B3200 Poetry Workshop

Prof. David Groff
Wednesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 3FG (32603)

Just as each of us humans has a distinctive voiceprint, so does every poet. In this workshop you’ll be encouraged to define and refine your particular poetic voice. We’ll use the reading aloud of our poems to make observations and insights about them that lead us into the adventure of revision. In class exercises and discussion, we’ll explore ways to liberate the imagination and take poems to the often-startling places they need to go, while writing in both received and organic poetic forms. We will also read poets of diverse nationalities, races, eras, genders, and aesthetics, to discover how we can better value their voices and find inspiration for our own poems.
In addition to writing and revising poems, we will explore where and how to send them out for publication, as part of a larger discussion about the voice of the emerging writer in a complex and rapidly changing American literary culture. Please be ready to submit a poem a week, do assigned reading of work by poets past and present, provide generous written responses to poems by other workshop participants, perform in-class and take-home poetry prompts, present the workshop with a written introduction to a poet you love, and create an end-of-semester chapbook of your poetry.

David Groff received his MFA from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. He also has an MA in English and Expository Writing from the University of Iowa. His books of poetry are Live in Suspense (Trio House Press, 2023),  Clay (Trio House Press, 2013), and Theory of Devolution (University of Illinois Press, 2002). He has co-edited the anthologies Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners (University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), and Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (Alyson, 2010).

B3600 Non-Fiction Workshop

Prof. Irvin Weathersby, Jr.
Mondays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 1HJ (32607)
ONLINE

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, a memoir-in-essays forthcoming in January 2025 that mediates on expressions of racism in art, museums, and public space in New Orleans and throughout the world. He has written for Guernica, Esquire, The Atlantic, EBONY, and other outlets. He is a 2022 Mellon/ACLS Community College Faculty Fellow. His work has also 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 and in the MFA program at St. Joseph’s University.

B4501 Special Topics:
Screenwriting Workshop

Prof. Marc Palmieri
Mondays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 1FG (32606)

The good news is, these days one can move a script from page to screen faster and cheaper than ever before. While the possibility of selling a script to Hollywood is always real (seriously- it does happen), it is exciting and motivating to consider that thanks to how far digital technology has come, seeing one’s own work on the independent film circuit, festivals and the internet can happen without someone giving you lots and lots of money. Students will develop a screenplay for a film, television or the web. All are welcome to work in other variations such as television scripts and web series scripts. We will examine the storytelling possibilities of the form, its advantages and challenges – and no doubt stumble on important things we didn’t expect. Students will also offer critiques and participate in feedback discussions of classmates’ work.

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 an assistant professor in the School of Liberal Arts at Mercy College. Credits include: Miramax Films’ Telling You (screenplay), The Thing (webseries), 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 as Craft Seminar.

B2046 Taste of the Archive: African American Literature and Oral History as Praxis

Prof. Janée Moses
Thursdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 4RS (20994)

This seminar, which begins and ends with Brent Hayes Edwards’s essay, “The Taste of the Archive” bends genre with a simultaneous study of narrative, oral history, and archive to highlight aspects of the past that are “hard to pin down” or elusive. In the first part of the course, students will explore fiction and non-fiction texts in the African American literary canon that deal with issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, and belonging to highlight contradictory truths that “can’t quite be explained away,” and consider how methods of African American literature can be applied to narrative-based oral history projects that embrace, rather than bridle, complicated truths about our shared pasts.
In the second part of the course, students will merge African American literary methods, archival practices, and oral history methods and theory to create their oral history projects. These projects will include the development of oral narratives that move from the realm of spoken word to polished manuscripts. In addition to the manuscript, students will analyze their oral history practice by writing methodology statements that expand the field of oral history.

Janée Moses, Assistant Professor of English, specializes in African American Literature, 20th-century black expressive cultures, and oral history theory and methodology. Her current book project is an intertextual study of black women’s life writing and performances that combines extraordinary pursuits and ordinary experiences to highlight the fullness of their lives. Her writing appears in publications including Rejoinder and BOMB Magazine. An established oral historian, Moses serves as the Director of BOMB Magazine’s Oral History Project, preserving the narratives of black visual artists in America.

This course is also available as Craft Seminar.

