Creative Writing

B3000 Fiction Workshop

Prof. Dalia Sofer
Tuesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 2RS (28192)

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, a writer’s voice and language may differ from those of a character, how conflict (internal and external) can create narrative tension, or how fictional 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. Soraya Palmer
Wednesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 3HJ (53094)

This course will help you to tap into the unexpected and embrace the elements of surprise in your writing. I will be encouraging you to embrace the childhood parts of your imagination that can get you out of your comfort zone in your writing and allow yourself to experiment, fail, and try again. Some weeks will include prompts that all students will be invited to partake in at home or (time permitting) in class. These assignments are aimed at examining the craft techniques we are familiar with from an unfamiliar lens. For instance, how might animating an ordinary object force you to use setting (e.g.: a haunted house, a talking mirror) as a central character in your story? How do you use the macabre to build tension and create a sense of dread for your characters and/or your readers? We will read classic and contemporary authors who embrace the unfamiliar such as Carmen Maria Machado, George Saunders, Flannery O’Conner, Mary Gaitskill, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and Maisy Card to examine how authors use elements of surrealism, magical realism, unexpected turns, and strangeness to tell stories. Each student will have the opportunity to be workshopped twice. You may submit short stories or excerpts of longer works. Students will be expected to actively participate both verbally and in writing for their peers during the workshop. All genres are welcome.

Soraya Palmer is the author of The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts. She is a Flatbush-born-and-raised writer and licensed social worker. Her novel was named one of Today’s “38 Best New Books to Read in 2023,” one of the “Buzziest Debut Novels of the New Year” by Goodreads, one of the “Best and Most Anticipated Books of 2023” by Elle magazine, and one of “The Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2023” by Ms. Magazine. Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Hazlitt, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She has been awarded a residency at Blue Mountain Center and graduated from the Virginia Tech MFA program. She lives in Brooklyn with her cat, Nicholas.

B3000 Fiction Workshop

Prof. Mark J. Mirsky
Thursdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 4TU (31774)

The focus of the workshop is on the writing of the individuals in the seminar, not on reading assignments or exercises. The course will try to identify the unique voice of each writer, and encourage students to develop and enrich this voice. I hope to meet with each student in the class from the beginning of the semester during individual sessions in my office and in personal emails. All new work handed in to me counts toward the page requirement of sixty pages. One can contribute journal or diary pages, even letters to fulfil this. The course while centering on fiction will discuss the journals of Kafka, Thoreau and Musil and the border between journals and fiction.

All the writing submitted that is written during the semester counts toward the requirement of sixty pages. There are three brief assignments detailed during the first class. that I ask students to complete and send in before the second class. I will lecture on methods of narrative in the course of the semester both in relation to the manuscripts submitted and in regard to stories and novels that I regard as “classics” of fiction, from writers of the past: Witold Gombrowicz, Isak Dinesen, Bruno Schulz, the critic, Edmund Wilson, Robert Creeley, and Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf. Students can submit brief samples of their writing at the beginning of the course (within reasonable limits), and the instructor will respond to them. The instructor will lecture briefly on creative narrative in the course of the semester both in relation to the manuscripts submitted and some of the assigned reading. If the schedule of manuscripts submitted permits it, he will assign and discuss specific texts.

Readings are rotated from year to year bit, the following may be distributed or assigned: “Letter to His Father,” and selected short stories by Franz Kafka, Mist by Miguel de Unamuno, “First Love”
by Samuel Beckett, Unions by Robert Musil, “Sorrow Acre” by Isak Dinesen; At Swim, Two Birds, by Flann O’Brien, Joyce Carol Oates’ Beautiful Days, Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin, Donald Barthelme’s “A Shower of Gold,” from his Sixty Stories, The Collected Stories of Jorge Luis Borges, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Robert Creeley’s “Mr. Blue,” Delmore Schwartz’s “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan. Kundera, Zora Neale Hurston’s collection, Of Mules and Men, and work by Cynthia Ozick and Flannery O’Connor. I may also be assigning stories that appeared in the magazine Fiction, which I have been the Editor-in-Chief of for over fifty years.
Students are required to read all the submissions of their fellow students and expected to comment on them in class and in emails circulated to all the members of the class.

