B3000 Fiction Workshop

Prof. Dalia Sofer
Tuesday 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 2RS (34240)

In this course we will read and discuss your manuscripts—short stories or excerpts from longer works. Together we’ll explore the elements of craft, including point of view, character, setting, style, and language. We’ll talk about the possibilities of fiction—how, for example, conflict (internal and external) can create narrative tension, how subtext can reveal the complexity of a situation, how time can be collapsed or expanded, or how well-chosen details can evoke character. We will also consider structure and form, as well as editing and revision. Ideally, you’ll each submit two pieces for discussion throughout the course. In each class, we’ll discuss two students’ works, and fellow students will provide written notes and critiques; I will do the same.
My primary goal in this course is to focus on your intention, and on whether your manuscript manifests that intention. I’m less interested in the “formulas” of storytelling than in discovering what is unique to your vision. We’ll explore ways to sustain narrative tension while allowing a work of fiction the freedom to be what it wants to be, and we’ll talk about roadblocks and successes. Occasionally, time permitting, we may also take detours to read stories or essays that may fuel our conversations.

Dalia Sofer is the author of the novels Man of My Time (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)—a New York Times Editors’ Choice and Notable Book of 2020, and The Septembers of Shiraz (Ecco Press, 2007)—also selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, winner of the Sami Rohr Choice Award, a finalist for the Jewish Book Award, and longlisted for several prizes.  A recipient of a Whiting Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, the Sirenland Fellowship, the Santa Maddalena Foundation Fellowship, and multiple residencies at Yaddo, Sofer has contributed essays and reviews to various publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The LA Review of Books, The Markaz Review, and The Believer.  

B3000 Fiction Workshop

Prof. Salar Abdoh
Tuesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 2TU (34239)

This course is a standard graduate workshop. Each student shares their work two times during the semester. Submissions can be segments of a novel or a short story. My focus in the workshop is entirely on the students’ own pieces. My style is not to do paragraph by paragraph edits of a work. Rather, I look at the overall arc of a piece, and address the fundamental elements of fiction within it – pacing, character, voice, dialogue, prose, transitions, et cetera. Another aspect of my style of workshop is to not be overly intrusive. In other words, I try to work within the context that the writer has created; I don’t believe in ‘hard intrusion’ into a writer’s intent, style and execution, unless on very rare occasions it is absolutely called for.

Salar Abdoh is a novelist, essayist and translator. His latest book, A Nearby Country Called Love, was published in 2023.

B3000 Fiction Workshop

Prof. Lyn Di Iorio
Wednesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 3FG (34238)

In this fiction workshop, participants will write and revise two or three self-contained works of short fiction and provide thoughtful critiques of the work of fellow writers (through both written and oral commentary).  Referring to the technical elements of the craft (such as characterization, inciting incident, desire line, structure, conflict, point of view, dialogue, beats, tone, setting, epiphany and counter-epiphany, and others), we will discuss what each workshop submission is trying to accomplish and suggest ways to help the writer strengthen their work.

When useful, we’ll also discuss selected chapters from Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, 2nd edition, by Renni Browne and Dave King, a book which students should purchase. 

In order to prepare for future submissions to literary journals or magazines (perhaps as soon as the end of the semester), each participant may also be assigned to read a few issues of a literary journal and write and deliver an oral report assessing the type of fiction the journal tends to prefer.  I may also ask you to distribute a story for the class to read that embodies the journal’s expectations.  This assignment—which has proven useful in helping some of my students place their stories in fine journals such as Boulevard, Electric Literature and The Kenyon Review—will help us actively discuss and select different publications appropriate for the diverse works written by our class.  

Lyn Sandín Di Iorio is a fiction writer and scholar. A 2021-22 winner of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellowship, she has recently published fiction in The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, Big Other and Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas; one of these stories was named “Distinguished Story” in Best American Short Stories 2021.  Her novel Outside the Bones was a top-five finalist for the 2012 John Gardner Fiction Prize; a Latinidad List Best Debut Novel; and winner of a Foreword Review Indies Silver Award.  Her book of literary criticism, Killing Spanish, focuses on Latinx identity.  She has also published widely on magical realism and women’s writing.  She graduated from Harvard University and Stanford University’s graduate creative writing program and received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. 

