as researcher. 100 Units.

Research is an essential and imaginative process for the nonfiction story, but in what ways are the writer's methods unique to literary practice? This course will explore the role of research in writing creative nonfiction. Students will develop methods that play a role in writing essays, memoir, and literary journalism. The seminar will be conducted in four sequential parts: immersion research; interview techniques; library research; translating technical jargon for a public readership. Assignments will equip students with the practical steps for completing each style of research. We will also discuss how to integrate research into the descriptions, narrative, and subtext of the writing. Students will experiment with: dramatizing research through scene-building; using reflection to respond to their findings; and inviting research to become part of the plot. Research, we will find, generates some of the most dramatic and surprising moments in the writing process. We will read texts that correspond to the areas of focus, including works by Eula Biss, Daisy Hernandez, and Sarah Viren. Students will leave the course equipped to include research into their writing process for advanced writing workshops and thesis projects.

Instructor(s): Kathleen Blackburn     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40412

CRWR 21502. Advanced Translation Workshop. 100 Units.

All writing is revision, and this holds true for the practice of literary translation as well. We will critique each other's longer manuscripts-in-progress of prose, poetry, or drama, and examine various revision techniques-from the line-by-line approach of Lydia Davis, to the "driving-in-the-dark" model of Peter Constantine, and several approaches in between. We will consider questions of different reading audiences while preparing manuscripts for submission for publication, along with the contextualization of the work with a translator's preface or afterword. Our efforts will culminate in not only an advanced-stage manuscript, but also with various strategies in hand to use for future projects. We will also have the opportunity to have conversations via Zoom with some of the translators we'll be reading. Students who wish to take this workshop should have at least an intermediate proficiency in a foreign language and already be working on a longer translation project.

Instructor(s): Jason Grunebaum     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu (include writing sample). Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Students who wish to take this workshop should have at least an intermediate proficiency in a foreign language and already be working on a longer translation project. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 41502

CRWR 21504. Advanced Translation Workshop: Scales of Reading. 100 Units.

Peer review of translations-in-progress can often take the form of line edits: we discuss word choices that call attention to themselves rather than talking through the larger compositional units in which those choices are made. While a fine-grained reading is vital to revision, it can also run the risk of minimizing our critical engagement with translated texts merely on the basis of "awkward" or " stilted" language. This workshop will explore the different scales of reading employed in reviewing drafts: Yes, those instances that make us pause or take us out of the text are worth marking for the translator, but ultimately, they're only useful to the translator if we can synthesize them into a larger, coherent reading of the work as a whole. By treating translations-in-progress as literary works deserving of close readings (rather than merely manuscript pages to be edited), we'll seek to provide our peers with a critical account of our experience as the primary readers of their translations. Specifically, we'll practice grounding our accounts in aspects of craft and structure, form and content, in order to move beyond our subjectivities as readers and our idiolects as writers - and better understand how a translated work's larger concerns are enacted in the language itself. Students with translations-in-progress, as well as students who will be starting new projects, are welcome to participate in this workshop.

Instructor(s): Annie Janusch Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu (include writing sample). Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Students who wish to take this workshop should have at least an intermediate proficiency in a foreign language and already be working on a longer translation project. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 41504

CRWR 21505. Advanced Translation Workshop: Prose Style. 100 Units.

Purple, lean, evocative, muscular, literary, exuberant, lucid, stilted, elliptical. These are all labels that critics and reviewers have used to characterize prose styles that call attention to themselves in distinct ways. Of course, what constitutes style not only changes over time, but also means different things in different literary traditions. How, then, do translators carry style over from one language and cultural milieu to another? And to what extent does style structure storytelling? We will explore these questions by reading a variety of modern and contemporary stylists who either write in English or translate into English, paying special attention to what stylistic devices are at work and what their implications are for narration, characterization, and world building. Further, we'll examine the range of choices that each writer and translator makes when constituting and reconstituting style, on a lexical, tonal, and syntactic scale. By pairing readings with generative exercises in stylistics and constrained writing, we will build toward the translation of a short work of contemporary fiction into English. To participate in this workshop, students should be able to comfortably read a literary text in a foreign language.

Instructor(s): Annie Janusch     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 41505

CRWR 22117. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Beginning a Novel. 100 Units.

This workshop is for any student with a novel in progress or an interest in starting one. Our focus will be the opening chapter, arguably the most consequential one-for the reader naturally, but most importantly for us the writer. How might it introduce the people and world of the story, its premise or central conflict, its narrative tone and style? How might it intrigue, orient, or even challenge the reader and begin teaching them how to read the book? And if the first chapter is our actual starting point as the writer, how might it help us figure out the dramatic shape of our novel, its thematic concerns, its conceptual design? We'll apply such questions to the opening chapters of an exemplary mix of novels-The Great Gatsby, The Age of Innocence, Invisible Man, Beloved, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The Vegetarian, Normal People, etc.- and examine what they are expected to do as well as what they can unexpectedly do. And as everyone workshops the first chapter (or prologue) of their own novel, we'll consider ways of adjusting or rethinking them so that the author can better understand their project overall and build on all the promise of the material they have.

Instructor(s): Vu Tran     Terms Offered: Autumn Note(s): Students must have taken Fundamentals + a Beginning Workshop in the same genre as the Advanced Workshop you want to register for. Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42117

CRWR 22128. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Novel Writing, The First Chapters. 100 Units.

In this workshop-focused class we will focus on the early stages of both developing and writing a novel: choosing the POV, establishing the setting, developing the main characters and the dynamics between them, setting up the conflicts and seeding the themes of book, etc. As a class we will read, break down and discuss the architecture of the openings of several published novels as you work on your own opening chapters, which will be workshopped during the course.

Instructor(s): Augustus Rose     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu (include writing sample). Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42128

CRWR 22130. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Inner Logic. 100 Units.

In this advanced workshop, we will explore the range of strategies and techniques that fiction writers employ to make readers suspend their disbelief. We will consider how imagined worlds are made to feel real and how invented characters can seem so human. We will contemplate how themes, motifs, and symbols are deployed in such a way that a story can feel curated without seeming inorganic. We will consider how hints are dropped with subtlety, how the 'rules' for what is possible in a story are developed, and how writers can sometimes defy their own established expectations in ways that delight rather than frustrate. From character consistency to twist endings, we'll investigate how published authors lend a sense of realism and plausibility to even the most far-fetched concepts. Through regular workshops, we will also interrogate all students' fiction through this lens, discussing the ways in which your narratives-in-progress create their own inner logic. Students will submit two stories to workshop and will be asked to write critiques of all peer work.

