columbia creative writing department

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Creative writing.

The Creative Writing Department offers writing workshops in fiction writing, poetry, and nonfiction writing. Courses are also offered in film writing, structure and style, translation, and the short story.

For questions about specific courses, contact the department.

Registration Procedures and Course Approval

All creative writing classes have limited enrollments and require instructor or departmental approval prior to registration.

Students should visit the Writing Department's website for details and instructions.

Registration Procedures

INTERMEDIATE FICTION WORKSHOP WRIT2100W001 3 pts

Intermediate workshops are for students with some experience with creative writing, and whose prior work merits admission to the class (as judged by the professor). Intermediate workshops present a higher creative standard than beginning workshops, and increased expectations to produce finished work. By the end of the semester, each student will have produced at least seventy pages of original fiction. Students are additionally expected to write extensive critiques of the work of their peers. Please visit  https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate  for information about registration procedures.

Course Number

Times/location, section/call number, intermediate fiction workshop writ2100w002 3 pts, intermediate nonfiction wrkshp writ2200w001 3 pts.

The intermediate workshop in nonfiction is designed for students with some experience in writing literary nonfiction. Intermediate workshops present a higher creative standard than beginning workshops and an expectation that students will produce finished work. Outside readings supplement and inform the exercises and longer written projects. By the end of the semester, students will have produced thirty to forty pages of original work in at least two traditions of literary nonfiction. Please visit https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate  for information about registration procedures.

INTERMEDIATE POETRY WORKSHOP WRIT2300W001 3 pts

Intermediate poetry workshops are for students with some prior instruction in the rudiments of poetry writing and prior poetry workshop experience. Intermediate poetry workshops pose greater challenges to students and maintain higher critical standards than beginning workshops. Students will be instructed in more complex aspects of the craft, including the poetic persona, the prose poem, the collage, open-field composition, and others. They will also be assigned more challenging verse forms such as the villanelle and also non-European verse forms such as the pantoum. They will read extensively, submit brief critical analyses, and put their instruction into regular practice by composing original work that will be critiqued by their peers. By the end of the semester each student will have assembled a substantial portfolio of finished work. Please visit https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate  for information about registration procedures.

BODY & WORD WRIT3037W001 3 pts

Our writing often appears primarily as a product of cognitive faculties, and we easily overlook the profound influence our bodies exert on our thoughts and, consequently, our writing. Our perception of language itself is tied to how we perceive our physical selves. We can understand our bodies materially, as intricate structures of bone, muscle, and cells, or kinesthetically, through movement, force, and tone, intertwined with a spectrum of sensations like pain and pleasure, which intersect with our psychological and emotional landscapes. Through a series of movement exercises, readings, and writing assignments, this seminar delves into the profound impact a deeper understanding of our bodies and their movement can have on our writing, and conversely, how writing can influence our bodily experiences. Using various artistic mediums such as dance, film, literature, and fine arts, we aim to enhance our ability to articulate and write the body's presence and movement through space and time. Students from all concentrations are encouraged to join.

ADVANCED FICTION WORKSHOP WRIT3100Q001 3 pts

Building on the work of the Intermediate Workshop, Advanced Workshops are reserved for the most accomplished creative writing students. A significant body of writing must be produced and revised. Particular attention will be paid to the components of fiction: voice, perspective, characterization, and form. Students will be expected to finish several short stories, executing a total artistic vision on a piece of writing. The critical focus of the class will include an examination of endings and formal wholeness, sustaining narrative arcs, compelling a reader's interest for the duration of the text, and generating a sense of urgency and drama in the work. Please visit https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate for information about registration procedures.

ADVANCED FICTION WORKSHOP WRIT3100Q002 3 pts

Senior fiction workshop writ3101q001 4 pts.

Seniors who are majors in creative writing are given priority for this course. Enrollment is limited, and is by permission of the professor. The senior workshop offers students the opportunity to work exclusively with classmates who are at the same high level of accomplishment in the major. Students in the senior workshops will produce and revise a new and substantial body of work. In-class critiques and conferences with the professor will be tailored to needs of each student. Please visit https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate for information about registration procedures.