B1707 Prosody

Prof. Michelle Valladares
Tuesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 2RS (34244)

Nothing in the cry 
of cicadas suggest they 
are about to die 
        Basho, translated by Sam Hamill

This critical practice workshop is an exploration of poetic structure and form. It is part exploration of traditional forms, an examination of traditional and contemporary versions of the form and writing in form. You will consider the sonnet, villanelle, sestina, haiku, ghazal and others. We will read poems by Shakespeare, Bishop, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, WS Merwin and Anne Carson. You will use this rigorous study of form to invigorate your own language and poems. We will use The Making of a Poem, A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms, edited by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland and A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver.

Michelle Yasmine Valladares is the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and an Assistant Professor in English. She is a poet, essayist and an independent film producer. She is the author of Nortada, the North Wind
(Global City Press) and several chapbooks. Her poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has been published in literary journals and her work has been included in Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, (Norton) and other anthologies. She was awarded “The Poet of the Year” by the Americas Poetry Festival of NY. She is the poetry editor for Global City Press and has co-produced three award winning independent films.  Her most recent essay, “Rainmaker: How a Mentor Transformed My Destiny,”  was published in Feminists Reclaim Mentorship, (SUNY Press) edited by Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman.  In 2023, she received the CCNY President’s Award for Outstanding Faculty Service.  She received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and her BA from Bryn Mawr College.  You can check out her work at michelleyasminevalladares.com. Her graduate courses include Poetry Workshop, Prosody 1 and 2,  and The Conversation between Poetry and Art.​

B1955 Writing for the Culture:
Creating Your Roadmap to Publication, as Writer, Author, and Literary Citizen

Prof. David Groff
Wednesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 3FG (41986)

How can you move from writer to author? As an MFA prose writer, poet, or dramatist, you can sharpen the tools you need, and gain the insider knowledge required, to cultivate your vocation and establish yourself as an author with a vital voice.

This intensive provides you with the practices and strategies you need to publish your work—together with an emphasis on writing short nonfiction that prepares the way for your first book.

The course features two strands that will alternate and interact over the semester:

• Becoming a published writer and author. As you learn about the “MFA vs. NYC” book publishing realms, literary journals, general interest magazines, online sites, and reading series, you’ll explore various venues for your writing—ones that square with your ambitions and aesthetic—and submit your writing to them, composing and honing targeted and effective query and pitch letters. You’ll master the Artist’s Statement required for grant proposals, residency applications, and post-MFA options. You’ll deconstruct the dynamics of the annual AWP writers conference—the giant public square of literary publishing, to be held in Los Angeles in March. You’ll discover how to create new opportunities, build community, find readerships, and foster creative possibilities.
• Becoming a culture worker through writing nonfiction. You’ll begin to establish a presence in the literary world by writing and submitting for publication 3000 words of nonfiction—personal essays, lyric essays, reviews, interviews, literary criticism, and op eds—that complement the concerns of your other creative writing. You’ll read many examples of literary nonfiction and use them as models. You’ll workshop the nonfiction you write for the course and read and respond in writing to the work of your fellow MFA students. And you’ll interact with visiting writers/culture workers and publishing professionals who will give practical advice about how to make yourself seen, heard, and read.

By the end of this course, you’ll have begun the challenging work of moving from MFA writer to professional author, with a voice that resounds for your readers and contributes to our culture.

David Groff is a poet and independent book editor specializing in connecting new writers with their readers. Formerly a senior editor at Crown, he has edited novels and serious nonfiction published by publishers ranging from Random House to Bellevue Literary Press.  David received his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers Workshop and has an MA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa. His first book, Theory of Devolution, was selected for the National Poetry Series; his second poetry collection, Clay, won the Louise Bogan Award; his third book of poems, Live in Suspense, appeared in 2023. He has co-edited two anthologies, Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners, which won a Lambda Literary Award, and Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS. He has taught poetry, nonfiction, and publishing in the City College MFA creative writing program since 2007.   