Instructor(s): Baird Harper     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42130

CRWR 22132. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Strange Magic in Short Fiction. 100 Units.

In this workshop based course we'll investigate how strangeness and magic function in short fiction. We'll read stories by authors like Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, and Alice Sola Kim, examining how these writers portray the fantastical and impossible. We'll explore concepts like defamiliarization, versimilitude, and the uncanny. We will contemplate how magical realism and surrealism differ from sci-fi and fantasy genre writing, and ask how we, as writers, can make the quotidian seem extraordinary and the improbable seem inevitable, and to what end? Students will complete several short creative exercises and workshop one story that utilizes magic or strange effects. Students will also be expected to write thoughtful, constructive critiques of peer work. Throughout the course, we'll consider how the expectations of literary fiction might constrain such narratives, and we can engage with and transcend these archetypes.

Instructor(s): Benjamin Hoffman     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42132

CRWR 22133. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Writing the Uncanny. 100 Units.

Sigmund Freud defines "the uncanny" ("unheimlich") as something that unnerves us because it is both familiar and alien at the same time, the result of hidden anxieties and desires coming to the surface. In this advanced fiction workshop, we will explore how fiction writers use the uncanny to create suspense, lend their characters psychological depth, thrill and terrify their readers, and lay bare the darkest and most difficult human impulses. We will read and discuss fiction by writers like Shirley Jackson, Jamaica Kincaid, Octavia Butler, Kelly Link, Ben Okri, Haruki Murakami, and Victor Lavalle, drawing craft lessons from these writers to guide our own attempts at writing the uncanny. Much of our class time will be dedicated to evaluating student work and honing our skills of composition and critique. In addition to shorter writing exercises and "mini-workshops" throughout the quarter, every student will complete a full-length "uncanny" short story for workshop and compose critique letters for each of their peers. Students will be required to significantly revise their full-length short story by the end of the quarter.

Instructor(s): Stephanie Soileau     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42133

CRWR 22134. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Cultivating Trouble and Conflict. 100 Units.

If you want a compelling story, put your protagonist among the damned." --Charles Baxter While crisis is to be avoided in life, when it comes to narrative, trouble is your friend. In this advanced workshop we'll explore the complex ways writers create conflict in their stories, be it internal or external, spiritual or physical, romantic, financial or familial. We'll read masters of the form like Edward P. Jones, George Saunders, ZZ Packer, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Yiyun Li, and discuss how they generate conflict that feels organic, character-driven, and inevitable. Weekly writing exercises will encourage you to take creative risks and hone new skills. Each student will workshop two stories, with strong emphasis on focused and productive peer critique and in-class commentary.

Instructor(s): Sharon Pomerantz     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42134

CRWR 22135. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Narrative Time. 100 Units.

The Long and the Short of it: Narrative Time A story's end point determines its meaning. The history of a life can be covered in a sentence, a few pages or seven volumes. How do writers decide? In this advanced workshop, we'll look at different ways to handle narrative time, paying special attention to building blocks like direct and summary scene, flashback, compression, slowed time and fabulist time. We'll examine work by writers whose long stories feel like novels, like Alice Munro and Edward P. Jones, alongside those who say everything in a short single scene of a page or two, like Grace Paley and Kate Chopin. Students will be encouraged to experiment with time in both writing exercises and story revisions.By the end of the course, you will have generated significant raw material and workshopped one story. Two stories, one polished and one in draft, will be prepared for the final.

Instructor(s): Sharon Pomerantz     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42135

CRWR 22137. Advanced Fiction Workshop: The College Novel (& Story) 100 Units.

In this advanced fiction workshop, we will examine and write narratives set at college, the so-called campus and varsity novels (and, in our case, short stories). We will try to capture the attendant promise and uncertainty of life on the cusp of adulthood, asking what it means to come of age, to age, to experiment, and possibly, to regress. We'll attempt to veer away from cultural cliché and caricature to portray the truth of life on campus and come to grips with the way you live right now, as we consider what it means-to borrow the title of one novel-to make our home among strangers. Students will read published works and submit two stories or novel excerpts for workshops. Please expect a rigorous but constructive workshop environment where being a critic and an editor is essential.

Instructor(s): Ben Hoffman     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42137

CRWR 22140. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Killing Cliché 100 Units.

It's long been said that there are no new stories, only new ways of telling old ones, but how do writers reengage familiar genres, plots, and themes without being redundant? This course will confront the literary cliché at all levels, from the trappings of genre to predictable turns of plot to the subtly undermining forces of mundane language. We will consider not only how stories can fall victim to cliché but also how they may benefit from calling on recognizable content for the sake of efficiency, familiarity, or homage. Through an array of readings that represent unique concepts and styles as well as more conventional narratives we will examine how published writers embrace or subvert cliché through story craft. Meanwhile, student fiction will be discussed throughout the term in a supportive workshop atmosphere that will aim not to expose clichés in peer work, but to consider how an author can find balance-between the familiar and the unfamiliar, between the predictable and the unpredictable-in order to maximize a story's effect. Students will submit two stories to workshop and will be asked to write critiques of all peer work.

Instructor(s): Baird Harper     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42140

CRWR 22146. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Disruption and Disorder. 100 Units.

This workshop-based course proceeds from the premise that disorder and disruption are fruitful aesthetics that might be applied to numerous elements of fiction to unlock new possibilities in our work. Students will seek to identify typical narrative conventions and lyrical patterns and then write away from them-or write over them, toward subversion, surprise, and perhaps even a productive anarchy. Students will search for hidden structures in work by Taeko Kono, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Diane Williams, Garielle Lutz, and others, examining the methods these writers use to lead readers to unexpected, original, and transgressive places. Students will complete several short creative exercises in which they practice disruption and disorder in plot, pace, dialogue, and syntax. In the second half of the course, students will workshop one story or excerpt and write thoughtful, constructive critiques of peer work. Revision is also a crucial component of this class, as it is an opportunity to radically warp and deviate from our prior visions. Throughout the quarter, we will attempt to interrupt and shake up our own inclinations as artists.