A founding editor of Fiction, Mark Jay Mirsky is the author of five novels: Thou Worm Jacob, Proceedings of the Rabble, The Red Adam, Puddingstone, and Blue Hill Avenue (one of The Boston Globe’s ‘100 Essential Books of New England’). He has published a collection of novellas, The Secret Table, as well as five books of criticism and journalism, on Judaism, Dante, Shakespeare, and other topics. He edited The Diaries of Robert Musil, The History of Pinsk, and Rabbinic Fantasies. His essays and reviews have appeared in The Partisan Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Washington Post’s Book World, The Boston Globe, and other places. A recent interview with Mark appears on the website Artfuse, and a longer, forthcoming one is scheduled to appear on the website, Collidescope.

B3200 Poetry Workshop

Prof. Michelle Valladares
Tuesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 2RS (20909)

Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d. I swear to you there are divine
things more beautiful than words can tell.

–Walt Whitman

Words had an energy and power and I came to respect that power early. Pronouns, nouns, and verbs were citizens of different countries,
who really got together to make a new world.

—Audre Lorde

The power of poetry to reveal the divine, to honor our humanity and to transform the poet and reader will be addressed in this poetry workshop through student engagement with writing poems, reading contemporary poetry and discussing the poem on the page. We will explore the different ways to travel from a draft of a poem to the final version. We will investigate revision, write from prompts and explore new ways of becoming a reader of poetry.

Requirements include writing a poem a week and workshopping poems a few times in the semester. Students will memorize several poems and occasionally endure a lecture on craft. The workshop is open to writers in all genres and will benefit both your writing and experience of the world in these challenging times. We will take a deep dive into the power of language to shape our perceptions of the world. As poet and philosopher Thomas Merton writes “when we experience the world as alive, we share an intimate connection with all that exists. We can see the world as being made of a life-giving language, and our awareness of this language goes deep into our psyches and deep into the cosmos.”

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.

B3405 From Fiction to Scripts

Prof. Marc Palmieri
Mondays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 1FG (28193)

You’ve written the fiction, but can you see the movie? This class will involve composing a screenplay for an adaptation of prose. Through approaching a work of fiction (one’s own short story, or that in the public domain of another author) as a film, we will consider: What element of the fiction or non-fiction narrative are we choosing to emphasize? How are the advantages and opportunities of cinematic storytelling to be best employed? What are the different ideas and approaches to what “adaptation” means – and how is the film version its own independent work of art?Students will develop a screenplay for a short film or make progress toward a feature length screenplay. The course will include the group offering ideas for the cinematic approach on the source material screenplay drafts based on a critical reading, training in the screenplay manuscript form, and workshopping with feedback discussions of each classmate’s adaptation.

Marc Palmieri has taught dramatic writing in the MFA program at CCNY since 2010, and has taught Modern and Postmodern Drama, Shakespeare, Dramatic Writing for the stage, TV and film, Fiction and other courses for the Undergraduate English Department since 2006. He is a fulltime assistant professor in then School of Liberal Arts at Mercy College, where he was the recipient of the 2022 Faculty Innovation Award and the 2023 Outstanding Research Award. Writing credits include: Miramax Films’ Telling You (screenplay), The Thing (webseries: http://www.theplayis.com) stage plays include Waiting For The Host, Levittown (NY Times Critic’s Pick), The Groundling, Carl The Second and Poor Fellas (all published by Dramatists Play Service). He has published twice in Fiction, as well as the Global City Review and (Re) An Ideas Journal, and in numerous anthologies for Applause/Limelight Books and Smith & Kraus Inc. His collection of plays for middle schoolers, S(cool) Days, is published by Brooklyn Publishers. His memoir, She Danced With Lightning is published by Post Hill Press (August, 2022). Marc is a fully vested member of SAGAFTRA and Actors Equity. BA Wake Forest, MA, MFA CCNY. www.marcpalmieri.com

This course is also available under Craft Seminars.

B3600 Non-Fiction Workshop

Prof. Irvin Weathersby, Jr.
Thursdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 4TU (53095)

During the fall semester, students will submit two manuscripts up to twenty-five pages each, and learn to critique the work of their peers. Students will also explore exemplars of creative nonfiction and discuss the publication process from writing query letters, soliciting representation, and working with publishers. This class will nurture writers looking to expand their understanding of creative non-fiction as it relates to other forms including memoir, narrative non-fiction, feature writing, journalism, the personal essay and others, including fiction and poetic forms. Each of us has a story to tell, and this workshop will give students the tools to determine how their stories will be told.

