2026-2027 Catalog

CRWR 10206. Fiction Workshop I. 100 Units.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading fiction, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore characterization, point of view, plot, scene work, and worldbuilding. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of a Fiction Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Fiction Workshop II.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 30206

CRWR 10306. Poetry Workshop I. 100 Units.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading poetry, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore precise imagery, unpredictable figuration, intentional musicality, the use of line and stanza, and the relationship between form and content. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of Poetry Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Poetry Workshop II.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 30306

CRWR 10406. Literary Nonfiction Workshop I. 100 Units.

This creative writing course, focused on the art of writing and reading literary nonfiction, addresses the fundamentals of craft. Through creative writing exercises and assignments, students will explore narrative, voice, imagery, and the relationships between ethics and art, form and content, and the self and the subject matter. Students can expect to read deeply, respond creatively, and to engage with their peers in a workshop setting. This course is designed both for writers with a passion for the genre and those who are interested in gaining experience. Successful completion of Literary Nonfiction Workshop I is a prerequisite for enrollment in Literary Nonfiction Workshop II.

Instructor(s): Staff     Terms Offered: Autumn Spring Winter
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 30406

CRWR 12112. Reading as a Writer: Chicago "City on the Remake" 100 Units.

This course invites writers to reconsider the influence of Chicago's public spaces on artistic impulse. In particular this quarter, we will examine aspects and depictions of a "fantastic Chicago." If Chicago is a city that "dreams itself," what do its spaces of violence and environmental degradation say about that dream? Students will analyze and explore Chicago writers' work in prose and poetry, then develop their own creative responses, building connections to adopted critical approaches. To these ends, we will examine work by writers including Daniel Borzutzky, Barry Pearce, Sterling Plumpp, Ed Roberson, and Ava Tomasula y Garcia, as well as the city's rich legacies in documentary and the visual arts.

Instructor(s): Garin Cycholl     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CHST 12112, AMER 12112

CRWR 12136. Reading as a Writer: Adaptation as Form. 100 Units.

The main goal of this course will be to understand the reasons, traditions and methods behind the practice of literary adaptations. From Joyce Carol Oates's "Blue Bearded Lover," to Anne Sexton's "Cinderella", to Angela Carter's "Wolf-Alice" and Marina Carr's "By the Bog of Cats," there are stories that continue to resonate through the centuries, and others that are made to resonate through the labor of new story tellers. Each text will be explored both independently and within the context of its adaptive genealogy. Students will be expected to read each text carefully, come prepared to actively participate in class discussion and respond to both academic and creative writing prompts based on assigned texts and class lecture.

Instructor(s): Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

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

Some of the most compelling pieces of writing across all genres deal with, and often feature, the concept of Evil at their center. Whether they address it directly through a character, like Bulgakov's Professor Woland in Master and Margarita, or as a concept in Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. Whether the narratives are anchored in the concreteness of real crime, like in Capote's In Cold Blood, and sometimes they revel in the abstraction of sin, as in Milton's Paradise Lost, they always dare to ask, "What and why is evil?" Why might character cower at the thought of that which awaits us in the dark, like in HP Lovecraft's Dagon, and why might a real 19-year-old woman in Bute, Montana anticipate it with bated breath, like in Mary MacLane's I Await the Devil's Coming. This course is designed to explore this question alongside authors who devoted their lives to understanding the role of evil in literature and life, to contemplating its necessity, its appeal, its frivolity, and its betrayal. The course will be divided into three sections, each section devoted to a specific genre during which two to three texts will be explored, discussed, and analyzed in class, and at the end of which one analysis paper will be due, culminating in a final analytical and creative piece.

Instructor(s): Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

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

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

Instructor(s): Stephanie Soileau     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CHST 12147

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

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

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

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

Like the monsters it so often portrays, Gothic fiction is at once a transgressive, seductive, and mutable genre-blending horror, mystery, and romance and using supernatural elements to blur the line between realism and fantasy. It's amid this ambiguity that the Gothic is at its most evocative and visceral, powerfully dramatizing our encounters with the irrational and inexplicable in nature, in others, and in ourselves. This Arts Core course will focus on these psychologically provocative aspects of the genre. As we read Gothic works from different eras and cultures, we'll examine what these stories of extraordinary conflict might reveal about the horrors and mysteries of ordinary life-of our hidden desires, anxieties, and pathologies. Crucially, we'll approach them from the writer's perspective and consider what the Gothic enables a writer to explore and express that other genres may not. With this in mind, students will write their "Gothic Scenes" throughout the quarter, applying their own intimate Gothic lens to elusive encounters from their past.

Instructor(s): Vu Tran     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

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

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

Instructor(s): Julie Iromuanya     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): GNSE 12159

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

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

Instructor(s): Nick Twemlow     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

CRWR 12170. Reading as a Writer: Literary Tyrants. 100 Units.