HOW TO BUILD A PERSON WRIT3121W001 3 pts

Apocalypses now writ3125w001 3 pts, the ecstasy of influence writ3132w001 3 pts.

What does it mean to be original? How do we differentiate plagiarism from pastiche, appropriation from homage? And how do we build on pre-existing traditions while simultaneously creating work that reflects our own unique experiences of the world?

In a 2007 essay for Harper ’ s magazine, Jonathan Lethem countered critic Harold Bloom’s theory of “the anxiety of influence” by proposing, instead, an “ecstasy of influence”; Lethem suggested that writers embrace rather than reject the unavoidable imprints of their literary forbearers. Beginning with Lethem’s essay—which, itself, is composed entirely of borrowed (or “sampled”) text—this class will consider the nature of literary influence, and its role in the development of voice.

Each week, students will read from pairings of older stories and novel excerpts with contemporary work that falls within the same artistic lineage. In doing so, we’ll track the movement of stylistic, structural, and thematic approaches to fiction across time, and think about the different ways that stories and novels can converse with one another. We will also consider the influence of other artistic mediums—music, visual art, film and television—on various texts. Students will then write their own original short pieces modeled after the readings. Just as musicians cover songs, we will “cover” texts,  adding our own interpretive imprints.

SENIOR NONFICTION WORKSHOP WRIT3201W001 4 pts

Seniors who are majors in creative writing are given priority for this course. Enrollment is limited, and is by permission of the professor. The senior workshop offers students the opportunity to work exclusively with classmates who are at the same high level of accomplishment in the major. Students in the senior workshops will produce and revise a new and substantial body of work. In-class critiques and conferences with the professor will be tailored to needs of each student. Please visit  https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate  for information about registration procedures.

HYBRID NONFICTION FORMS WRIT3214W001 3 pts

Writing about art writ3215w001 3 pts.

Prerequisites: No prerequisites. Department approval NOT required. 

This course will introduce students to writing about visual art. We will take our models from art history and contemporary art discourse, and students will be prompted to write with and about current art exhibitions and events throughout the city. The modes of art writing we will encounter include: the practice of ekphrasis (poems which describe or derive their inspiration from a work of art); writers such as John Ashbery, Gary Indiana, Eileen Myles, and others who for periods of their life held positions as art critics while composing poetry and works of fiction; writers such as Etel Adnan, Susan Howe, and Renee Gladman who have produced literature and works of art in equal measure. We will also look at artists who have written essays and poetry throughout their careers such as Robert Smithson, Glenn Ligon, Gregg Bordowitz, Moyra Davey, and Hannah Black, and consider both the visual qualities of writing and the ways that visual artists have used writing in their work. Lastly, we will consider what it means to write through a “milieu” of visual artists, such as those associated with the New York School and Moscow Conceptualism. Throughout the course students will produce original works and complete a final writing project that enriches, complicates, and departs from their own interests and preoccupations.

SCIENCE AND SENSIBILITY WRIT3217W001 3 pts

Life stories writ3225w001 3 pts.

In this seminar, we will target nonfiction that tells stories about lives: profiles, memoirs, and biographies. We will examine how the practice of this kind of nonfiction, and ideas about it, have evolved over the past 150 years. Along the way, we will ask questions about these nonfiction forms: How do reporters, memoirists, biographers, and critics make sense of their subjects? How do they create work as rich as the best novels and short stories? Can criticism explicate the inner life of a human subject? What roles do voice, point-of-view, character, dialogue, and plot—the traditional elements of fiction—play? Along the way, we’ll engage in issues of identity and race, memory and self, real persons and invented characters and we’ll get glimpses of such key publications as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books. Some writers we will consider: Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Walt Whitman, Henry Adams, Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Ross, James Agee, John Hersey, Edmund Wilson, Gore Vidal, Gay Talese, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Janet Malcolm, Robert Caro, Joyce Carol Oates, Toni Morrison, Joan Didion, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. The course regularly welcomes guest speakers.