B1987 From Idea to Publication: A Deep Dive into Genre Fiction
ONLINE

Prof. Mayra Cuevas
Mondays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 1HJ (41985)

This intensive development crash course guides students through the craft of writing commercial and upmarket genre fiction, while incorporating real-world insight into paths to publication. Students engage in active craft techniques for idea, character and plot development, while gaining an understanding of the genres marketplace. Writers will use their own life experience, identity exploration and cultural background to create a more authentic narrative that feels fresh and original. At the conclusion of 15 weeks, students will have developed their own idea into a novel-length story concept, and then into the first chapters of a manuscript. They will also work with critique groups for feedback, gain insight into the current publishing landscape, break down the literary agent query process and the relationship between authors, agents and editors. This is a workload heavy course for students wishing to develop and complete a full-length novel. 

Mayra Cuevas is the award-winning author of multiple books and stories for children and adults. Her young adult novel Does My Body Offend You? (co-written with Marie Marquardt) was long-listed for the PEN/Faulkner Award, named a 2023 Book All Young Georgians Should Read, a New York Public Library Best Books for Teens 2022 and a Target YA Book Club selection. In 2023, she was named Georgia Author of the Year in the Young Adult category. She currently has multiple titles in development with Simon and Schuster and Penguin Random House. Mayra is also the author of the teen foodie romcom Salty, Bitter, Sweet, and the short story Resilient, published as part of the anthology Foreshadow: The Magic of Reading and Writing YA. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Mayra is a former award-winning producer for CNN. She is now a creative writing visiting professor for City University of New York’s MFA program. Mayra is the co-founder of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival and its Latinx Storytellers,  Conference, a Library of Congress Emerging Strategies Honor and National Council of Teachers of English Latinx and Black Caucus’s Advocacy Award winner. Mayra believes in the power of stories to change lives and the right of all students to have access to diverse books in the classroom. She is also passionate about teaching writers of all ages how to craft and publish their stories. Mayra keeps her sanity by practicing Buddhism and meditation. She lives in Atlanta. Find Mayra on Instagram @Mayra.Cuevas and her website MayraCuevas.com.  

B1968 The Historical Novel After Modernism

Prof. Robert Higney
Thursdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 4RS (34243)

Over the past 20 years, about 75% of novels nominated for major American literary awards have been set in the historical past. Critics used to describe historical fiction as a nineteenth-century genre (think Sir Walter Scott, or Tolstoy’s War and Peace) that lost relevance with the formal experiments of modernism, and that lived on primarily as a nostalgic entertainment genre. Yet today the historical novel has become arguably the dominant form of prestige literary fiction. When, how, and why did this happen? In this course we’ll revisit the history of the genre itself and major critical statements and examine both historical fiction and historical writing itself as narrative genres. But our reading will focus on developments in historical fiction since the mid-twentieth century, and on the uses to which it has been put by postcolonial, diasporic, and contemporary writers. Authors may include, for example, J.G. Farrell, Toni Morrison, Julia Alvarez, Kazuo Ishiguro, Laila Lalami, Namwali Serpell. Work will include regular discussion board posts, a 5-7 page midterm assignment, and final research or creative project.

Robert Higney writes about twentieth century British and colonial/ postcolonial literature, including authors such as Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, and Mulk Raj Anand, as well as contemporary fiction. Recent work has appeared in the journals ASAP/J, Studies in the Novel, and Symplokē, and his book Institutional Character: Collectivity, Individuality, and the Modernist Novel came out in 2022 with the University of Virginia Press. In the graduate program, he has taught courses on twentieth-century British fiction, contemporary literature and publishing, and the historical novel. He has directed MA Literature theses on topics including Toni Morrison and folklore, Caribbean and South Asian fiction, modern dance, and contemporary historical novels. 

B1993 Writing from Journals: Fiction and Memoir

Prof. Mark J. Mirsky
Thursdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 4TU (34106)

The purpose of this course is to encourage students to write their own journals and stories, after examining American and European authors whose stories, journals, letters speak to the questions that they struggle with in their lives. It will explore the tension between the journals and books of Henry David Thoreau in the mid 19^th Century and Franz Kafka in the early 20th century. The former in his A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, The Maine Wood, Cape Cod, are about travel to far off places but also to his own backyard. They mirror traumas that he expresses indirectly, which he takes up in greater detail in his extensive journals. Kafka’s Journals in its recent re-translation explains many of the motivations behind his novels and short stories. Similarly, the journals of Robert Musil through the mid 20^th century illuminate his difficult fiction. Joyce Carol Oates’ novels, stories and letters construct with an elusive discretion like Kafka and Musil the violence and the cruel paradoxes of love. How do Cynthia Ozick, and Donald Barthelme’s fairy tales, tease their authors, their lives? Does the language of a writer’s work, the plot, speak to his or her secrets? Among the writers I hope to examine will be Bruno Schulz, Virginia Woolf, Witold Gombrowicz, Frederick Douglas, Norman Mailer, Jorge Luis Borges, and Italo Calvino.