This course explores the characteristics and features of non-democratic regimes and tyrannies as they are reflected in literature and film: how and why they come about, what sustains them, why some resist them and others do not, and how/why they fall. Analyzing films, novels, and articles left in the wake of dictatorships like those of Julius Caesar, Hitler, and Rafael Trujillo, we will investigate the effects of absolute authority, how ordinary people react to repression, and the shaky transition from despotism to freedom. We will consider a diverse range of writers including Suetonius, Shakespeare, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hannah Arendt, and George Orwell. Assignments include critical essays, creative exercises, and a final creative piece.

Instructor(s): Valer Popa     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

CRWR 12171. Intro to Genres: True Crime Fiction. 100 Units.

From 19th century penny dreadfuls to the more recent explosion of podcasts and documentaries, True Crime has long endured as a popular narrative genre. Yet, despite the genre's popularity, there is contention around its potential exploitation of victims, romanticization of violence, and lurid positioning as "entertainment." This course aims to critically examine the narrative tropes, appeals, and language of the true crime genre by engaging with works of True Crime fiction, including both works of fiction based on "true" events (such as Underneath by Lily Hoang, Butter by Asako Yuzuki, and My Men by Victoria Kielland) and entirely fictionalized works that develop themselves as convincing True Crime facsimiles (such as Defiance by Carole Maso, My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite, and Death in Her Hands by Ottessa Moshfegh). The course will include reading discussions, short weekly written responses, and a project wherein students compare and contrast two alternate "versions" of a True Crime story.

Instructor(s): Meghan Lamb     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

CRWR 12180. Reading as a Writer: Losers. 100 Units.

It's very boring to talk about winners," Umberto Ecco once said. "The real literature always talks about losers." In this class, we shall embrace all manner of failures, no-accounts, and deadbeats, those unlikely 'heroes' around which good fiction often rotates, considering how they intrigue us with their flaws and failings, but also how they can present pitfalls at the levels of plot (lack of agency), tone (reward vs. punishment), and reader sympathy. Through an array of short fiction, as well as films and a hybrid novel, this course aims to uncover the ways narrative craft can infuse stories about shiftless and inept protagonists with a sense of curation, poignancy, and meaning. Students will also attempt their own short story versions of "loser lit," to be workshopped by the class. Expectations will, of course, be very low.

Instructor(s): Baird Harper     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

CRWR 12181. Intro to Genres: Graphic Design. 100 Units.

This studio course introduces students to essential graphic design skills and concepts. Through a series of hands-on assignments, we'll explore how graphic information-type, image, composition, and layout-shapes the way we communicate and understand the world. You will experiment with accessible tools like photocopiers and laser printers, and work through the phases of the design process: from research, conception and ideation, to sketching, evaluation and the development of form, to final execution and production.

Instructor(s): Danielle Aubert     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 20038, MADD 22181

CRWR 12182. Intro to Genres: Parody. 100 Units.

Beginning writers are often told to imitate 'great authors' to discover their voices. One way to reconcile imitation with originality is to copy works from literary history with a comic touch. In this course, students will satirize poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from the history of Western literature to learn how art works. Parodying Stein's portraiture illuminates the workings of literary mimesis; satirizing Lispector's proliferating points of view adumbrates perspectival horizons in narrative; satirizing Tanizaki's praise of shadows illustrates the mechanics of nonfiction polemic. Students will write imitations of literary works and a final mock-academic essay on parody and mimesis.

Instructor(s): Srikanth Reddy     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

CRWR 12183. Intro to Genres: The Grammars of Narrative. 100 Units.

Ever since humans were drawing on cave walls, the ways in which we communicate meaning through stories has been evolving. This class will look at three forms of narrative-fiction, narrative poetry, and film-and explore their "grammars" (i.e. the modes, tools, elements of craft, etc. that a particular genre uses to convey meaning or achieve certain effects). How does film (a visual medium that offers a voyeuristic experience) tell a story differently than does fiction (which invites the reader to participate more in an act of shared imagination), differently than poetry (which condenses a story to its essences)? How is meaning or emotion conveyed differently through each? How do different grammars influence the effects they achieve? Students will look at and discuss various works of fiction, poetry, and film, read critical and craft-oriented texts, complete weekly reading responses, and write creative exercises. A hybrid creative/analytical paper will be due at the end of the course.

Instructor(s): Augustus Rose     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

CRWR 12184. Reading as a Writer: Violence and Comedy. 100 Units.

According to Mel Brooks, "Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die." It isn't easy to argue with Brooks, yet there exist numerous wildly successful marriages between violence and comedy for which his maxim doesn't fully account. In this class, we will explore such marriages-works by Helen Garner, Juan Pablo Villalobos, Laura Vasquez, Daniil Kharms, Franz Kafka, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Isaac Babel, Ralph Ellison, and more-and we'll attempt to better understand their success. In the process, we'll seek to develop a clearer sense of the twisting border that separates comedic from tragic violence. Students will read the assigned works closely, discuss them with rigor, and write violent and comic fiction of their own.