Instructor(s): Benjamin Hoffman     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42146

CRWR 22149. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Long Stories. 100 Units.

The advantage, the luxury, as well as the torment and responsibility of the novelist," writes Henry James, "is that there is no limit to what he may attempt." Writers interested in these torments and luxuries can begin to experiment with long form in this workshop. Each student will compose a single long story of about forty pages. We'll attend to the freshness of beginnings, the satisfactions (and compromises) of endings and, most acutely, to the crises of middles. A scaffolding of workshops, outlines, and conferences will support and structure your efforts. Along the way we'll explore the opportunities of long-form structure with examples from the likes of David Foster Wallace, Alice Munro, Ted Chiang, and Toni Morrison. Most of our class time will be devoted to workshopping long stories by students.

Instructor(s): Benjamin Lytal     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42149

CRWR 22152. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Finding and Refining Voice. 100 Units.

As writers, your "voice" is you imposing who you are on the truthfulness of your sentences. Finding your voice, then, is the process-whether you're describing a character, an image, or an idea-of constantly asking yourself, Do I absolutely believe this?, of rewriting and rewriting your sentences until you absolutely do believe it, and finally of refining all the technical aspects you brought to bear to assure that level of individual truth. Out of that, naturally and inevitably, comes your voice-at least for the time being. In this workshop, we'll examine this crucial stage in the development of your own aesthetic, which is not merely a writing style, but more importantly a personal perspective on the world that informs and is informed by that style. We will read a selection of writers with distinctive worldviews and thus distinctive literary voices (Paul Bowles, Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Lorrie Moore, Ottessa Moshfegh, Ocean Vuong, Garth Greenwell, etc.), and we'll complement those readings with writing exercises and workshops of your own fiction, where you will actively interrogate, cultivate, and refine your emerging voice.

Instructor(s): Vu Tran     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42152

CRWR 22153. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Rants and Rambles. 100 Units.

The unshackled narrators that dominate many of our most exciting novels-from Dostoevsky's underground man to the uber-relatable mother of 2019's Ducks, Newburyport-take their bearings not from the scenic method of theater or the omniscient narration of history but from the essay form and from oral storytelling. This workshop plumbs those resources to better understand this alternative tradition, studying the craft that can make unruly narrative both highly entertaining and intellectually satisfying, exploring rhetoric, repetition, leitwortstil, logical nesting, suspense, digression, irony, and humor. While executing creative exercises in voice, we'll read books of furious energy by Thomas Bernhard and Jamaica Kincaid alongside cooler, essayistic meanders by W. G. Sebald and Claire-Louise Bennett. Students will compose and workshop a substantial work that takes its cues from these examples.

Instructor(s): Benjamin Lytal     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42153

CRWR 22154. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Unlikeable Characters. 100 Units.

From "unreliable" to "unlikeable," certain characters--and character qualities--are often measured against popular understandings of who is "good," who is "relatable," and who gets to decide. As Ottessa Moshfegh quips in a Guardian interview, "We live in a world in which mass murderers are re-elected, yet it's an unlikeable female character that is found to be offensive." In this technical seminar, we will critically investigate cultural dialogues around "unlikeability," and discuss the shared qualities and compelling narrative capabilities of "unlikeable" characters. Assignments will include reading responses, short craft analyses, and a presentation.

Instructor(s): Meghan Lamb     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42154

CRWR 22155. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Writing About Work. 100 Units.

Writing about work, jobs, and vocational experiences may seem contradictory- or even antithetical-to our goals in fiction. After all, if we aim to inspire, to invigorate, to otherwise wield a narrative "axe for the frozen sea within us" (as Kafka wrote), why write about the very day-to-day tasks so often charged with numbing and blurring our sensation of life? In this workshop, we will explore and answer this question with our own work-focused fictions, developing strategies for defamiliarizing the mundane, and using routines to build dramatic tension. Utilizing a combination of creative workshops and exercises-and drawing upon models from the job-focused fiction of Eugene Martin, Dorothy Allison, Lucia Berlin, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Edwidge Danticat, and other writers-we will also deepen and develop our characters through precise depictions of their work environments.

Instructor(s): Meghan Lamb     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42155

CRWR 22156. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Narrator as Personality. 100 Units.

While aspiring writers usually grasp quickly how to write direct dialog-we hear it all around us, in public and private spaces-narration is a trickier enterprise. In this writing workshop, we will look at the narrator as personality, a voice that exists to tell the story, but not always to enter it. The narrator can be a constant, like an elbow in the side, or effaced, touching down to only give us the basics of time and place. They can be all knowing, summarizing scenes, people and events from a distant, God-like vantage, or reportorial, speaking in present tense as events unfurl. Some narrators make us laugh but are conning us with their charm; others explain the psychology of events like a great therapist or moralize like a member of the clergy. We will read a wide range of examples from writers like Edward P. Jones, Anton Chekhov, Salman Rushdie, Amy Hempel, Yiyun Li, and Louise Erdrich. Students will be encouraged to experiment in both writing exercises and story revisions. By the end of the course, you will have generated significant raw material and workshopped one story, which you will revise for the final.

Instructor(s): Sharon Pomerantz     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42156

CRWR 22157. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Tiny Chapters. 100 Units.

In this advanced fiction workshop, students will have the opportunity to assemble a long narrative out of short fragments. Composing with small units reframes the art of narrative. We'll study the diverse affordances of working with fragments-collage, aporia, essayistic interpolation-always keeping an eye on the totality of our narratives. We'll discuss the art of brevity-including related forms like the aphorism, the note, and the joke. We'll begin in experiment and end with substantial compositions. Our readings will be drawn from the numerous contemporary novelists who use this method (Jenny Offill, Olga Ravn, Dorthe Nors) as well as the older generation of authors who, in their different ways, may be said to have pioneered the form (Marguerite Duras, Gwendolyn Brooks, William Gass, Renata Adler). But most of our class time will be devoted to workshopping original student work.

Instructor(s): Benjamin Lytal     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42157

CRWR 22158. Advanced Fiction Workshop: From the Ground Up. 100 Units.