The class will be asked not just to read but to write fiction, journal, memoir and criticism in the course of the semester. A total of thirty-five pages of student writing in any of these categories must be submitted by the end of the semester. Serious revision of the pages submitted, after consulting with the professor will be credited.

Mark Jay Mirsky was the founding editor of the magazine Fiction in 1972, together with Donald Barthelme, and Max and Marianne Frisch. It still publishes from offices at The City College. Professor Mirsky is the author of five novels, Thou Worm Jacob, Proceedings of the Rabble, The Red Adam, Puddingstone, and Blue Hill Avenue (the last, listed among the 100 Essential Books of New England—by The Boston Globe.) He has published a collection of novellas, The Secret Table, as well as five books of criticism and journalism, My Search for the Messiah, The Absent Shakespeare, The Drama in Shakespeare’s Sonnets—”A Satire to Decay,” Dante, Eros and Kabbalah, and A Mother’s Steps in addition to numerous stories and articles. He is the editor of the Diaries of Robert Musil, co-editor of the two volume History of Pinsk (Stanford University Press), and Rabbinic Fantasies (Yale University Press). His essays and reviews have appeared in Partisan Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Washington Post, Book World, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere.

This course is also available as Craft Seminar.

B2055 Modern Literature, Illness, and Medicine

Prof. Keith Gandal
Wednesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 3HJ (34242)

The meteoric rise of modern medicine, starting in the late 19th century, with its strictly “materialist” approach to health—and its separation from what is now called psychology—has greatly transformed the very conception of the human being. From that period until now, literature, which is of course centrally concerned with characters and human experience, has not only reflected but also contested this modern medical understanding of human illness. We will consider representations of illness and doctors—and their relation to the medical versions of these—in American works, as well as a couple of European works that were immediately imported to the US, from the 1890s to the present. This class initiates a new project in literary studies, which will involve discussions usually outside the purview of literature courses: about the nature of the scientific method and the history of science. This is not the typical course on “Literature and Medicine,” which, even when it focuses on modern literature and medicine, does so in an ahistorical way. Standard courses might, for example, “raise questions about ethical behavior in the face of sickness” (to quote a random course description at another university) or discuss “narratives or metaphors of illness.” But, as these phrases indicate, such courses takes “sickness” as a given; in other words, it doesn’t raise questions about the ethics of the modern medical construction of sicknesses themselves. Sicknesses for which we are still seeking a cure cannot be said to be fully understood. The treatments of sicknesses that have no cure have a significant social history because our medical ideas about such sicknesses are, by necessity, at an experimental stage, which is to say, they are not scientifically proven—as only a cure is scientific proof. To take perhaps the most important example, doctors have for centuries recognized cancer, but the conception of the cause of cancer is very different today from what it was even in the late 19th century.
Warning: “Chronic” and “terminal” illness, perhaps especially cancer, autoimmune disorders, and now COVID-19 as well, is a troubling subject for many people. It can be a source of fear and post-trauma; a lot of us know people who have had cancer or a serious case of COVID or have an autoimmune disorder; many of us fear it. Fear of cancer is a serious social issue and one we will be discussing; arguably, in fact, the promotion of fear is a major tactic deployed by the medical profession in the management of cancer. This course, by contrast, will not promote fear of cancer, but just the opposite. However, in this class, there is no getting around discussing cancer, heart disease, and other chronic illnesses; in fact, such discussions are central to the course. We can’t shy away from issues because they are disturbing. So, if you have a problem reading or talking about chronic illness—which is understandable—you should not take this course. 

