Creative Writing
B3000 Fiction Workshop
Prof. Dalia Sofer
Mondays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 1FG (20772)
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. Soraya Palmer
Tuesdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 2RS (36954)
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 expected 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 short works by authors who embrace the unfamiliar such as Carmen Maria Machado, George Saunders, 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 one piece of their choice and one prompt-based piece. 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 who has worked to advocate for survivors of gender-based violence who are facing criminal charges related to their abuse. She has also spent time as a community organizer for young people who fights against gentrification and police brutality. 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. Salar Abdoh
Tuesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 2TU (20991)
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.
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. Kima Jones
Mondays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 1HJ (32607)
ONLINE
Course description is forthcoming.
Kima Jones is the founder of Jack Jones Literary Arts, a book publicity agency for black and brown writers, where, for five years, she worked as lead strategist on all publicity campaigns. In 2017, Kima founded the Jack Jones Literary Arts retreat—a two-week respite and book incubator for black and brown nonbinary and women writers. The Los Angeles Times called Kima “2018’s literary breakthrough” and “an important new voice on the national stage.” In 2019, Kima founded Culture, Too—a mentorship conference for black and brown cultural critics. The New York Times reported, “Kima Jones is taking the publishing industry by storm.”
In the spring of 2021, Kima Jones joined Triangle House Literary as an agent where she represents literary fiction, essay collections, memoir, hybrid texts, commercial fiction, poetry, speculative fiction and horror. Her clients include David Haynes and Rochelle Spencer.
Kima Jones is at work on her first book, Butch, a memoir, forthcoming from Knopf.
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.
This course is also available as Craft Seminar.
Craft Seminars
B1616 Bible, Myth and Contemporary Literature
Prof. Mark J. Mirsky
Thursdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 4TU (22220)
This course is designed to introduce graduate Creative Writing students, and students in the Literature M.A., to the way questions of good and evil, belief or non-belief in an afterlife, and the idea of the hero or heroine, are expressed both in contemporary fiction and major texts of the past. We will read chapters from major texts of Antiquity as well as from writers in the Twentieth Century. The course starts with the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, chapters of Homer’s Odyssey, then alternates with stories of the Polish writer, Bruno Schulz, readings from The Book of Genesis, The Book of Job, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and Max Frisch’s Homo Faber. Among the contemporary writers whose books are included are William Faulkner, Milan Kundera, Cynthia Ozick, James Baldwin, Bruno Schulz, Isak Dinesen, Jorge Luis Borges, and Donald Barthelme and Joyce Carol Oates. The latter will be a guest speaker during the semester.
The instructor requires the submission of two questions about the reading assigned for that week. At the end of the course students must submit either a creative response or critical paper on one or two of the books from the syllabus. This final paper should number between nine and ten pages or 2,500 words.
In addition to the books and stories that students are required to read, the instructor will provide further reading as background to the class discussion and speak about them. These will include pages from Hesiod’s Theogony, chapters from The Book of Samuel 2, (the story of King David and Absalom), The Gospel of Matthew, work by Flannery O’Connor, Marcel Proust, Miguel de Unamuno and Robert Musil in pdf or e-pub versions. These readings, however are optional.
Tentative Reading List:
The Epic of Gilgamesh, 2nd Norton Crit. Ed.
The Odyssey, Richard Lattimore translation
Genesis: King James Bible
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera (PDF)
The Book of Job, Edward Greenstein trans. digital or hardback
The Trial, Franz Kafka, Breon Mitchell trans.
“Sorrow Acre” Isak Dinesen (PDF)
Homo Faber, Max Frisch
Absalom, Absalom, William Faulkner
Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates.
Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges, trans. by Andrew Hurley
Sixty Stories of Donald Barthelme.
Professor 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 Literature.
B1988 From Stanza, to Body, to Country: Crafting Place in Poetry
Rosanna Young Oh
Thursdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 4TU (code: 48255)
The poet David St. John observed, “Place in writing often exists at that intersection
between the reality of place and one’s imagination about that place – what one believes, hopes, or imagines about the various possibilities of oneself in that place.” How does place, in other words, reveal more than the physical setting itself, and the writer’s interiority and obsessions? In this craft class, we will consider the ways in which writing about place enables intimate conversations with the self, communities (both personal and public), and history. Each week, we will read poems and supplementary texts that
foreground our discussions of place in a variety of contexts, such as food, architecture, nature writing, myth, and labor, to name a few.