Instructor(s): Adam Levin     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.

CRWR 14700. Creative Writing. 100 Units.

Building directly on best practices developed at the College over the spring quarter, this remote learning workshop helps students find a voice and develop a sustainable writer's practice through a series of creative exercises in fiction, essay, and poetry. By the end of the course, each student will have revised and completed several significant pieces of writing. This course integrates lively videoconferences with sustaining written feedback, collaborations, and rich readings and discussions in creative literature. We'll toggle between full-class discussions and small group work, leveraging the small group to foster strong working relationships across time zones. Like writers throughout history, we'll inspire and push each other by correspondence, and we'll celebrate the ways in which writing is the long-distance medium par excellence. Daily sessions will include one or more live conferences, scheduled written exercises with rapid instructor feedback, and structured online discussions. In directed exercises you'll practice classic and experimental techniques, and in longer pieces you'll create original work, to be revised after intensive peer workshopping. Students will have the opportunity to meet several working writers through live conferences with the class. Students write in and out of class-time hours and complete nightly reading assignments. Active class participation is required.

CRWR 17020. Family Sagas: Women's Writing from Africa and the African Diaspora. 100 Units.

When asked why she writes, Jamaica Kincaid once said, "I liked to talk about my mother, her family, my life, what happened to me…and I could only get to them in this way." This English and Creative Writing seminar focuses on family sagas: multigenerational stories of intimacy, friction, and survival in women's writing of Africa and the African diaspora. Reading novels and poetry, we will come to understand how Black women writers have remembered or imagined family. The works we will read take place against the backdrops of slavery, colonialism, war, intimate violence, nationalism, and migration. Yet, they also portray the rhythms and joys of everyday life. Throughout the quarter, we will explore the imaginative techniques these authors use to engage the senses, both the mundane and the fantastical. This body of work will also be a guide for our own creative writing, in which we will mine our own family stories, meditating on family heirlooms, portraits, and more. In addition to our classroom work, we will engage the study and craft of family sagas in the city of Chicago: activities may include visiting libraries, bookstores, and theatres, and special visits from writers. (Fiction, 20th/21st)

Instructor(s): Julie Iromuanya & Kaneesha Parsard     Terms Offered: Winter
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 25630, GNSE 20160, RDIN 25630, SIGN 25630

CRWR 20203. Creative Writing Studio: Research and World-Building in Fiction. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Augustus Rose     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40203

CRWR 20217. Creative Writing Studio: Elements of Style. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Julie Iromuanya     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40217

CRWR 20232. Creative Writing Studio: Narrative Influence. 100 Units.

T. S. Eliot once said, "good writers borrow, great writers steal." In this studio class we will look at modeling as a springboard for creativity. What makes a piece of writing original? Is it possible to borrow a famous writer's story structure, theme, even their voice, yet produce something wholly original? Do writers influence each other through language? Technical prowess? Use of plot? Place? All of the above? With special emphasis on James Joyce and Anton Chekhov--whose technical innovation has influenced pretty much every writer of the last hundred years--we'll spend time looking at both the immitated and the immitators, including Raymond Carver, George Saunders, I. B. Singer, Shirley Jackson, Edward P. Jones, Jhumpa Lahiri, Yiyun Li and many more. Students will write short literary essays, but the emphasis will be on writing and modeling. Ultimately we'll end with a short workshop.

Instructor(s): Sharon Pomerantz     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40232

CRWR 20240. Creative Writing Studio: Crafting Historical Fiction. 100 Units.

How do we dramatize history? How do we recapture the past in a compelling way, or make it speak to the urgent questions of our present? In this class, we will explore ways to craft fiction around historical events. How should we conduct our research? How do we effectively position our characters within the wider struggles of the past? And how much are we allowed to deviate from the written record when writing our fiction? Readings will include Alessandro Manzoni, Georg Lukacs, Edward P. Jones, Olga Tocarczuk, and Alejo Carpentier. Meanwhile, assignments will include critical reading responses, creative exercises, and a final portfolio piece.

Instructor(s): Valer Popa     Terms Offered: Autumn. If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40240

CRWR 20241. Creative Writing Studio: Internet Literature. 100 Units.

From Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts to Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This, there has been a recent surge of popular fiction that not only employs online-based communication as a narrative device, but explores the Internet as a new field of literature: a field with its own rhetoric, network of referents, and unique poetics. In this Writing Studio, we will explore the evolution of Internet Literature from early Internet-focused works-such as Dennis Cooper's Sluts and Jeanette Winterson's The PowerBook-to contemporary works such as Olivia Laing's Crudo, Esther Yi's Y/N, and B.R. Yeager's Amygdalatropolis. We will also hone our craft understanding of Internet Literature through writing exercises that engage with Internet forms, including social media, message boards, and various iterations of AI. The course will include reading discussions, short weekly written responses, and workshopping of original student work.