In a craft talk, writer Stephen Dobyns once described an exercise he used for generating stories inspired by Raymond Carver, who said about his process, "I write the first sentence, and then I write the next sentence and then the next." Apparently, Dobyns was frustrated by that answer, but later challenged himself to write 50 first sentences of potential stories. Then, he picked half of them and wrote 25 first paragraphs. From those, he eventually completed about a half dozen stories. (I learned this from an article by the great short story writer Kelly Link.) In this generative workshop, we will proceed in this fashion. During the first week, we'll study the first sentences of stories and each write our own 50 first sentences. During the second week, we'll study the first paragraphs of stories and each write 25 first paragraphs, and so on until all students have a few complete drafts of stories, one of which will be submitted to our in-class workshop. Along the way, we'll read and discuss well-made stories by writers such as Kelly Link, Denis Johnson, Joy Williams, Edward P. Jones, Justin Torres, Mary Gaitskill, and many others. To be successful, students will read and write actively and share their well-informed opinions with enthusiasm, especially in our workshop discussions.

Instructor(s): Ryan Van Meter     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42158

CRWR 22159. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Family Life, Family Strife. 100 Units.

If, as the opening lines of Anna Karenina suggests, it is true that "every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," then the unique character of family is largely determined by its distinct manner and type of conflict. In this advanced fiction workshop, we'll examine fiction about family friction with an eye for observing the strategies that authors have used to construct dramas that revolve around how families love, cope, or crumple in the midst of crisis. As we identify tropes of family dysfunction, we'll also consider the ways authors use narrative devices like point-of-view, setting, plot, and scene to investigate how we define family (and how those definitions have evolved); its bonds and intergenerational inheritances; how families-like institutions- are bonded by their distinctive habits, manners, mores, and laws; and how kinship might magnify, subvert, or critique larger society. Above all, we'll debate what family life and family strife teach us about storytelling. Over the course of the term, we will write and workshop your own fiction inspired by model texts.

Instructor(s): Julie Iromuanya     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42159

CRWR 23113. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Waste, Surplus, Reuse. 100 Units.

What do writers and artists do with surplus, with extras, leftovers, and other excesses of production? Is there a creative use to put them to? When viewed in the context of ecology and economy, what are the ethical dimensions of working with surplus? Are there also ethics and aesthetics of the "useless"? With these guiding questions, this course will explore creative approaches to waste, and develop revision practices that draw on the reuse of material surplus. We will consider forms of excess, and we'll examine diverse types of waste and things that "waste", including literal trash, ruins, the body, time, the dream, and everyday texts (such as emails, text messages, rough drafts, conversations, and ephemeral media). Readings and media may include work by Georges Perec, Harryette Mullen, Nikki Wallschlaeger, T. S. Eliot, Kurt Schwitters, and Agnes Varda. Students should plan to complete various prompts, lead discussion on readings, and complete a final project.

Instructor(s): Nate Hoks     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43113

CRWR 23123. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Form & Formlessness. 100 Units.

Wallace Stevens suggests that "The essential thing in form is to be free in whatever form is used." How does form provide a kind of freedom for a poet? How does it manifest itself in a poem? Does it mean we have to follow prescribed rules, or is there a more intuitive approach? This course will give students a chance to try out a range of traditional and experimental forms, both as an attempt to improve as writers and in order to interrogate form and its other, what Bataille called the formless, or "unformed" (l'informe). We'll explore traditional and contemporary takes on a variety of forms, such as sonnets, odes, aphorisms, serial poems, and poetic collage. Students should expect to write exercises, submit new poems, contribute feedback on peer work, write short response papers, and submit a final portfolio.

Instructor(s): Nathan Hoks     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu (include writing sample). Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43123

CRWR 23126. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Poetry and the Present Moment. 100 Units.

In this workshop we will tackle the problem of writing poetry in the present moment at a range of scales, thinking critically about our world's obsession with the "contemporary." At the grandest scale, we will ask what it means to write into the contemporary moment, one in which we seem to feel time fading with every status update and tweet, and one that demands embodied engagement-reading works that have been written recently, in dialogue with living authors. At the most intimate scale, we will consider how poetry can cultivate critical awareness of the present moment amidst forces that pull us with dopamine-induced promises and regrets into the future and past. How does poetry, with its odd ability to punctuate, syncopate, fragment, and suspend time, intervene in daily life and in the historical record? Authors for consideration will include Issa, Basho, Gertrude Stein, F.T. Marinetti, David Harvey, Cecilia Vicuna, Bernadette Mayer, Etel Adnan, Leslie Scalapino, Lyn Hejinian, Julie Patton, CA Conrad, Julian T. Brolaski, and Bhanu Kapil. Students will have the chance to experiment with different forms of attunement to the present, and will produce a daybook in tandem with a final "book" project that may take a range of forms.

Instructor(s): Jennifer Scappettone     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43126

CRWR 23132. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Poets' Prose. 100 Units.

Which one of us, in his moments of ambition, has not dreamed of the miracle of a poetic prose," wrote Charles Baudelaire in Paris Spleen,"... supple enough and rugged enough to adapt itself to the lyrical impulses of the soul, the undulations of reverie, the jibes of conscience?" This genre-blurring workshop will explore elements of the history and practice of the prose poem, and other poems and texts that combine strategies, forms and gestures of prose (fiction, nonfiction, etc.) with those of poetry. We will also read texts that are difficult to classify in terms of genre. "Flash Fiction," "Short Shorts," the fable, the letter, the mini-essay, and the lyric essay will be examined, among others. We will discuss the literary usefulness (or lack of it) of genre and form labels. The class will be taught as a workshop: students will try their hand at writing in their choices of hybrid forms, and will be encouraged to experiment. Writers from all genres are welcome, as what we will be studying, discussing, and writing will involve the fruitful collision of literary genres.

Instructor(s): Suzanne Buffam     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43132

CRWR 23133. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Poets in Archives. 100 Units.