Rosanna Young Oh is the author of The Corrected Version (Diode Editions, 2023),
which won the Diode Editions Book Prize and the North American Poetry Book Award. Her writing has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Graywolf Lab, RHINO Poetry, Literary Hub, and Rain Taxi Review of Books, among other publications. She has received support and residencies from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, the Hudson Valley Writing Center, the Vermont Studio Center, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the New York State Writers Institute. Her poetry was also the subject of a solo exhibition at the Queens Historical Society, where she was an artist-in-residence. A graduate of Yale (B.A.), the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins (M.F.A.), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (M.A.), Rosanna lives and writes on Long Island.
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 Literature.
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.
This course is also available as Creative Writing.
Literature
B1616 Bible, Myth and Contemporary Literature
Prof. Mark J. Mirsky
Thursdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 4TU (22220)
This course is designed to introduce graduate Creative Writing students, and students in the Literature M.A., to the way questions of good and evil, belief or non-belief in an afterlife, and the idea of the hero or heroine, are expressed both in contemporary fiction and major texts of the past. We will read chapters from major texts of Antiquity as well as from writers in the Twentieth Century. The course starts with the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, chapters of Homer’s Odyssey, then alternates with stories of the Polish writer, Bruno Schulz, readings from The Book of Genesis, The Book of Job, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and Max Frisch’s Homo Faber. Among the contemporary writers whose books are included are William Faulkner, Milan Kundera, Cynthia Ozick, James Baldwin, Bruno Schulz, Isak Dinesen, Jorge Luis Borges, and Donald Barthelme and Joyce Carol Oates. The latter will be a guest speaker during the semester.
The instructor requires the submission of two questions about the reading assigned for that week. At the end of the course students must submit either a creative response or critical paper on one or two of the books from the syllabus. This final paper should number between nine and ten pages or 2,500 words.
In addition to the books and stories that students are required to read, the instructor will provide further reading as background to the class discussion and speak about them. These will include pages from Hesiod’s Theogony, chapters from The Book of Samuel 2, (the story of King David and Absalom), The Gospel of Matthew, work by Flannery O’Connor, Marcel Proust, Miguel de Unamuno and Robert Musil in pdf or e-pub versions. These readings, however are optional.
Tentative Reading List:
The Epic of Gilgamesh, 2nd Norton Crit. Ed.
The Odyssey, Richard Lattimore translation
Genesis: King James Bible
The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera (PDF)
The Book of Job, Edward Greenstein trans. digital or hardback
The Trial, Franz Kafka, Breon Mitchell trans.
“Sorrow Acre” Isak Dinesen (PDF)
Homo Faber, Max Frisch
Absalom, Absalom, William Faulkner
Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
Beautiful Days, Joyce Carol Oates.
Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges, trans. by Andrew Hurley
Sixty Stories of Donald Barthelme.
Professor 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.
B1954 Race and Sexuality in the Narratives of James Baldwin
Prof. Gordon Thompson
Wednesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 3HJ (20584)
We will take a narrative or narratological approach to Baldwin’s various works. The class will explore how in his works seemingly private narrative tropes connect with larger or universal themes. This approach, in other words, is expected to reveal how patterns in the lives of the general reader of any demographic may connect with issues raised in Baldwin’s works even if, at first glance, such issues may appear limited to a single social group or individual. We will look at one of Baldwin’s plays, a couple of short stories, and four of his early novels, from Go Tell it on the Mountain to If Beale Street Could Talk. Questions of race, sexuality, and the pursuit of happiness will be discussed.
Dr. Gordon E. Thompson, a Professor of English and African American cultural studies at the City College of New York/CUNY, has degrees in English, African American Studies, and American Studies, from, respectively, the City College of New York and Yale University. He has taught at institutions such as Stanford and LSU, publishing two books on African American literature, The Assimilationist Impulse in Four African American Narratives and Black Music, Black Poetry. Along with conference presentations, he has written articles for American Literature, Callaloo, CLA, and African American Review. In addition to his lectures on classic African American poetry, the art and culture of the Harlem Renaissance, American literature, and the great books of world literature, he is currently circulating a draft of an article on the life and fiction of James Baldwin.