Irvin Weathersby is the author of In Open Contempt (Viking), a forthcoming memoir-in-essays that mediates on expressions of racism in art, museums, and public spaces in New Orleans and throughout the world. He has written for Guernica, Esquire, The Atlantic, EBONY, and other outlets. His work has received funding and support from the Voices of our Nation Arts Foundation, the Professional Staff Congress-City University of New York Research Award, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference where he was named the 2019 Bernard O’Keefe Scholar in Nonfiction. He has earned an MFA in creative writing from The New School, and a master’s in education from Morgan State University. He teaches composition and creative writing at Queensborough Community College.

B3610 Non-Fiction Workshop:
The Memoir II

Prof. Emily Raboteau
Mondays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 1HJ (28172)

This is the second semester of a year-long class that started in the fall, for students deep in the process of writing a book-length memoir or memoir-in-essays, with a clear concept. There are select seats for new students interested in beginning to write or conceive a memoir. The cohort of students in this class are dedicated to revising, expanding, workshopping, and editing book-length manuscripts over the course of an entire academic year.

Memoir is about you and your story and yet your reader is coming to the page not for you, but because they expect to learn or understand something about themselves or about the world through your story. This class will help you see your own role in a bigger and more universal human story—no matter what your story might be.

Writing about your own life can feel overwhelming. There’s simply too much material–how do you know what to leave out? And yet at the same time our stories can feel too small, too ordinary. How do we elevate our writing beyond the personal? In this workshop we’ll focus on shaping the material of lived experience into story. We’ll explore the building blocks of narrative prose: scene, structure, reflection, voice and setting. We’ll workshop your entire manuscript. And we’ll discuss problems and opportunities unique to personal writing: fostering vulnerability; tackling difficult subject matter; incorporating research; avoiding narcissism and solipsism; writing about real people.

Our primary texts will be your work. We’ll read each other closely and ask useful, generative questions. We’ll also look at some brief excerpts from great essays and memoirs. And we’ll make time for in-class exercises to help you explore new approaches. My goal is for each student to continue the work of writing, buoyed by a supportive community.

Emily Raboteau is a novelist, essayist, and cultural critic. She is a contributing editor at Orion Magazine, and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books. Her last book, Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, won a 2014 American Book Award. Her next book, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse,” focusing on the intersection of climate change and environmental justice through the lens of motherhood, will be published by Holt in March, 2024. Bylines include the New Yorker, The New York Times, New York Magazine, McSweeney’s, The Guardian, VQR, Best American Short Stories, Best American Science Writing, and Best American Travel Writing.

Craft Seminars

B1983 Poetry Mentors

Prof. David Groff
Wednesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 3FG (28194)

As we learn where poets have gone before us, we can better venture where we need to go. Our poet-forerunners can serve as mentors, guides, guardians, and inspirers for how we can write and read today. In this course, we will trace the paths of American poets who emerged between the end of World War II and contemporary times and discover how they can influence our own writing. From the Beats to the Confessional Poets, the New York School, the Black Arts movement, the New Formalism, feminist poetics, ecopoetry, language poetry, postmodernism, the poetry of social witness and engagement of the twenty-first century, disability poetics, and other movements in our own times, we will look at certain poetic “schools,” as well as the work of many poets resolutely un-schooled, and we’ll see what we can learn from them as we write poetry in our own era. We will commit to reading a profoundly diverse range of poets, including those not already ordained into the canon, focusing on those mentor-poets who challenge prevailing concepts of what a poem can be and do. We’ll bring out mentoring into the present, with poets of our own time who can help us point out own paths.
Coursework for American Poetry Mentors will include (1) writing “after” poems in imitation, response, reaction, rejection, or revision of the mentor-poets you are reading; (2) writing several short critical introductions and analyses of mentor-poets; and (3) completing a final prose/poetry project that integrates your study of your forerunners into your own vision for your writing and/or reading of contemporary poetry. You’ll share and workshop your poems and critical work with other participants in the course, so we all can benefit from what each student is discovering.

Texts for Poetry Mentors may include a published anthology along with handouts and linked texts. The course is for everyone intrigued by the unfolding legacy of American poets, of the recent past and present, and how those poets can mentor us.

David Groff received his MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop and an MA in nonfiction from the University of Iowa. His books are poetry are Live in Suspense Trio House Press, 2023) , Clay (winner of the Louise Bogan Award, Trio House Press, 2013), and Theory of Devolution (University of Illinois Press/National Poetry Series, 2002). He has co-edited the anthologies Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013, winner of a Lambda Literary Award) and Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (Alyson, 2010). He teaches workshops and craft seminars in poetry. An independent book editor with an interest in the ways writers engage with the culture, he also leads MFA courses in publishing and authorship.