Instructor(s): Meghan Lamb     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40241

CRWR 20242. Creative Writing Studio: The Comic Muse: Humor in Poetry. 100 Units.

Humor is often treated as poetry's guilty pleasure - the thing serious poets do between serious poems. This seminar rejects that premise entirely. From the ribald fabliaux of medieval verse to the deadpan surrealism of Russell Edson, from Swift's savage ironies to Natalie Shapero's sardonic restraint, comic poetry has always been doing the most sophisticated work: puncturing authority, negotiating pain, and telling the truth at an angle. We will study humor not as decoration but as epistemology - a way of knowing and saying what other modes cannot reach. Topics include: the rhetoric of the joke; bathos and anticlimax as poetic structure; the long tradition of parody and mock-epic; nonsense verse and its philosophical undertow; the relationship between comedy and elegy; and the political uses of irony and satire. Students will read widely, write critically, and compose original comic poems in a range of modes."

Instructor(s): Suzanne Buffam     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40242

CRWR 20243. Creative Writing Studio: Image + Text. 100 Units.

This studio course will focus on literary texts, visual art, and time-based works that revel in the intersection of image + text. Students will explore a range of examples with the aim of discussing the historical context of the intersection of image and text, considering the works of contemporary practitioners, and creating several creative works that students will discuss in workshop. Some questions: What is the difference between conceptual text-informed visual art and, say, poetry, if any? How do we think of protest via the intersection of text + image? How do cartoons and graphic novels enter the discussion? Think of this course as a recent history of your current visual culture.

Instructor(s): Nicholas Twemlow     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40243, MADD 20243

CRWR 20244. Creative Writing Studio: Writing About the Arts. 100 Units.

A course in which students learn close looking skills by going to a variety of galleries and museums in Chicago, and try out writing a range of written forms, including lyric essays, reviews, wall texts, catalog essays, artists' statements and interviews. Readings from recent exhibition reviews to long-form criticism, creative history to ekphrastic poetry to personal essay.

Instructor(s): Rachel Cohen     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 20244, CRWR 40244, ARTH 20244, ARTH 30244, ARTV 30244

CRWR 20245. Creative Writing Studio: Poetics of Permeability and Fluidity. 100 Units.

This studio invites students to explore the way literary language blurs barriers between self and other, enacting a poetics of permeability or fluidity in various ways, including figurative language, identity, and trance-based performance rituals. Texts will range widely, including film, cave art, narrative fiction, poetry, and performance work by Werner Herzog, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Haruki Murakami, Antonin Artaud, Ariana Reines, Yoko Ono, Will Alexander, Kim Hyesoon, John Ashbery and Jerome Rothenberg. Students will be able to respond with creative texts in various genres.

Instructor(s): Nathan Hoks     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40245

CRWR 20246. Creative Writing Studio: Sublime, Beauty, & Horror. 100 Units.

This workshop-centered course invites writers to navigate the "sublime" in poetry and prose, that boundary between beauty and horror in contemporary writing. What defines a moment of insight or the impulse of horror? How does the sublime offer means of engaging the boundary between the human and nonhuman worlds in the present moment? What formal play has previously explored these boundaries? To these ends, we will examine work by writers including Angela Carter, Xi Chuan, Lauren Groff, Mona Susan Power, and Dubravka Ugresic.

Instructor(s): Garin Cycholl     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40246

CRWR 20247. Creative Writing Studio: Joan Didion's California. 100 Units.

Across the several decades of her career, Joan Didion continually grappled with the myths, realities, facts and illusions of her home state in essays and memoirs. Though she lived in New York City for the last 35 years of her life, some of her most indelible work focuses our attention on images of the so-called "Golden West": the hippie movement in San Franciso in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem," the Manson Family murder trial in "The White Album," the Donner Party in Where I Was From, as well as Patty Hearst, Alcatraz, the Reagans and wildfire season, to name a few of many. In this class, we'll study several of her California-centered works and write our personal essays about place, history, our moment in time and where we are from. We'll also attempt to understand the hallmarks of her prose style, her enduring appeal, the issue of her celebrity, among other possibilities.

Instructor(s): Ryan Van Meter     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40247

CRWR 20248. Creative Writing Studio: Creative Research (or, The Numinous Particulars) 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Stephanie Soileau     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40248

CRWR 20249. Creative Writing Studio: How to Build a Literary Ecosystem from Scratch. 100 Units.