ADVANCED POETRY WORKSHOP WRIT3300W001 3 pts

This poetry workshop is reserved for accomplished poetry writers and maintains the highest level of creative and critical expectations. Students will be encouraged to develop their strengths and to cultivate a distinctive poetic vision and voice but must also demonstrate a willingness to broaden their range and experiment with new forms and notions of the poem. A portfolio of poetry will be written and revised with the critical input of the instructor and the workshop. Please visit https://arts.columbia.edu/writing/undergraduate  for information about registration procedures.

Ecopoetics WRIT3321W001 3 pts

“There are things / We live among ‘and to see them / Is to know ourselves.’”

George Oppen, “Of Being Numerous”

In this class we will read poetry like writers that inhabit an imperiled planet, understanding our poems as being in direct conversation both with the environment as well as writers past and present with similar concerns and techniques. Given the imminent ecological crises we are facing, the poems we read will center themes of place, ecology, interspecies dependence, the role of humans in the destruction of the planet, and the “necropastoral” (to borrow a term from Joyelle McSweeney), among others. We will read works by poets and writers such as (but not limited to) John Ashbery, Harryette Mullen, Asiya Wadud, Wendy Xu, Ross Gay, Simone Kearney, Kim Hyesoon, Marcella Durand, Arthur Rimbaud, Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Muriel Rukeyser, George Oppen, Terrance Hayes, Juliana Spahr, and W.S. Merwin—reading several full collections as well as individual poems and essays by scholars in the field.

Through close readings, in-class exercises, discussions, and creative/critical writings, we will invest in and investigate facets of the dynamic lyric that is aware of its environs (sound, image, line), while also exploring traditional poetic forms like the Haibun, ode, prose poem, and elegy. Additionally, we will seek inspiration in outside mediums such as film, visual art, and music, as well as, of course, the natural world. As a class, we will explore the highly individual nature of writing processes and talk about building writing practices that are generative as well as sustainable.

21STC AM POETRY & ITS CONCERNS WRIT3365W001 3 pts

The lyric has often been conceived of as timeless in its content and inwardly-directed in its mode of address, yet so many poems with lasting claim on our attention point unmistakably outward, addressing the particulars of their times.  This course will examine the ways in which an array of 21st poets have embraced, indicted, and anatomized their cultural and historical contexts, diagnosing society’s ailments, indulging in its obsessions, and sharing its concerns.  Engaging with such topics as race, class, war, death, trauma, feminism, pop culture and sexuality, how do poets adapt poetic form to provide meaningful and relevant insights without losing them to beauty, ambiguity, and music?  How is pop star Rihanna a vehicle for discussing feminism and isolation?  What does it mean to write about Black masculinity after Ferguson?  In a time when poetry’s cultural relevancy is continually debated in academia and in the media, how can today’s poets use their art to hold a mirror to modern living?  This class will explore how writers address present-day topics in light of their own subjectivity, how their works reflect larger cultural trends and currents, and how critics as well as poets themselves have reflected on poetry’s, and the poet’s, changing social role.  In studying how these writers complicate traditional notions of what poetry should and shouldn’t do, both in terms of content and of form, students will investigate their own writing practices, fortify their poetic voices, and create new works that engage directly and confidently with the world in which they are written.

STORIES WITHIN STORIES WRIT3404W001 3 pts

The science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, in her sly, radical manifesto of sorts “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” proposes an idea of the “bottle as hero”: instead of conflict serving as our central organizing theory for narrative, she suggests that “the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag.” In other words: a container. These containers needn’t only apply to novels, I contend, but many types of literary narratives, whether they are classified as fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or some hybrid of forms.