B2140 Immigration Literature: Place ­– Language – Identity

Prof. Grazyna Drabik
Tuesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 2TU (21431)

The immigrant experience has been well represented in American literature since the beginning of the 20^th c. Numerous narratives, in fiction and non-fiction, chart the dynamics, variations, and stages of the migration experience. They tend to highlight the Ur-concept of the “American Dream” and the process of “assimilation/ acculturation” by which immigrants “become Americans,” espousing the promise of a new life. The leading themes of the immigration literature are clashes of culture; forging new individual and communal identities; conflicting loyalties that shape lives led between the adopted homeland and country of origin; redefinition of gender roles and of inter-generational relations; and the transformative role of education.
Important writers such as Willa Cather, Claude McKay, Frank McCourt, Paule Marshall, Sandra Cisneros, and Julie Otsuko have contested and enriched the American literary canon in significant ways addressing these important themes. Our graduate seminar recognizes the riches of this classic ethnic-based (or place of origin-based) approach but also notes the need to extend the discussion further, in an open-ended and exploratory manner. 
The course will focus on the dialectics of place, language, and identity, as highlighted by the writers, our contemporaries, who speak with the “forked-tongue,” writing from the perspective of a bi-cultural, marginal, and/or transnational experience. They are particularly attuned to the impact of massive displacement and to contradictions of ongoing cultural transformations. Their novels and short stories, plays, poems and personal essays do not fit comfortably within established versions of national histories, as they confront the complexity of cross-cultural encounters and the importance of transnational ties.
Our readings include novels by Cristina García, Stuart Dybek and Teju Cole; a play by Martyna Majok; short stories by Jhumpa Lahiri; and selection of poems and essays by Dunya Mikhail, Maxine Hong Kingston, Czeslaw Milosz, Edwidge Danticat and Aleksander Hemon.
The seminar is demanding in terms of the amount and diversity of reading materials, but leaves space for individual special interests, offering a wide range of choices for the term project.

Grazyna Drabik teaches World Humanities & Immigration Literature at City College and a seminar on Arts in New York at Macaulay Honors College, CUNY. Her areas of special interest are cross-cultural exchanges and challenges of literary translation. She has recently published the translation of Andrzej Bobkowski’s Wartime Notebooks: France, 1940- 1944 (Yale University Press, 2018) and is currently preparing a large selection of poems by Brazilian poet Adélia Prado, to be published in Polish.

C0910 The Short Story in the Americas and Beyond

Prof. Lyn Di Iorio
Tuesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 2RS (20987)

In this course we explore the modern short story, a beautiful yet highly underrated form. Our approach focuses on both the genre tendencies of the short story since it began in the 19th century in the Americas and its technical aspects. We will follow the idea that there have been two genre tendencies in short story practice. The first involves uncanny, mysterious, magical and haunted happenings. The first modern short stories by Americas-based authors, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, were in this mysterious-haunted category. In Latin America, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar adapted that tendency. Mariana Enriquez and Carmen Maria Machado are contemporary pursuers of it. We will read these writers and others in this category. The other genre tendency is decidedly non-magical. These realist pieces often focus on the psychology of characters who are outsiders because of class, race, gender, queerness, youth, identity or psychic bent. Practitioners of this tendency include Anton Chekhov, Ernest Hemingway, Junot Díaz, and Otessa Moshfegh. We will also have to contend with the fact that some authors seem to write in both categories. Lauren Groff and Bryan Washington come to mind and of course we will read them.
In discussing the short story, we must also address its technical aspects. Among other elements, we will consider protagonists and their desire lines; the way story conflict escalates; the importance of good endings; and the use of sensuous and precise details. I will also probably devote class days to discussions about violence, animals, and children in the short story.
The main writing assignments will be a final research paper about stories read in class and an essay delivered as an oral report about a short story to be discussed in class. But we will also have extra fun with one or two creative writing exercises. I urge creative writers to write a short story as their final project!

Lyn Sandín Di Iorio is a fiction writer and scholar. She is a recent recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fiction Fellowship and a Rifkind Center Faculty Fellowship for her book-in-progress: Hurricanes and Other Stories. Her short fiction has appeared most recently in The Kenyon Review and Big Other: Puerto Rican Writers Folio: A Hauntology and a story was named “Distinguished Story” in Best American Short Stories 2021. She also wrote Outside the Bones, a finalist for the 2012 John Gardner Fiction Prize and Killing Spanish, a book about Latinx literature and identity. She graduated from Harvard University and Stanford University’s Creative Writing Program, and received her Ph.D. from UC-Berkeley. She teaches creative writing and literature classes at CCNY and CUNY Graduate Center.