Literary ecosystems that support underrepresented voices often require strategic interventions to create robustness. This Studio course will use the South Asian Literary Translation Project (SALT) as a case study for a hands-on examination of these kinds of interventions. Close reading of translations that have emerged from SALT will help equip us with the tools to read literature in translation from any language, while focusing on specific strategies used by translators to bring literature from this particular region into English. These readings will also serve as lenses to closely examine the interventions that helped bring these works into being: literary mentorships, subventions to publishers, reader's reports, translation workshops, travel and publicity grants, community building, and awards. We will discuss with writers, translators, publishers, and literary nonprofits how these discrete features work in conversation to nourish a given literary ecosystem; what's been working with SALT, and the challenges it faces; performance indicators that can be used to judge success. The final student portfolio will include two reader's reports and a 1000-word blueprint for a project to address the needs of a particular literary ecosystem.

Instructor(s): Jason Grunebaum     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40249

CRWR 20250. Means of Production I: Contemporary Literary Publishing (Books) 100 Units.

This course will introduce students to the aesthetic criteria, cultural and institutional infrastructures, and collaborative practices of literary evaluation in the making of contemporary American poetry. How does a manuscript of poetry 'make it' onto the list of a literary publisher, and from there to the bookshelves of the Seminary Coop? How do individual readers and editorial collectives imagine the work of literary assessment and aesthetic judgment in our time? We will begin the course with a survey of new directions in Anglophone poetry as preparation for an intensive editorial practicum in the evaluation and assessment of literary manuscripts in the second half of the term. Visits with literary editors and authors will offer students opportunities to learn about the field of contemporary literary publishing. Course work will include reviewing and evaluating manuscript submissions to the Phoenix Poets book series at the University of Chicago Press. (Poetry)

Instructor(s): Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy     Terms Offered: Autumn
Equivalent Course(s): ENGL 20250

CRWR 20251. Creative Writing Studio: Compress Warp Kill. 100 Units.

All excellent fiction is made of strong sentences, strong strings of words that tempt us to linger even as they push us toward the next strong string. This class will focus on how to make such sentences. We'll read exemplary fiction by various authors-Garielle Lutz, Lydia Davis, Gayl Jones, Paul Beatty, J.D. Salinger, Jose Emilio Pacheco, and more-and discover and discuss how their sentences operate. We'll do exercises, in and out of class, to master our intentions. We will read student sentences and take them apart. We will force student sentences to box and do yoga and sleep and sing opera. We will smash them up and twist them to find their strengths. If they have no strengths, we will put them to death, and feed their cold bones to other, better sentences in need of more calcium. We will find all the fun and have it.

Instructor(s): Adam Levin     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40251

CRWR 20252. Creative Writing Studio: Constructing with Fragments. 100 Units.

Writing is information in sequence but how is that information generated and subsequently sequenced? This studio course is interested in the process of synthesizing larger pieces of narrative writing from smaller, non-narrative components. The process will begin with students generating 'fragments', loose bits of seemingly unconnected prose, poetry, found language, bullet points, and raw information. Students will go on to iteratively draft until they complete one or several emergent narrative works. In this course, students will study fairy tales, oral traditions such as the Arabian Nights, Roland Barthes' Hermeneutic Code, graphic novels such as The Barn Owl's Wondrous Capers by Sarnath Banerjee, and authors such as Tim O'Brien, Sayaka Murata, and Ray Bradbury.

Instructor(s): Raghav Rao     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40252

CRWR 20253. Creative Writing Studio: Sounding Out Voice. 100 Units.

How do we hear the voice of a text when we're reading in another language? What makes a voice intrinsically itself? And where can we locate those qualities in the language that the voice speaks in? This workshop explores what translators read for when constructing a narrative or poetic voice in English. Students will select a long-form literary text to translate, and we will work through the drafting process by breaking the text down into short extracts that we will close-read together each week in class. In doing so, we'll listen through the translation for evidence of how the source wants to sound, in order to discern its voice, its tendencies, and how it behaves in language. Our own translation work will be accompanied by assigned readings that represent a range of contemporary world literature in translation, paying attention to what the translator does with English to sketch a cohesive voice. We'll build toward the polished translation of a short prose text or a selection of poems, which students will submit as part of a final portfolio, along with a translator's note that provides critical commentary on their reading of the source text and their treatment of it in translation.

Instructor(s): Anne Janusch     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40253

CRWR 20254. Creative Writing Studio: Getting Started in Translation. 100 Units.

Many creative writers who are conversant in more than one language find that literary translation offers an affinity mode of writing. Employing skills that span language study, literary analysis, and creative writing, literary translation offers young writers a way of inhabiting other voices, sharpening their writing without the burden of invention, and reading far beyond the contemporary American canon. But how do you get started translating? This studio will offer students the space to explore their sensibilities as readers so that they may discover new international literature that speaks to them as writers. We'll start with research activities that seek to survey current literary practices in the language or world area that each student is interested in. Then, we'll read our way into a few potential projects by bringing in tools of critical reception, close reading, and literary analysis. Finally, we'll embark on the first phases of translation praxis through language work and creative imagining in English. Students will leave the studio with an invested project that they may continue independently or within the structure of a translation workshop.