This course will examine how the historical archive can be a source for poetry writing, seeking to develop frameworks for interpreting the experiences that poets enact through archives. Deeper questions to be examined involve the relation between poetic form and historical knowledge; the relation between imagination and memory; between material histories and their inscription; between poets and their historical and biographical pasts; and between the critical and creative, the historical and biographical, and the exteriors and interiors of literature, history, myth, and politics. Because this is an advanced workshop, we will rely on mutual exchange dedicated to improving writing. Critique will therefore be our core activity, guided by our readings and professor instruction, but driven primarily by original student work and discussion.

Instructor(s): Edgar Garcia     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43133

CRWR 23134. Advanced Poetry Workshop: The Book as Form. 100 Units.

What is a book? This supposedly obsolete medium has undergone vital metamorphosis over the course of the past century, migrating from text into the visual and performing arts, as well as online. As contemporary writers we will consider what it means to contribute to its evolution, thinking about new forms that the "poetry collection" can take, as well as more emergent forms of the book as project-or process. Authors to be studied include Sappho, Basho, Mina Loy, Bruno Munari, Bread and Puppet Theater, Susan Howe, Anne Carson, Ann Hamilton, Buzz Spector, Bhanu Kapil, Don Mee Choi, Jen Bervin, Mei-Mei Burssenbrugge, Stephanie Strickland, Tan Lin, Edwin Torres, Nanni Balestrini, Douglas Kearney, and Amaranth Borsuk. Be prepared to think about poetry from the scale of the syllable to the scale of the entire bound (or unbound) work.

Instructor(s): Jennifer Scappettone     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43134

CRWR 23135. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Weird Science. 100 Units.

This class invites students to explore various relationships between science and poetry, two domains that, perhaps counter-intuitively, often draw from each other to revitalize themselves. As poets, we'll use, misuse, and borrow from science in our poems. We'll approach poems like science experiments and aim to enter an "experimental attitude." From a practical point of view, we'll try to write poems that incorporate the language of science to freshen their own language or to expand the realm of poetic diction. Furthermore, we'll work with tropes and procedural experiments that may result in revelation, discovery, and surprise. Readings may include work by Aimé Césaire, Kimiko Hahn, Ed Roberson, Dean Young, Joyelle Mcsweeney, and Will Alexander. Students can expect to write several poems, participate in discussion forums with both initial response papers and follow-up comments, critique peers' work, and submit a final portfolio. A substantial amount of class time will be spent workshopping student work.

Instructor(s): Nathan Hoks     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43135

CRWR 23136. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Poetry as Parasite. 100 Units.

Might there be a kind of poem that acts like a parasite latched on to a host body? A poem whose very life is the fusion of various sources, voices, discourses? This poetry workshop invites students to read and write poetry that, either overtly or subtly, engages with other texts. We'll examine ways that poems create intertextual relationships (e.g. quoting, voicing, alluding, echoing, stealing, sampling, imitating, translating…) and test out these methods in our own writing. Students should expect to engage with the basic question of how their work relates to other poets and poems. Expect to read a substantial amount of work by modern and contemporary poets, submit new original poems for workshop, complete intertextual writing exercises, participate in discussion forums with both initial response papers and follow-up comments, critique peers' work, and submit a final portfolio. A substantial amount of class time will be spent workshopping student work.

Instructor(s): Nathan Hoks     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43136

CRWR 23137. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Poetry, Archives, and History. 100 Units.

This course introduces fundamental ideas about poetic form and approaches to poetic writing through close reading and discussion of poetry (modern and contemporary but not exclusively). We will consider poetic elements from the ground-up-reading closely for sound, image, syntax, and meaning-in order to enliven those elements in student writing. Likewise, we will consider how poems appear at a crossroads between history and experience (the past and present) in order to inspire students to write not only about themselves but about real and imagined social, cultural, historical, and intellectual locations and horizons (considering such aspects of poetry writing as geography, history, mythology, anthropology, kinship, science, visual media, audio media, etc). We will do so in conversation with our peers by way of regular presentations and workshops, in which students will give feedback to one another's works, learning thus how to read critically while generously, and how to respond collegially while also constructively. At the end of the quarter students will revise drafts based on class writing exercises and workshop conversations, to produce a portfolio prefaced by a critical reflection. The arc of the class also involves the making of a collaborative syllabus (with a wide range of texts offered and guided by the instructor but available to the creative configuration of the students themselves), to strengthen our grasp of archival and curatorial aspects of poetry writing.

Instructor(s): Edgar Garcia     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43137

CRWR 23138. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Poetics of Procedure and Restraint. 100 Units.

Rats who build the labyrinth from which they will try to escape" is how Raymond Queneau famously described the members of Oulipo, a group of international writers and mathematicians founded in France in 1960, and which still thrives today. The group's aim is to use constraints and procedures to create new literary forms. ("Oulipo" is an acronym that stands for Workshop or Sewing Circle of Potential Literature.) In a similar spirit of playful experiment, we will take a hands-on approach, with students composing new drafts each week. We will experiment with a variety of methods, ranging from traditional verse forms to concrete poetry; creative translations; re-writing; erasures; collages; documentary and research-based poetics; site-specific and ritual poetry; incorporating film, sound, image; and a selection of stimulating Oulipian constraints (e.g. only using certain letters or writing three versions of the same poem, etc.). As we workshop students' drafts, we will discuss topics including inspiration, authorship, form, copying and plagiarism; poetry, activism, and social justice; and the idea of "fact" in poetry. At the end of the quarter, you'll revise your drafts and collect them in a portfolio.

Instructor(s): Rachel Galvin     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43138

CRWR 23139. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Ekphrastic Poetry. 100 Units.

In this generative advanced poetry workshop we will find inspiration for our own poetry by engaging with the visual arts. We will read poems that respond to, reflect, and refract the arts, and exercises will be based on our own encounters in museums, at the movies, in the realms of fashion, architecture, landscape, and elsewhere. We will ask ourselves about artifice and making, the materiality of the written word, the relationship between observation and expression, the emotive qualities of the image, and the sonic qualities of words. Most of our course reading will be contemporary poetry, but we will also explore a range of exciting earlier examples. Each class meeting will include workshops of student poems, discussions of assigned literature, and conversations about art practice and art community. In addition to reading deeply, looking closely, and writing wildly, students are expected to be lively participants in the arts community on campus, and will attend exhibitions, concerts, readings, screenings, and other events and experiences that bring us into contact with various modes of expression. Texts may include poems by, Harryette Mullen, James Schuyler, Brenda Shaughnessy, David Trinidad, and Virgil.