With this in mind, the generative cross-genre craft seminar Stories within Stories aims to uncover beautiful and practical approaches to gathering small narratives into a larger, cohesive whole. Readings will include Svetlana Alexievich’s devastating novels in voices, Percival Everett’s incendiary novel-within-a-novel Erasure , Ted Chiang’s mesmerizing historical fantasy, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s braided essays of restoration, Nâzım Hikmet’s epic in verse Human Landscapes from My Country , Renee Gladman’s cross-disciplinary approaches to writing and drawing, Yevgenia Belorusets’s dispatches from Ukraine, Edward Gauvin’s identity-memoir-in-contributors’ bios, Saidiya Hartman’s speculative histories, Gary Indiana’s gleefully acerbic roman à clef Do Everything in the Dark , Alejandro Zambra’s standardized test-inspired literature, W. G. Sebald’s saturnine essay-fiction, and Lisa Hsiao Chen’s meld of biography and autobiography, as well as fiction and nonfiction by Clarice Lispector, Vauhini Vara, Eileen Myles, Olga Tokarczuk, and Julie Hecht, among other texts. 

In addition, we will also read essays on craft and storytelling by Le Guin, Gladman, Zambra, Lydia Davis, Walter Benjamin, Garielle Lutz, Ben Mauk, and more. What we learn in this course we will apply to our own work, which will consist of regular creative writing responses drawn from the readings and a creative final project. Students will also learn to keep a daily journal of writing.

FICTION WORKSHOP WRIT5100R001 6 pts

Fiction workshop writ5100r002 6 pts, fiction workshop writ5100r003 6 pts, fiction workshop writ5100r004 6 pts, fiction workshop writ5100r005 6 pts, fiction workshop writ5100r006 6 pts, fiction workshop writ5100r007 6 pts, fiction workshop writ5100r008 6 pts, fiction workshop writ5100r009 6 pts, fiction workshop writ5100r010 6 pts, nonfiction workshop writ5200r001 6 pts, nonfiction workshop writ5200r002 6 pts, nonfiction workshop writ5200r003 6 pts, nonfiction workshop writ5200r004 6 pts, poetry workshop writ5300r001 6 pts, poetry workshop writ5300r002 6 pts, poetry workshop writ5300r003 6 pts, poetry workshop writ5300r004 6 pts, poetry workshop writ5300r005 6 pts, special projects workshop writ5500r001 6 pts, cross-genre seminar writ6010q001 3 pts.

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR

CROSS-GENRE SEMINAR WRIT6010Q002 3 pts

Cross-genre seminar writ6010q003 3 pts, cross-genre seminar writ6010q004 3 pts, cross-genre seminar writ6010q005 3 pts, cross-genre seminar writ6010q006 3 pts, fiction seminar writ6110r001 3 pts, fiction seminar writ6110r002 3 pts, fiction seminar writ6110r003 3 pts, fiction seminar writ6110r004 3 pts, fiction seminar writ6110r005 3 pts, fiction seminar writ6110r006 3 pts, fiction seminar writ6110r007 3 pts, fiction seminar writ6110r008 3 pts, fiction seminar writ6110r009 3 pts, fiction seminar writ6110r010 3 pts, fiction seminar writ6110r011 3 pts, fiction seminar writ6110r012 3 pts, nonfiction seminar writ6210r001 3 pts, nonfiction seminar writ6210r002 3 pts, nonfiction seminar writ6210r003 3 pts, nonfiction seminar writ6210r004 3 pts, nonfiction seminar writ6210r005 3 pts, nonfiction seminar writ6210r006 3 pts, nonfiction seminar writ6210r007 3 pts, poetry seminar writ6310r001 3 pts, poetry seminar writ6310r002 3 pts, poetry seminar writ6310r003 3 pts, poetry seminar writ6310r004 3 pts, poetry seminar writ6310r005 3 pts, translation workshop writ6400q001 3 pts, translation workshop writ6400q002 3 pts, translation workshop writ6400q003 3 pts, translation seminar writ6410r001 3 pts.

TRANSLATION SEMINAR

TRANSLATION SEMINAR WRIT6410R002 3 pts

Fiction lecture writ6510r001 3 pts, nonfiction lecture writ6520r001 3 pts.

NONFICTION LECTURE

POETRY LECTURE WRIT6530R001 3 pts

POETRY LECTURE

NONFICTION THESIS WORKSHOP WRIT8200R001 9 pts

Nonfiction thesis workshop writ8200r002 9 pts, nonfiction thesis workshop writ8200r003 9 pts, nonfiction thesis workshop writ8200r004 9 pts, nonfiction thesis workshop writ8200r005 9 pts, research arts writing writ9000qra1 0 pts.