Instructor(s): Anne Janusch     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 40254

CRWR 22113. Fiction Workshop II: The Love Story. 100 Units.

This workshop approaches "the love story" as both a narrative genre and a foundational subject for all kinds of stories. As we read a selection of unique and provocative works involving love, we'll ask: What distinguishes a good love story from a bad one-and, for that matter, a great from a good one? As writers, how might we deepen the genre's most potent tropes while avoiding its most devitalizing clichés? How does exploring romantic love uniquely enable us to write not only about other kinds of love but about the most elusive subjects in life? Underlying all these questions is one that each student should ask for themself throughout the quarter: What am I truly writing about when I write about love? Through focused writing exercises and workshops of their own love stories, students will work toward answering these questions and writing as honestly and convincingly as possible about this most examined of human experiences.

Instructor(s): Vu Tran     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42113

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

Beginning a novel can be daunting, but this class aims to remove some of the mystery behind the process and get students started on that long journey into the unknown. We will examine the early stages of developing and writing a novel: choosing the POV and narrative voice, establishing the setting, developing the main characters and the dynamics between them, setting up the conflicts and seeding themes, choosing areas to research, etc. As a class we will read, break down, and discuss the openings of a handful of published novels as you work on your own opening chapters, which will be workshopped as part of the course. Students are expected to submit two opening chapters of a novel-in-progress (and a revision of one) as well read and critique chapters from your peers for workshop.

Instructor(s): Augustus Rose     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory. Please contact the instructor to be added to the waitlist for the option to enroll during add/drop. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42128

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

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

Instructor(s): Benjamin Hoffman     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42132

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

A story's endpoint determines its meaning, yet the history of a life can be covered in a sentence, a few pages, or seven volumes. How do writers make these choices? We'll look at different ways to handle narrative time, paying special attention to related building blocks like direct and summary scene, setting, point of view, prose rhythm and tense. More specifically, we'll examine categories of time, including classic/straightforward, flashback, compression, slowed time, Swiss cheese time, and fabulist time. We'll read and discuss long stories that have the sweep of novels alongside those that say everything in a single scene. You'll be encouraged to experiment with time in writing exercises, story assignments and revision. *NOTE: Undergraduate students are expected to have taken Fiction Workshop I (CRWR 10206) before enrolling in this class.

Instructor(s): Sharon Pomerantz     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42135

CRWR 22142. Fiction Workshop II: The Fantastical. 100 Units.

Increasingly, the fantastical creeps into popular narratives, a rupture in the fabric of otherwise ordinary reality. This workshop will focus on the fantastical in contemporary literature and culture, and the logistical issues and questions that commonly arise around it. We will look at the role of fantastical in puncturing the veil of "realism." What is the fantastical doing that can't be done through other narrative techniques? How does the narrative metabolize this disruption? How should the fantastical be tempered by the mundane? Students for this course should not only have an interest in speculative fiction, but should have already made some efforts within this mode. Note that this course does not focus exclusively on fantasy or science fiction, though there may be some genre overlap. Come prepared to engage with free-associative creative exercises. Readings may include works by George Saunders, Jan Jamil Kochai, and Rachel Ingalls. *NOTE: Undergraduate students are expected to have taken Fiction Workshop I (CRWR 10206) before enrolling in this class.

Instructor(s): Ling Ma     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42142

CRWR 22156. Fiction Workshop II: The Narrative Personality. 100 Units.

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

Instructor(s): Sharon Pomerantz     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 42156

CRWR 23145. Poetry Workshop II: The Sonnet Sequence. 100 Units.

The sonnet form has a unique place in Western poetics--as a site for affective expression, formal exploration, and poetic narration. This advanced poetry workshop takes the historical tradition of the sonnet sequence--from the early modern period to contemporary avant-gardes across a range of languages and regions--as a model for serial lyric form. Authors will range from Petrarch, Dante, Sidney, and Shakespeare to Tonya Foster, Ed Roberson, and Wanda Coleman. (Please note students will *not* be required to write sonnet sequences!) Writing exercises will explore questions of lineation, recursion, seriality, and poetic narratology.

Instructor(s): Srikanth Reddy     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 43145

CRWR 24016. Literary Nonfiction Workshop II: Other People's Stories. 100 Units.

Many are read to as children, some even learn to read before they show any interest in speaking, but most-regardless of language, background or nationality-will first experience stories by overhearing them. Most children's first literature, in fact, will come from grandparents, cousins and close friends retelling bits and pieces of their everyday lives. Later, when these children grow up to be writers, they will ask themselves questions about the mechanics and ethics of how to retell these stories that both are and are not our own. From Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago," to Brian Doyle's "Thirsty for the Joy," from John Hershey's "Hiroshima" and Art Spiegelman's "Mouse" to Rebecca Skloot's "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks," the world of nonfiction writing is rife with second, third, and fourth hand stories in which the essayist must learn to negotiate the researched history of people and places, with the malleability of secondhand memory. How do we believably and respectfully tell others' stories? How do we learn to find them? How do we draw these stories out, jot them down? How do we know when to make them our own and when to leave them in the liminal space of another's inaccessible and inscrutable experience? This course is designed to tackle these specific questions through workshops, writing prompts and guided discussions of assigned texts.