Instructor(s): Robyn Schiff     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CHST 23139, CRWR 43139

CRWR 23140. Advanced Poetry Workshop: Poetry and Crisis. 100 Units.

Since Homer's narratives of war and exile, and Hesiod's accounts of cyclical degeneration and the uncertain future of humankind, poetry has dealt with crisis and liminality. Our own present moment is defined by a convergence of climate and ecological crises, refugee crisis, food crisis, war, and epidemic. In this workshop, we will examine poetic writing arising out of crises, whether political, artistic, or existential, and craft poems that attempt to deal with crisis - both in the form of a concrete Event, and as a literary trope - through critical creative engagement, experimentation, and intertextual dialogue. Readings may include work by Peter Balakian, Jericho Brown, Don Mee Choi, Jorie Graham, Ilya Kaminsky, Valzhyna Mort, Claudia Rankine, Ocean Vuong, as well as classical sources. Students can expect to workshop their poems in class; to engage, critically and supportively, with peers' work; and to develop a final portfolio.

Instructor(s): Oksana Maksymchuk     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43140

CRWR 24002. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Writing About the Arts. 100 Units.

Thinking about practices is a way of focusing a conversation between creative writers, art historians, curators, and working visual artists, all of whom are encouraged to join this workshop. We ourselves will be practicing and studying a wide variety of approaches to visual art. We'll read critics like John Yau and Lori Waxman, memoirists like Aisha Sabbatini Sloan, inventive historians like Zbigniew Herbert, and poets like Gwendolyn Brooks and Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, as well as curatorial and museum writings, catalogue essays, artists' statements, and other experimental and practical forms. The course hopes to support students both in developing useful practices and experimenting boldly. Classes will be shaped around current exhibitions and installations. Sessions will generally begin with student-led observation at the Smart Museum, and we will spend one session on close looking in the study room at the Smart. Students will also visit five collections, exhibitions and/or galleries and, importantly, keep a looking notebook. Students will write a number of exercises in different forms (immersive meditation, researched portrait, mosaic fragment), and will also write and revise a longer essay (on any subject and in any mode) to be workshopped in class.

Instructor(s): Rachel Cohen     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu (writing sample required). Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): ARTH 24002, ARTH 34002, CRWR 44002

CRWR 24012. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Writing the Narrative Nonfiction Feature. 100 Units.

In this writing workshop, students will go through all the stages of composing a narrative nonfiction feature story. After generating a few ideas that seem original, surprising in their approach, and appropriate in scope, we will write and re-write pitches, learning how to highlight the potential story in these ideas. After the class agrees to "assign" one of these features, each student will report, research and write a draft. The features will be workshopped in class, and students will go through an editorial process, polishing their stories through drafts and experimenting with style and form for a final assignment. Along the way, we will consider the mechanics, ethics and craft of this work as we read published nonfiction and talk to writers/reporters about their process. In the end, we should be able to put together a publication that contains all of these feature stories.

Instructor(s): Ben Austen     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44012

CRWR 24019. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Experimental Essay. 100 Units.

Most introductions to creative nonfiction include one sections devoted to the strange and unwieldy-Ander Monson's "I've Been Thinking About Snow" or a page or two of Anne Carson's Nox. A brief foray into the metaphysical essay, the interactive essay, the performance essay and then back into the mainstream of creative nonfiction. This course, however, will be ignoring the mainstream entirely and, rather, will be devoted to the fringe, the strange and almost undefinable. From the performance essay to the video game essay, from the illustrated essay to the found essay and everything in between. This course will consist of experimental readings with accompanying writing prompts and in-class discussions, as well as dedicated workshops to each student's own experimental creative nonfiction project.

Instructor(s): Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44019

CRWR 24020. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Writing the Eco-memoir. 100 Units.

We live in an era marked by human-driven environmental change, an epoch distinguished not only by the reality of anthropogenic impacts, but of human witness. Never before, writes Elizabeth Rush, have humans been here to tell the story of collapse, extinction, adaptation, and memory. In this workshop, we will read and write eco-memoir, a hybrid form of literary nonfiction that blends the work of ecology, history, and personal narrative to understand more fully how memory is bound to ecosystems. Some might simply call this memoir, following J. Drew Lanham's view that the writing of memoir is also the writing of environment. This course will ask how the memoirist looks at place, taking up W.G. Sebald's thinking that places seem to "have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them." Students will practice using the tenets of literary memoir-writing to engage with the theoretical frameworks of such environmental thinkers as Donna Haraway and Jedidiah Purdy. We will ask: to what extent is remembering a collective act? How might the eco-memoir represent the uneven consequences of ecological disruption? What narrative structures does the story of an ecosystem take? Students will write two-full length essays or memoir chapters. Readings will include texts by Kendra Atleework, Elizabeth Bush, Linda Hogan, J. Drew Lanham, W.G. Sebald, and visiting writers.

Instructor(s): Kathleen Blackburn     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44020

CRWR 24021. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: The Trouble with Trauma. 100 Units.

In "The Body Keeps the Score" Bessel van der Kolk writes, "The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves." Many trauma survivors begin writing reluctantly, even repulsed by the impulse to query their woundedness. The process is inhibited by stigma surrounding the notion of victimhood, entities that would prefer a survivor's silence, plus our tendency to dismiss and devalue ones suffering in relation to others. Students in this class will shed some of these constricting patterns of thinking about trauma so they may freely explore their stories with confidence, compassion, curiosity, and intention. We'll read authors who have found surprise, nuance, and yes, healing through art, honoring the heart-work that happens behind the scenes. Half of class-time will include student-led workshops of original works in progress. Paramount to our success will be an atmosphere of safety, supportiveness, respect, and confidentiality. By the quarters end each student will leave with a piece of writing that feels both true to their experience and imbued with possibility.

Instructor(s): Dina Peone     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44021

CRWR 24022. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Writing Beyond the Event. 100 Units.