B1983 From Idea to Publication: A Deep Dive Into Genre Fiction

Prof. Mayra Cuevas Nazario
Thursdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 4RS (53088)
ONLINE

This intensive course guides students through the craft of writing commercial and upmarket genre fiction, while incorporating real-world insight into paths to publication. Students will engage in active craft techniques for idea, character and plot development. They will learn to use their own life experience, memories, identity exploration and cultural background to create a more authentic narrative that feels fresh and original. Through the course of 15 weeks, students will develop their own idea into a novel-length story concept, and then into the first chapters of a manuscript. Students will gain an understanding of the upmarket and commercial genres marketplace including mystery, suspense, thriller, romance, science fiction, fantasy, and women’s fiction, and their many subgenres. Over the course, students will work with critique partners, gain insight into the current publishing landscape, break down the literary agent query process and the relationship between authors, agents and editors.

Mayra Cuevas is the author of the young adult novel Does My Body Offend You? (co-written with Marie Marquardt), long-listed for the prestigious 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. Mayra is also the author or the YA foodie romcom Salty, Bitter, Sweet, and the short story Resilient, published as part of the anthology Foreshadow: The Magic of Reading and Writing YA. Her new young adult novel and debut picture book are scheduled for publication in 2025 with Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House. She is currently developing her debut adult title in collaboration with Alloy Entertainment. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Mayra is a former CNN award-winning producer, where she worked for almost 20 years. She teaches in the MFA program at City University of New York, as a Dortort Visiting Professor of Creative Writing. Mayra is a co-founder and board member of the Latinx Kidlit Book Festival, recipient of the National Council of Teachers of English, 2022 Latinx and Black Caucus’s Advocacy Award. She keeps her sanity by practicing Buddhism and meditation. She lives in Atlanta with her husband, her two stepsons, their fluffy cat, and a very loud chihuahua.
You can find Mayra on Instagram @Mayra.Cuevas and her website MayraCuevas.com.

B3002 Craft of the Novel

Prof. Keith Gandal
Wednesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 3HJ (20914)

In this Craft seminar, we will comprehensively analyze or break down novels from the writer’s point of view. We will not be concerned, as in literature courses, with meaning or historical context, but rather with the construction of a novel. We will look at a select number of novels as we analyze all aspects of the novel-writing craft: plot and action; conflict and suspense, promises and questions; setting a scene; openings, climaxes, and endings; issues of pacing; issues of style; characters; flashbacks, background information, and reveal; dialogue and description; sense of place and time; interior monologue, and so on.
The focus will be on dramatic structure, which involves many of these elements—and whose effective achievement makes a book exciting to read—and we will use the analytic “textbook” that I feel is the best on the subject, namely Jack Bickham’s. (It is out of print, but available used.)
Regarding the choice of novels: Iris Murdoch is a British novelist; the novels we’ll be reading were published in the 60s and 70s. She has won a number of prizes, including the most prestigious British award for a novel, the Booker Prize, and she is arguably one of the great novelists in English in the second half of the 20^th century.
This course was initially a response to student requests; another request was the use of my own novel, Cleveland Anonymous, of whose construction I obviously have full insider knowledge—and so provides a special opportunity for students to get an example of how a publishable novel gets conceived, put together, and edited. But the use of my novel is something we will decide as a class. If we do use it, to insure that there is no conflict of interest, I will lend students copies free of charge.

Requirements: Class participation; analytic term paper; final exam.

Tentative Texts:
Jack Bickham, Writing Novels That Sell
Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honorable Defeat, A Severed Head
Keith Gandal, Cleveland Anonymous

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, a comic memoir, comes out in 2024 from University of Michigan Press: Firsthand: How I Solved a Literary Mystery and Learned to Play Kickass Tennis while Coming to Grips with the Disorder of Things.
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).

B3405 From Fiction to Scripts

Prof. Marc Palmieri
Mondays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 1FG (28193)

This course is also available under Creative Writing.