Research Arts for MFA Writing Program - Students Must Have Completed 60 Points to Register

WRIT RESEARCH ARTS INTERNSHIP WRIT9800RRI1 6 pts

Interenship for MFA Writing Research Arts Students

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Quarto is the official undergraduate literary magazine of Columbia University’s Creative Writing Department. It is a student-run magazine that publishes the best of Columbia’s undergraduate writers from all four of Columbia’s undergraduate colleges. The Creative Writing Department provides support and a faculty advisor to the magazine, though the editorial board has representatives from a variety of academic fields across campus.

Tag: creative writing

Can you tell which of these break-up texts are ai-generated.

PhD student Tuhin Chakrabarty’s thesis about creative writing and large language models was featured in the Washington Post.

Computer-Human Interaction Papers Delve into Livestreaming, Visual Design, and Creative Writing

CS researchers headed to the 2019 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Glasgow, Scotland. The conference gathers researchers and scientists to examine the ways that technology can be used to improve people and society.

This year’s papers feature women-led research – assistant professor Lydia Chilton presented three projects, including one with Katy Gero, a PhD student. While undergrad Lauren Arnett took part in a poster presentation for work that studied livestreaming.

Below are brief descriptions and links to the research.

VisiBlends: A Flexible Workflow for Visual Blends Lydia B. Chilton Columbia University , Savvas Petridis Columbia University , Maneesh Agrawala Stanford University

Visual blends are an advanced graphic design technique to draw attention to a message. They combine two objects in a way that is novel and useful in conveying a message symbolically. This paper presents VisiBlends, a flexible workflow for creating visual blends that follows the iterative design process. The tool introduces a design pattern for blending symbols based on principles of human visual object recognition.

“To the average person, it seems that a visual blend requires creative inspiration—an aha! moment—and that there is no exact formula to make one,” said Chilton , in an interview . “We wanted to deconstruct the process of building visual blends and see if there was a way we could make it more accessible to people by coupling the human element with computational methods.”

Visiblends allows users to collaboratively generate visual blends with steps involving brainstorming, synthesis, and iteration. An evaluation of the workflow shows that decentralized groups can generate blends in independent microtasks, co-located groups can collaboratively make visual blends for their own messages, and VisiBlends improves novices’ ability to make visual blends.

Cross-platform Interactions and Popularity in the Livestreaming Community Lauren Arnett Columbia University , Robert Netzorg Columbia University , Augustin Chaintreau Columbia University , Eugene Wu Columbia University

The paper explores how livestreamers on the platform, Twitch, may want to use other social media accounts to develop their audience.

Twitch is a social media platform owned by Amazon that focuses on livestreaming for video gamers. With opportunities for receiving donations and paid subscriptions, the most popular Twitch content creators can earn up to $500,000 per month.

Twitch users have social incentives to become popular, as passionate, tight-knit communities form in support of individual successful streamers. A common piece of advice for Twitch users looking to gain popularity is to have a social media presence and use it to promote themselves. The researchers looked into the validity of this claim to see if social media presence was in fact associated with popularity, to confirm if that is an effective way of promotion for streamers.

With data from over 17,000 streamers both directly from Twitch and scraped from social media platforms, different behaviors on social media platforms were examined to see if they correlated with popularity. For example, a Twitch user who develops a social media following before they started streaming may be able to transfer their popularity over to their Twitch profile. However, when compared with Twitch users who started a social media account after their first stream, the researchers were surprised to find that based on two measures of popularity, users who started Twitch with an existing social media presence did not experience a significant advantage over those who do not.

“Throughout this project, I’ve been amazed by the variety of people who stream and the lengths they go to for their audiences,” said Lauren Arnett , a computer science student. The livestreaming community extends all over the world and unites over particular games or streamers with a ton of enthusiasm. Streamers themselves spend the hours of an overtime work week playing for the entertainment of their viewers, creating a complex livestreaming schedule that will satisfy followers in any time zone. She continued, “although Twitch is a relatively unknown platform, the commitment and connections that exist on it run deep.”