Instructor(s): Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44016

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

In this writing workshop, students will go through all the stages of writing a narrative nonfiction feature (nonfiction's equivalent of the short story). Students will generate story ideas, write a pitch, and then report, research and write drafts of a feature story. Along the way, we will consider the mechanics, craft and ethics of this work as we read published nonfiction and talk to visiting writers about their process. Students will workshop writing in class, learning more about editing and experimenting with style and form. The goal is for students to produce work worthy of publication.

Instructor(s): Ben Austen     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CHST 24030, CRWR 44030

CRWR 24031. Literary Nonfiction Workshop II: Excavating the Self. 100 Units.

What does it mean to make sense out of lived experience? How do we claim ownership of our own stories, and shape those narratives on our own terms, independent of pressures that originated elsewhere? How do we craft narrative personas that readers deem trustworthy; how do we capture voices that feel compelling, urgent, and help to reorder the fallout of our lives into a coherent structure that can offer insight, even to readers we have never met? In this advanced nonfiction workshop, we will attempt to grapple with some of these concerns. With a particular emphasis on memoir and personal essay, we will explore what it means to excavate the self and map out the vast terrain contained within. Readings will include Vivian Gornick, Leslie Jamison, Aleksandar Hemon, James Baldwin, William Maxwell, Orhan Pamuk and Thomas Browne. Class time will be split between discussion of readings and student led workshops of original essays/memoirs in progress. By the end of the quarter, students will have workshopped two pieces of writing and submitted a final portfolio. *NOTE: Undergraduate students are expected to have taken Literary Nonfiction Workshop I (CRWR 10406) before enrolling in this class.

Instructor(s): Valer Popa     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44031

CRWR 24034. Literary Nonfiction Workshop II: Writing Chicago. 100 Units.

This writing and reading course will allow us to explore the city of Chicago and many approaches to studying it and responding to it in prose by turns imaginative, narrative, and documentary. We'll think about issues like crises in housing, asylum, incarceration; about art and space in photographs, public murals, sculpture, architecture; and about plants, animals, and waterways. Students will write shorter exercises, keep a mixed media Chicago notebook, and write a longer piece in the genre or hybrid of their choice for workshop. Readings may include Eve Ewing, Lori Waxman, Frank London Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Rosalyn LaPier, Stuart Dybek, Sandra Cisneros, Aleksandar Hemon, Leonard Dubkin, Rebecca Zorach, Studs Terkel and more. *NOTE: Undergraduate students are expected to have taken Literary Nonfiction Workshop I (CRWR 10406) before enrolling in this class.

Instructor(s): Rachel Cohen     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CHST 24034, HMRT 24034, CRWR 44034

CRWR 24036. Literary Nonfiction Workshop II: The Confessional Essay. 100 Units.

The very inception of nonfiction as a genre is irrevocably intertwined with the confessional mode. From St. Augustine to Rousseau, from Thomas DeQuincy to Maggie Nelson, from Mary McLane to Sarah Viren, Literary Nonfiction can hardly be conceived of without the sincere offering of personal vulnerability known as the confession. But what makes a confession a literary? What is considered a worthy revelation? What is the line between vulnerability and voyeurism? And how should we deal with nonfictional inheritance of guilt, religion and "Truth"? This course is designed to tackle these questions both abstractly and concretely by reading from the masters and applying these concepts directly to the essays produced within the workshop setting. Students will be expected to turn in 2-3 confessional essays, alongside reading responses and workshop letters throughout the course of the quarter.

Instructor(s): Lina Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas     Terms Offered: Autumn
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44036

CRWR 24037. Literary Nonfiction Workshop II: Ways of Knowing: Research in Nonfiction. 100 Units.

Research is often cited as a core component of nonfiction writing, but what exactly do we mean when we say research? Where is the boundary between personal experience and intentionally sought-after knowledge? And how can a limited notion of this critical feature hold our work back? In this nonfiction workshop, we will explore the breadth of research methodologies available to nonfiction writers. From experiential learning and deep archival work to the more familiar mode of online research, this class will require students to engage both intellectually and corporeally with their chosen subjects. In class, we will read and examine texts that employ a range of methods professional writers have used to incorporate research, noting how information can be blended, woven, and rendered in unexpected ways. Students will practice employing these methods by writing and workshopping two creative writing pieces with distinct approaches to conducting and incorporating research. Representative authors include Benjamin Labatut's The Maniac, Helen Macdonald's H is For Hawk, and Hanif Abdurraqib's Go Ahead in the Rain. NOTE: Undergraduate students are expected to have taken Literary Nonfiction Workshop I (CRWR 10406) before enrolling in this class.