B3608 Craft of Creative Nonfiction

Instructor: Mikael Awake
Mondays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 1FG (53096)

Our course takes an interdisciplinary approach to thinking and writing about creative nonfiction. We’ll discuss histories of this artistic-academic genre and concepts of nonfiction writing across traditions, languages, and eras. We’ll read works of cultural criticism, memoir, public scholarship, and reportage, discussing the function of authorial presence, ethics, audience, and style in nonfiction. Through discussion of course texts, we will explore and debate interconnected craft concerns and spectrums of understanding which students may apply to their own work. Students will be responsible for periodic reading responses, a self-analysis essay on revision, and a final craft lecture.

Mikael Awake is a black writer and educator of Ethiopian descent. His fiction has appeared in Callaloo, McSweeney’s, and Addis Ababa Noir, and his nonfiction has appeared in The New Yorker, GQ, and Oxford American. With Daniel R. Day, he co-wrote Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem. Currently, he is working on a narrative history of outdoor basketball mecca Rucker Park to be published by Pantheon.

Literature

B1809 Virginia Woolf and
her World

Prof. Václav Paris
Mondays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 1HJ (20904)

All writers create their own world, but
few are as rich, as strange, and as
influential as that of Virginia Woolf. Woolf’s world is not easy to enter. Her novels,
ranging from her early The Voyage Out
to her late Between the Acts are complex psychological structures that make few concessions to lazy readers. Her networks were often private. Orlando, a fantasy
about (among other things) transsexuality
and living through centuries, is also a love letter to her friend, Vita Sackville-West.
But once you get into Woolf, you’ll find
that it’s even harder to get out. Woolf
changes the way you see things. She
gives you a vocabulary for what is going
on under the surface, for understanding pervasive features of everyday life that
you didn’t even suspect before. Reading
most of Woolf’s major novels, a range of
her essays and short fiction, and some
of the works of those in her circle, this
course offers a way into her world, which
is also—as we will come to see—increasingly our world. Evaluation will be on the basis of participation in class sessions, in the online discussion board, and through a midterm essay and final paper.

Born in the north of England, Václav
Lucien Paris has taught at the City College of New York since 2014. Currently, he is working on a project on primitivism, and environmentalism in 20th century
literature – with chapters on W.H. Hudson, Karel Čapek, Jan Welzl, Amos Tutuola,
and Leslie Marmon Silko. His first book,
The Evolutions of Modernist Epic, came
out with Oxford University Press in 2021.
Václav is also a walker, translator,
birdwatcher, and father of a three-year old.

B1812 Douglass and Melville:
Sailors, Slaves, and Whales

Prof. Carla Cappetti
Wednesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 3FG (20906)

In this course we will read the writings
and discover the affinities of Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville, two
titans of Nineteenth century American literature. In their writings, Frederick
Douglass and Herman Melville gave
voice and visibility to the suffering
and the resistance of sailors, slaves,
and whales. Reading Douglass alongside Melville will enable us to identify the
literary conventions shared by sailors’
stories, slave narratives, and hunting tales. Douglass and Melville consistently
denounced the ways race and nation
were used to justify enslavement and colonization in the early 19th century,
lynching, segregation, and the death
penalty in the late 19th century. Their
writings resonate with the same intense outrage at the dehumanization of slaves
and sailors, at the extermination of whales, and at the expansive colonization into Latin American and the South Pacific.

Carla Cappetti is the author of Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and
the Novel. She has also published articles
on Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, on the Federal Writer Project of the WPA, and on Natalia Ginzburg. She is currently writing a book on wild animals in American literature. She teaches courses and supervises theses on nature and animals, on urban literature, on Herman Melville and Frederick Douglass, and on Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright.
Honors she has received: Fulbright Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies, American Philosophical Society, Newberry Library Fellowship, Whiting Fellowship.

B1957 The Novel Now

Prof. Robert Higney
Thursdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 4RS (20910)

In this course, we will read a set of very
recent novels, from about the past decade, with an eye to what they can tell us about the literary landscape of the present. These works engage with the urban environment, the figure of the refugee, migration, race and identity, history and memory, and other major themes. They raise questions about the status of English as a global literary language, about the continued relevance of modernism and avant-garde writing, and about the relationships between “literary” and “genre” fiction. We will also study the conditions under which contemporary fiction is written, circulated, marketed and read. This includes the role of cultural prizes, the consolidation of the publishing industry, Amazon, and issues around translation.

In the past the syllabus for this course has included works such as Tom McCarthy, Remainder; Zadie Smith, NW; Teju Cole,
Open City; NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need
New Names; Mohsin Hamid, Exit West; Aravind Adiga, White Tiger; Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go; and Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven; plus critical/theoretical readings most weeks. This list is subject to significant revision for Spring 2024.