Tentative Texts: Literature (in order of publication date):
Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Willa Cather, One of Ours (Book IV)
John O’Hara, “The Doctor’s Son”
Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
Katherine Anne Porter, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” (novella)
William Burroughs, Junky
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
Norman Cousins, Anatomy of an Illness
Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Commentary:
Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Lectures 1 and 2)
Ivan Illich, “Medical Nemesis”
Robert Aronowitz, Unnatural History: Breast Cancer and American Society (excerpt)

Keith Gandal is Professor of English at City College of New York, with a joint appointment in American Literature and Creative Writing. His newest publication, Firsthand: How I Solved a Literary Mystery and Learned to Play Kickass Tennis while Coming to Grips with the Disorder of Things, a comic memoir, came out from University of Michigan Press in 2024. He is also the author of four scholarly books and a novel. His scholarly books are War Isn’t the Only Hell: A New Reading of World War I American Literature (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018), The Gun and the Pen: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and the Fiction of Mobilization (Oxford UP, 2008), Class Representation in Modern Fiction and Film (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane and the Spectacle of the Slum (Oxford, 1997). The novel is Cleveland Anonymous (North Atlantic Books, 2002). 

B6100 Sociolinguistics
HYBRID

Prof. Missy Watson
Thursdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 4TU (34236)

What are the entanglements between language, identity, power, and society? And why might teachers of language and literacy benefit from understanding such entanglements? These questions will guide our course of study this semester.

How language is used, perceived, and treated is inextricably tied to social factors—factors like race, class, gender, culture, geographic location, and immigration status, as well as systemic influences like national policies and dominant beliefs. This is the essence of the study of sociolinguistics and the rationale behind teacher training in this field. That is, sociolinguistics provides opportunities to critically examine power structures and attitudes surrounding language (including our own biases) that uphold social and racial hierarchies—a worthwhile pursuit for any educator. As teachers of language and literacy, we are implicated by these sociolinguistic realities, which not only affect our students and us, but are also reflected in and maintained by our pedagogies and institutions.

Over the course of this semester, we will survey the field’s collective knowledge on linguistic variation and change, cultural perceptions of language, as well as the identity politics of accents, dialects, gender, politeness, and multilingualism. We will also interrogate an array of linguistic myths, such as the myth of non-accents, the myth of standard language, and the myth of nonstandardized varieties being “broken.” Building from this knowledge, we’ll investigate how language is used in the US (and beyond) to identify, subordinate, and discriminate against groups of people. And we’ll examine the implications of sociolinguistics as it applies to our teaching: students will research select topics in sociolinguistics and, armed with that research, design course materials for local contexts that are driven by a more robust sociolinguistic perspective.

This is a zero textbook cost course. We will draw on three central texts: Janet Holmes and Nick Wilson’s An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Rosina Lippi-Green’s English With an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States, and Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill’s Language Myths.

Dr. Missy Watson is Associate Professor in the CCNY English Department. She serves as the Director of First-Year Writing Program, and she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in composition, pedagogy, language, and literacy. Her research lies at the intersection of composition and second-language writing and revolves around seeking social and racial justice.

Recent publications of Dr. Watson include the following: 
“Translingual Approaches in Basic Writing: Resisting the Legacy of Assimilationism.”  Basic Writing in the 21st Century: Legacies, Learners, Landscapes and Future Possibilities, edited by Laura Gray-Rosendale and Barbara Gleason. Peter Lang, forthcoming. (Co-authored with Rachael Shapiro).
“Translingual Praxis: From Theorizing Language to Antiracist and Decolonial Pedagogy.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 74, no. 2, 2022, pp. 292-321. (Co-authored with Rachael Shapiro). 
Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis: Emergent Teaching Through Emergencies. Peter Lang, 2022 (Co-edited with Sara P. Alvarez, Yana Kuchirko, Mark McBeth, and Meghmala Tarafdar).
“Averting Colorblind Translingualism.”  Racing Translingualism in Composition: Toward a Race-Conscious Translingualism, edited by Tom Do and Karen Rowan. Utah State University Press, 2021. (Co-authored with Rachael Shapiro). 
“Engaging (the Politics of) Language Difference in the Writing Classroom: A Multipronged Translingual Approach.”  Plurilingual Pedagogies, edited by Kay Losey and Gail Shuck. University of Michigan Press, 2021.
“The Inevitable Mess of Translingualism: Its –ism and the Schism of Cross-Disciplinary Conflict.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, vol. 20, no. 3, 2021, pp. 83-107.