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 20th 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.
Language and Literacy
B8109 Digital Literacies
Prof. Missy Watson
Wednesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 3HJ (20990)
ONLINE
What are digital literacies and what does it mean to be “digitally literate” in the 21st century? What are our personal relationships and histories with digital writing tools and spaces, and how do our experiences influence our individualized learning? How is our teaching shaped by the digital, and how might we best support students in developing digital literacies?
In this course, students will examine these and other questions pertaining to digital literacy. Assigned readings will provide theories on how digital technologies alter the ways in which we compose, reach audiences, and teach composition today. But students will also have ample opportunities to research their own interests in digital literacies. Additionally, students will experiment composing across digital genres, such as through creating a digital writing/teaching portfolio, exploring free software like Google Drive and Canva, engaging social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter, utilizing teaching and presentation technologies like Screencastify and Prezi, and making GIFs, TikTok videos, memes, infographics, and more. No experience necessary! We will celebrate risk-taking, compositional failures, and technological blunders alongside applauding our successes and individualized advancements with digital composing. Practicing writing across platforms, genres, purposes, and rhetorical modes, we will aim to develop the technical skills and rhetorical dexterity needed for writing and teaching in the so-called Digital Age.
B8118 Basic Writing in the 21st Century: Scholars, Teachers, Learners
Prof. Barbara Gleason
Tuesdays 6:45 – 8:35pm
Section 2TU (20989)
HYBRID
BW students write the way they do not because they are slow or nonverbal, indifferent to or incapable of academic excellence, but because they are beginners.
Mina Shaughnessy, Errors & Expectations, 1977
[G]iven sufficient time and support, students who start at basic writing levels can and do succeed.
Marilyn Sternglass, “Students Deserve Enough Time to Prove That They Can Succeed,” Journal of Basic Writing, 1999
This course will introduce graduate students to basic writing studies, a field inspired by CUNY’s 1970 Open Admissions policy and still thriving in 2024. Despite basic writing course closures and academic controversies, colleges and universities continue to admit students needing academic support and sufficient time to achieve their goals. These students are often first-generation college students, immigrants, Gen 1.5 students, and working adults. Their motivations, experiences, and needs continue to serve as catalysts for innovative research and instruction, even as public college budgets are stretched to their limits. Among the legacy scholars whose work we’ll read are Mina Shaughnessy, Marilyn Sternglass, Victor Villanueva, Min-Zhan Lu, Mike Rose, Peter Dow Adams, and Keith Gilyard. Course participants will learn about the Council of Basic Writing, a professional organization that supports instructors, and they will survey scholarship published in edited books and in periodicals, e.g., Journal of Basic Writing, Basic Writing e-Journal, Composition Studies, and WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship. Emerging issues, instructional sites, and perspectives that we’ll explore include (1) translingual approaches to writing instruction; (2) multilingualism and multiliteracies; (3) remote teaching and digital learning; (4) alternative basic writing course structures; (5) writing curricula and pedagogy. We will pay very close attention to understanding why and how some students enroll in basic writing classes while other students do not. And, since most basic writing classes are offered at community colleges, writing course offerings in community colleges will be considered in depth.
Barbara Gleason is a CCNY English Department professor and Director of the MA in Language and Literacy. Her scholarship focuses on basic writing, adult learners, writing course curricula, and program evaluation. She published The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Adult Learners with Kimme Nuckles in 2014 (Bedford St. Martin’s Series in Macmillan). With Laura Gray-Rosendale, Barbara has recently edited a collection of 33 original essays for a book titled Basic Writing in the 21st Century (Peter Lang, forthcoming in 2024).
C0862 Practicum – Introduction to Teaching Composition
Prof. Missy Watson
Thursdays 4:45 – 6:35pm
Section 4RS (20988)
This course prepares graduate students to teach introductory college writing and humanities classes. We will study and practice approaches to teaching composition, course design, instructional strategies, writing assignments, writing assessment, classroom management. We also explore a range of approaches and technologies for teaching and learning in online environments, and we will examine print and online resources for college writing instructors. Additionally, we will consider how to tailor our teaching to best support a wide variety of students—with variable needs, motivations, abilities, and cultural, linguistic, racial, educational, and social backgrounds.
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.