Requirements: substantial reading, weekly discussion boards, 4-5 page midterm essay, 15 page final project.

Robert Higney researches and 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 Contemporary Literature, Modernism/ modernity, and ASAP/J, 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 also taught courses on twentieth-century British fiction and the historical novel. He has directed MA Literature theses on topic including Toni Morrison and folklore, border-crossing in Salman Rushdie and Ernest Hemingway, modern dance, and Indian and Bangladeshi fiction.

B1974 Global Autobiography

Prof. Harold Veeser
Tuesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 2TU (28195)

This course will provide a basic map of life-writing. Cultural diversity within the broad tradition of memoir and autobiography is crucial to the course. I will focus on three themes:
(1) struggles with body image and weight loss or gain; (2) family and social pressure to conform to cultural norms in dress, gender, and relationships; and (3) contemporary techniques of constructing a vivid “self” in writing.
You will have a choice of projects: either a ten-page, 2500-word critical or creative paper; or else a group project to be presented to the whole class. This project will make up 48 points of your course grade. In addition, you will have to write thirteen discussion posts: these will make up 52 points of your course grade. These posts are to be a question and an insight about the readings for that week.

H. Aram Veeser (B.A., Ph.D. Columbia U.) has written articles for The Nation and Z Magazine, published books including The New Historicism (1989), The New Historicism Reader (1994), Confessions of the Critics (1997), The Stanley Fish Reader (1998), Painting between the Lines (2001), Edward Said: The Charisma of Criticism (2010), The Rebirth of American Literary Theory and Criticism (2020), and The Postcolonial Interview (special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2024). This year (2023) he has published “Afterword: Practicing the Fragment” in Jeffrey Di Leo, Selling the Humanities, University of Texas Press, 2024; “The Case for Armenians as Indigenous People,” Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 29.1 (25 October 2022); “Introduction” to Special Issue, The Postcolonial Interview, ed. H. Aram Veeser, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50.4 (Summer 2024, forthcoming), and “Thumb Prints on My Throat: The Academic Interview and the Police Interrogation,” also in The Postcolonial Interview; “Author Response to Forum on The Rebirth of Literary Theory and Criticism,” in symplokē (2022); “Vinyl Theory,” in The Comparatist 47 : 2023. 472-476; and “The Objective Form of the Object,” a review of Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said, by Timothy Brennan, in symplokē (2023) 30: 1-2: 367-376. His current book project is Manorexia: A Personal Account.

B2015 Themes in Comparative Literature

Prof. Mikhal Dekel
Wednesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 3HJ (53569)

An introduction to central concepts and texts in the comparative study of literatures and cultures. By reading, discussing and engaging in hands-on comparative work, we will explore a variety of approaches to the discipline and investigate the debates around comparativism and world literature. Readings will include Homer’s The Odyssey, Derek Walcott’s Omeros, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, and George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, among other works. Together with primary texts, we will discuss a variety of essays on comparative and world literature by Goethe, Auerbach, Moretti, Spivak, Thiong’o, and others. Mid-term and final paper.

Mikhal Dekel is Distinguished Professor of English and Director of the Rifkind Center for Humanities and the Arts. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation and the Lady Davis Foundation, among others, and is the author of Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey (W. W. Norton 2019); Oedipus in Kishinev (Bialik Institute, 2014); and The Universal Jew: Masculinity, Modernity and the Zionist Moment (Northwestern University Press, 2011). Her articles, translations and blogs have appeared in Foreign Policy, Journal of Comparative Literature, English Literary History, Jewish Social Studies, Callaloo, Shofar, Guernica, and Cambridge Literary Review, among others. Tehran Children has been featured on BBC, C-Span, the NY Times, The Guardian and elsewhere, and is a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

Language and Literacy

C0866 Teaching and Learning Literacy in Adulthood

Prof. Barbara Gleason
Tuesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 2TU (53916)
HYBRID

This course will provide a survey of influential adult learning scholars and an introduction to the distinctive learning experiences and motivations of adult learners. Topics such as accelerated learning, remote learning, neurodivergence and alternatives to formal education will be explored, especially as they impact experiences of adult learners. We’ll read case studies of educational programs, e.g., Liberating Voices: Writing at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers by Karyn L. Hollis (2004) and Adult Literacy and American Identity: The Moonlight Schools and Americanization Programs by Samantha NeCamp (2014). And we’ll examine examples of contemporary adult reading/writing programs in community colleges, adult education, and organizations for incarcerated individuals (e.g., Free Minds Book Club and Writing Workshop. Each course participant will (1) read selected chapters from Creating Courses for Adults: Design for Living by Ralf St. Claire (2014) and then design a curriculum for a short writing/reading workshop; and (2) either interview and report on an adult educator or attend and report on the 2024 NYC ABE/ESOL Conference. Course texts will includeBack to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education by Mike Rose (2012) and scanned excerpts from books and journals.