Much of the tradition of Western storytelling relies on scene-driven narratives propelled by rising action toward an inevitable apex. Often natural disasters are illustrated the same way: hurricanes, invasion of new species, infectious disease, and oil spills are cast as singular events with a beginning, middle and end. This advanced workshop will explore how to push beyond the event. We will examine how forms of nonfiction, from investigative journalism to lyric essays, push against the hegemony of the "event" to tell a longer, slower story of disruption across the nexus of time and space. Following Rob Nixon's concept of slow violence, readings will focus on places and communities whose narratives do not fit tidily into beginning-middle-end story structures. Workshop will ask students to consider how their work might recognize the contexts of extraction, commodity flow, climate change, and borders surrounding the "events" driving our stories.

Instructor(s): Kathleen Blackburn     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44022

CRWR 24023. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Coming of Age Memoir. 100 Units.

Where does childhood end and adulthood begin? For Wordsworth growth happens in reverse. "The Child is the father of the Man," he wrote in 1802, yearning to recall the fundamental joy of a rainbow. Proust was eager to forget his schooldays: "We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us." In this class, students will search their lives for events and lessons which they may consider formative, together evaluating the standards they use to qualify rites of passage, in order to isolate unique patterns of growth that students can call their own. Half the quarter will be dedicated to discussing original student work. A multitude of possibilities will be offered by readings of contemporary memoirists from all walks of life. By quarters end, each student will have laid down the groundwork for a dexterous memoir about surviving the challenges of their youth, and in doing so perhaps even imagine a future that is less prescribed and more personally fulfilling.

Instructor(s): Dina Peone     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Submit writing sample via www.creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44023

CRWR 24024. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Writing Reading. 100 Units.

There are many creative ways to write of, about, from, and because of reading. In this class, serious readers will have the chance to practice forms they love and may not often get chances to write: the incisive review, the long-form reading memoir, the biographical sketch of a writer in history, the interview, the essay about translation, diaristic fragments. In this course, we'll develop individual approaches, styles and regular practices. We'll make use of both creative (and traditional) research, analysis, and criticism, and explore the wide terrain available to creative writers. We'll go back to foundational essayists including Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf, study contemporary writers of reading such as Jazmina Berrera, Claire Messud, Niela Orr, Ruth Franklin, Emily Bernard, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Parul Sehgal. Students will keep a reading/writing notebook, conduct an interview, and write and revise a longer essay for workshop.

Instructor(s): Rachel Cohen     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44024

CRWR 24025. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Queering the Essay. 100 Units.

In Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Queering the Essay, we'll approach the essay as a vehicle for queer narratives, as a marker of both individual and collective memory, and as a necessary compliment to the journalism and scholarship that have shaped queer writing. Through readings and in-class exercises, we'll explore tenets of the personal essay, like narrative structure and pacing, alongside considerations of voice and vulnerability. After a brief historical survey, we'll look to contemporary essayists as our guides--writers like Billy-Ray Belcourt, Melissa Faliveno, Saeed Jones, Richard Rodriguez, and T. Fleischmann-- alongside more familiar writers like Alison Bechdel and Maggie Nelson. And through student-led workshops, we'll wrestle with concerns that often trouble narratives of otherness: What does it mean to write a personal narrative that has a potential social impact? How can we write trauma without playing into harmful stereotypes? How can our writing work as--or make demands toward--advocacy, rather than voyeurism?

Instructor(s): Victoria Flanagan     Terms Offered: Winter Note(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44025, GNSE 24205, GNSE 44205

CRWR 24026. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Feminist Biography. 100 Units.

The personal is political - that slogan of Women's Liberation - has long been understood, among other things, as a call for new forms of storytelling. One of those forms, feminist biography, has flourished in publishing since the 1970s, and it continues to evolve today, even as the terms of feminism and of biography are continually re-negotiated by writers and critics. In this workshop, we read some of those writers and critics. And we read illustrative examples of contemporary feminist biography (and anti-biography) in various nonfiction genres, including magazine profile, trade book, Wiki article, audio performance, personal essay, cult pamphlet, avant-garde art piece. Mostly, we try out the form for ourselves, in our own writing. Each workshop writer will choose a biographical subject (single, collective, or otherwise), and work up a series of sketches around that subject. By the end of the quarter, workshop writers will build these sketches into a single piece of longform life-writing. The workshop will focus equally on story-craft and method (e.g. interview and research techniques, cultivating sources); indeed we consider the ways that method and story are inevitably connected. This workshop might also include a week with an invited guest, a practicing critic or biographer.

Instructor(s): Avi Steinberg     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 24026, GNSE 44026, CRWR 44026

CRWR 24027. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Environmental Writing, Editing, and Publication. 100 Units.

Environmental writing is a quickly-expanding field in the literary and publishing community. It encompasses nonfiction sub-genres of traditional journalism, personal essay, and hybrid forms. This course is designed for students in creative writing with an interest in environmental reportage; it is also intended for students in environmental sciences (broadly speaking) with some writing experience who wish to practice presenting complex information to a non-expert audience. Reading contemporary environmental and science writing, students will develop nonfiction techniques relevant to writing environmental stories, like how to find and contact field experts, how to engage readers in complex topics, how to integrate research into narrative, how to use dialogue from interviews, how to weave the personal together with research material, and how to pitch environmental stories. The course will also cover the practical aspects* of the field by including a workshop with the Careers in Creative Writing Journalism program, guest lectures from editors and journalists in the field, and assignments that familiarize students with current environmental literary magazines. Readings will include Kerri Arsenault's Mill Town and selections from The Best American Science and Nature Writing.

Instructor(s): Kathleen Blackburn     Terms Offered: Autumn Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44027

CRWR 24028. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: World-building in Long-form Nonfiction. 100 Units.

A writer setting out to write a long piece of nonfiction prose may assume that the world of the piece is given, but in fact the nonfiction writer has significant work to do to create a space where a reader can live. In writing creative biography, history, memoir, literary criticism, art writing, and narrative journalism, there are wonderful possibilities for archival research, visiting places and spaces, making first hand observations, interviewing, finding settings and characters, and atmospheric research, whether reading old magazines, listening to radio shows, or studying weather patterns. In this course, advanced writers will immerse themselves in one longer project, developing it in notebooks and weekly postings and exercises. The first half of the course will focus more on practicing and reading (writers including Elizabeth Rush, Zbigniew Herbert, Valeria Luiselli, and James Baldwin), the second half will focus on workshopping as the longer pieces develop. Students will finish the course with a sustained piece of prose.