Instructor(s): Gleason, Jonathan     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 44037

CRWR 26342. Scores and Graphic Performance. 100 Units.

The performance score is a visual/textual work unto itself. Scores also provide performers and audiences with a language to understand the work. In this way, scores are documents of performative world-building while at the same time offering pathways into those worlds. This is a course about producing writing, drawing, and trace-making for the purpose of some other action - the performance of some unknown. Students will consider, in particular, how diasporic artists and writers have used writing, drawing, and mark-making as tools for inhabiting and re-enlivening performances of the past, theoretical performances, and those performances difficult to transcribe or translate. Students will have several opportunities over the course of the term to create and perform scores including their own in various media.

Instructor(s): A.M. Whitehead     Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): PQ: ARTV 10100, 10200, or 10300
Equivalent Course(s): TAPS 24118, ARTV 24118, MUSI 24118, TAPS 34118, ARTV 34118

CRWR 26343. Critical Worldbuilding. 100 Units.

Worldbuilding has many connotations: the conceptual process of imagining a fictional world, the spatialization of that world (eg. 3D modeling and level design in a game engine, production design for television or film) and the way details and ideas from that world are expressed to players and viewers. In general, worldbuilding suggests an attention to systems, an affinity with genre fiction, and the aggregation of small details to create senses of time and place that extend beyond a single narrative or experience. But what counts as a world? How is worldbuilding distinct from other forms of imagination? Why and how has it become so popular as a way of making and thinking about media now? In this theory-practice hybrid course, we will critically interrogate these questions through the process of building our own fictional worlds. You will bring to this course an idea for a fictional world, and over the course of nine weeks we will pay sustained attention to it through a series of small assignments and exercises. In the process, we will learn about the history of worldbuilding, the many academic and creative disciplines with which it intersects, and how we might use those theories and methods to imagine worlds differently.

Instructor(s): Doyle-Myerscough, Kaelan     Terms Offered: Spring
Prerequisite(s): This course is designed for third- and fourth-year undergraduate students with a background or interest in creative practice. There are no hard prerequisites, but students should be prepared to engage in critical making – creative work made with the goal of producing critical insights. Experience with creative writing, game design, and/or media studies is highly recommended.
Equivalent Course(s): CMST 27812, MADD 27812

CRWR 27250. Sensing the Anthropocene. 100 Units.

In this co-taught course between the departments of English (Jennifer Scappettone) and Visual Arts (Amber Ginsburg), we will deploy the senses most overlooked in academic discourse surrounding aesthetics and urbanism--hearing, taste, touch, and smell--to explore the history and actuality of Chicago as a site of anthropogenic changes. Holding the bulk of our classes out of doors, we will move through the city seeking out traces of the city's foundations in terraforming actions such as the filling in of swamp, the production of the river as pipeline, and the creation of transportation and industrial infrastructure--all with uneven effects on human and nonhuman inhabitants. Coursework will combine readings in the history and theory of the Anthropocene (the proposed geological epoch in which humans have become the dominant force shaping Earth's geology, climate, and ecosystems) with examples of how artists and activists have made these changes visible, tangible, audible, and otherwise apprehensible, providing forums for playful documentation and annotations as we draw, score, map, narrate, curate and collate our sensory experience of this all-encompassing yet elusive phenomenon into a final experimental book project. Admission by consent: Beginning February 16, please send to both jscape@uchicago.edu and amberginsburg@gmail.com: a short statement (as brief as a couple sentences) sketching your academic background/major/interests and specifying your interest (general or specific).

Instructor(s): J. Scappettone, A. Ginsburg     Terms Offered: May be offered in 2027-2028
Prerequisite(s): PQ: Third or fourth-year standing; room for several graduate students. Admission by consent: Beginning February 16, please send to both jscape@uchicago.edu and amberginsburg@gmail.com: a short statement (as brief as a couple sentences) sketching your academic background/major/interests and specifying your interest (general or specific).
Equivalent Course(s): ARTV 22322, BPRO 27200, ARCH 22322, ENGL 47700, ENGL 27700, ARTV 32322, COGS 26203, CEGU 27700, CHST 27200

CRWR 29200. Thesis Workshop: Fiction. 100 Units.

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

Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 49200

CRWR 29300. Thesis Workshop: Poetry. 100 Units.

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

Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 49300

CRWR 29400. Thesis Workshop: Literary Nonfiction. 100 Units.

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

Terms Offered: Winter
Prerequisite(s): If the course is listed as consent required or closed, please reach out to the instructor to enroll or to be added to the waitlist. Attendance on the first day is mandatory.
Equivalent Course(s): CRWR 49400