Barbara Gleason is CCNY English Department professor and Director of the MA in Language and Literacy. Her scholarship focuses on basic writing, graduate education, writing curricula, adult literacy education, and writing program evaluation. She published The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Adult Learners with Kimme Nuckles in 2014 (Bedford St. Martin), and she is currently co-editing Basic Writing in the 21st Century with Laura Gray Rosendale (Peter Lang, 2024).

B8100 Second Language Acquisition

Prof. Missy Watson
Thursdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 4TU (28197)
HYBRID

This course examines the relationship between research on second language acquisition and the teaching of English language and literacy. We will explore seminal scholarship in both second language acquisition and second language writing, building foundational theoretical knowledge on how multilingual individuals learn and acquire English language and advanced literacy. We’ll investigate what aspects of the acquisition process are universal, as well as the sorts of environmental, social, and individual factors that influence variability in language learning. To gain pedagogical insights, we’ll explore the diverse educational needs and experiences of multilingual adolescents in K-6 settings, second language writers in college composition courses, and adult immigrants in ESL community programs. Our goal will be to highlight the implications of research to English language and composition instruction. Course texts may include David E. Freeman and Yvonne S. Freeman’s 3rd edition of Between Worlds: Access to Second Language Acquisition, Richard A. Orem’s Teaching Adult English Language Learners, and Dana R. Ferris’ Teaching College Writing to Diverse Student Populations.

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. Her recent publications can be found in the Journal of Basic Writing, Basic Writing e-Journal, Composition Forum, Composition Studies, the Journal of Second Language Writing, and Pedagogy.

CCNY Graduate Course Bulletin for English

The City College of New York, CUNY

Registration Overview

Notes on Registration

Courses

Additional Information

Spring 2024

Creative Writing

B3000 Fiction Workshop

B3000 Fiction Workshop

B3000 Fiction Workshop

B3200 Poetry Workshop

B3405 From Fiction to Scripts

B3600 Non-Fiction Workshop

B3610 Non-Fiction Workshop:
The Memoir II

Craft Seminars

B1983 Poetry Mentors

B1983 From Idea to Publication: A Deep Dive Into Genre Fiction

B3002 Craft of the Novel

B3405 From Fiction to Scripts

B3608 Craft of Creative Nonfiction

Literature

B1809 Virginia Woolf and
her World

B1812 Douglass and Melville:
Sailors, Slaves, and Whales

B1957 The Novel Now

B1974 Global Autobiography

B2015 Themes in Comparative Literature

Language and Literacy

C0866 Teaching and Learning Literacy in Adulthood

B8100 Second Language Acquisition

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CCNY Graduate Course Bulletin for English

The City College of New York, CUNY

Registration Overview

Notes on Registration

Courses

Additional Information

Spring 2024

Creative Writing

B3000 Fiction Workshop

B3000 Fiction Workshop

B3000 Fiction Workshop

B3200 Poetry Workshop

B3405 From Fiction to Scripts

B3600 Non-Fiction Workshop

B3610 Non-Fiction Workshop: The Memoir II

Craft Seminars

B1983 Poetry Mentors

B1983 From Idea to Publication: A Deep Dive Into Genre Fiction

B3002 Craft of the Novel

B3405 From Fiction to Scripts

B3608 Craft of Creative Nonfiction

Literature

B1809 Virginia Woolf and her World

B1812 Douglass and Melville: Sailors, Slaves, and Whales

B1957 The Novel Now

B1974 Global Autobiography

B2015 Themes in Comparative Literature

Language and Literacy

C0866 Teaching and Learning Literacy in Adulthood

B8100 Second Language Acquisition

B3610 Non-Fiction Workshop:
The Memoir II

B1809 Virginia Woolf and
her World

B1812 Douglass and Melville:
Sailors, Slaves, and Whales