Instructor(s): Rachel Cohen     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44028

CRWR 24029. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Writing Sports. 100 Units.

As live performance, public ritual, and sheer melodrama, sports give lavish expression to some of our most deeply held cultural attitudes. As sports-related industries have grown exponentially in the past decades, and as the material and political fortunes at stake in these games has also grown, so too has the need for serious writing about sports. The world's stadiums and arenas have become theaters of very real battles over race and gender, class and religion, colonialism and social justice. At the same time, the games themselves have also changed in fascinating and telling ways. This workshop invites writers who are curious about sports as a subject for literary exploration. We examine the subject through various genres of nonfiction, from longform journalism to personal essay to audio storytelling. Our readings will include both canonical and contemporary voices in sports writing. Workshop writers can choose to build a portfolio of three pieces of original nonfiction, or one long piece in three parts. No previous knowledge of sports is required.

Instructor(s): Avi Steinberg     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop begins. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44029

CRWR 24030. Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Writing the Narrative Nonfiction Feature. 100 Units.

Apart from it being nonfiction, a nonfiction feature is like a short story-in terms of length and scenes and characters and all the potential innovations of storytelling. In this writing workshop, students will go through each stage of composing a narrative nonfiction feature story. After generating a few ideas that seem original, surprising in their approach, and appropriate in scope, we will write pitches. After the class agrees to "assign" one of these features, each student will report, research and write a draft. The features will be workshopped in class, and students will go through an editorial process, polishing their stories and experimenting with style and form for a final assignment. Along the way, we will consider the mechanics, ethics and craft of this work as we read published nonfiction and talk to writers and reporters about their process. There will be an emphasis in the class on Chicago writers and their beats; in weekly writing assignments, students will also report on local stories.

Instructor(s): Ben Austen     Terms Offered: Spring Prerequisite(s): Open bid through my.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Contact the instructor for a spot on the waiting list. Course requires consent after add/drop. Equivalent Course(s): CHST 24030, CRWR 44030

CRWR 29200. Thesis/Major Projects: Fiction. 100 Units.

This thesis workshop is for students writing a creative BA or MA thesis in fiction, as well as creative writing minors completing the portfolio. It is primarily a workshop, so please come to our first class with your project in progress (a story collection, a novel, or a novella), ready for you to discuss and to submit some part of for critique. As in any writing workshop, we will stress the fundamentals of craft like language, voice, and plot and character development, with an eye also on how to shape your work for the longer form you have chosen. And as a supplement to our workshops, we will have brief student presentations on the writing life: our literary influences, potential avenues towards publication, etc.

Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Note(s): Required for CW majors and MAPH CW Option students completing creative BA and MA theses in fiction and CW minors completing minor portfolios in fiction. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 49200

CRWR 29300. Thesis/Major Projects: Poetry. 100 Units.

This thesis workshop is for students writing a creative BA or MA thesis in poetry, as well as creative writing minors completing the portfolio. Because it is a thesis seminar, the course will focus on various ways of organizing larger poetic "projects." We will consider the poetic sequence, the chapbook, and the poetry collection as ways of extending the practice of poetry beyond the individual lyric text. We will also problematize the notion of broad poetic "projects," considering the consequences of imposing a predetermined conceptual framework on the elusive, spontaneous, and subversive act of lyric writing. Because this class is designed as a poetry workshop, your fellow students' work will be the primary text over the course of the quarter.

Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Note(s): Required for CW majors and MAPH CW Option students completing creative BA and MA theses in poetry and CW minors completing minor portfolios in poetry. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 49300

CRWR 29400. Thesis/Major Projects: Nonfiction. 100 Units.

This thesis workshop is for students writing a creative BA or MA thesis in nonfiction, as well as creative writing minors completing the portfolio. Student work can be an extended essay, memoir, travelogue, literary journalism, or an interrelated collection thereof. It's a workshop, so come to the first day of class with your work underway and ready to submit. You'll edit your classmates' writing as diligently as you edit your own. I focus on editing because writing is, in essence, rewriting. Only by learning to edit other people's work will you gradually acquire the objectivity you need to skillfully edit your own. You'll profit not only from the advice you receive, but from the advice you learn to give. I will teach you to teach each other and thus yourselves, preparing you for the real life of the writer outside the academy.

Instructor(s): Dan Raeburn; Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Note(s): Required for CW majors and MAPH CW Option students completing creative BA and MA theses in nonfiction and CW minors completing minor portfolios in nonfiction. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 49400

CRWR 29500. Thesis/Major Projects: Fiction/Nonfiction. 100 Units.

This thesis workshop is for students writing a creative BA or MA thesis or minor portfolio in either fiction or nonfiction--or both. In other words, your project may take a number of forms: fiction only, nonfiction only, a short story and an essay, a novel chapter and a piece of narrative journalism, and so on. This course might be of special interest to those working on highly autobiographical pieces or incorporating substantial research into their creative process--fiction that hews close to fact, say, or nonfiction that leans heavily into storytelling. And/or it might be useful for those who want to pursue hybrid or between-genres projects or simply want to continue working in more than one form. We'll be open to many possibilities. It's not a prerequisite that you've taken both a fiction and creative nonfiction course previously, but it will nonetheless be quite helpful to have done so. Note, too, that this is the cumulative course in Creative Writing. There will still be room to explore and rethink (sometimes radically) the pieces you've drafted in previous classes, but please do come to our first session with a clear sense of what you want to work on over the quarter. Required for CW majors and MAPH CW Option students completing creative BA and MA theses in fiction or nonfiction and CW minors completing minor portfolios in fiction or nonfiction.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Winter Prerequisite(s): Instructor consent required. Apply via creativewriting.uchicago.edu (in application please indicate experience in fiction & nonfiction and how this thesis workshop informs your own writing practice). Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 49500

Faculty Director

Director of the Program in Creative Writing Robyn Schiff Email

Undergraduate Primary Contact

Director of Undergraduate Studies Rachel Galvin Walker 511 Email

Administrative Contacts

Program Manager Michael Fischer Taft House 103 773.834.8524 Email

Student Affairs Administrator Denise Dooley Taft House 104 773.702.0355 Email

[email protected]

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