Metaphoria an Algorithmic Companion for Metaphor Creation Katy Ilonka Gero Columbia University and Lydia B. Chilton Columbia University

While computation has opened a floodgate of creative tools for music and the visual arts (like synthesizers, Photoshop, ChucK, SnapChat filters, and GANS) little of that fervor has transferred to the medium of text. Word processors that detect spelling and grammatical errors are useful, but do not support the creative elements of writing.

In this work, the researchers built a metaphor generation tool to help describe abstract concepts like ‘love’ or ‘consciousness’. Metaphors convey abstract ideas by comparing them to more concrete or familiar concepts, and are used in all forms of writing from poetry to journalism.

“Metaphoria is an online tool that generates metaphorical connections between two words,” said Katy Gero , a second year PhD student. “It is designed to give you ideas for poetry, essays, or stories. It augments your abilities, rather than replacing them.”

The tool can generate suggestions that make sense to the writer, given what the writer is looking to do. It can also make suggestions that inspire writers to come up with new and different ideas. The researchers found that Metaphoria almost always produces some connections that make sense, though it’s pretty dependent on the writer as to which connections make sense.

“Metaphoria rarely resulted in people writing very similar things; instead, Metaphoria inspires people to write things they might never have thought of,” said Gero.

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Upcoming events, in the news, press mentions, dean boyce's statement on amicus brief filed by president bollinger.

President Bollinger announced that Columbia University along with many other academic institutions (sixteen, including all Ivy League universities) filed an amicus brief in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York challenging the Executive Order regarding immigrants from seven designated countries and refugees. Among other things, the brief asserts that “safety and security concerns can be addressed in a manner that is consistent with the values America has always stood for, including the free flow of ideas and people across borders and the welcoming of immigrants to our universities.”

This recent action provides a moment for us to collectively reflect on our community within Columbia Engineering and the importance of our commitment to maintaining an open and welcoming community for all students, faculty, researchers and administrative staff. As a School of Engineering and Applied Science, we are fortunate to attract students and faculty from diverse backgrounds, from across the country, and from around the world. It is a great benefit to be able to gather engineers and scientists of so many different perspectives and talents – all with a commitment to learning, a focus on pushing the frontiers of knowledge and discovery, and with a passion for translating our work to impact humanity.

I am proud of our community, and wish to take this opportunity to reinforce our collective commitment to maintaining an open and collegial environment. We are fortunate to have the privilege to learn from one another, and to study, work, and live together in such a dynamic and vibrant place as Columbia.

Mary C. Boyce Dean of Engineering Morris A. and Alma Schapiro Professor

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Initiatives

The Efroymson Creative Writing Reading Series

The Efroymson Creative Writing Reading Series at Columbia College Chicago is one of the most dynamic, aesthetically diverse events of its kind in the city. Hosted by the English and Creative Writing Department, the series attracts prestigious, award-winning fiction writers, poets, and nonfiction writers who perform, engage, and educate on a myriad of topics and traditions.

The series is committed to curating critically engaged contemporary works that challenge traditional discourse and embrace culturally relevant, diverse voices. Our unique connection to the vibrant cultural and educational district in the South Loop sets the stage for some of the most fascinating, inspiring, and influential conversations on the literary arts.

All events are free and open to the public, taking place on campus and online via Zoom.

Fall 2023 events:

• October 12,  Toya Wolfe 1 p.m. Hokin Lecture Hall - 623 S. Wabash or join virtual session
• November 2, Josh Barkan 2 p.m. Hokin Lecture Hall - 623 S. Wabash or join virtual session

Spring 2024 events :

• February 20,  Richard Meier and Tony Trigilio  5:30 p.m. 1104 S. Wabash, 1st Floor, Conway Center or join virtual session 
• April 10,  Jean Chen Ho and  Garnett Kilberg-Cohen 1 p.m. 1104 S. Wabash, 1st Floor, Conway Center or join virtual session 

If you are interested in attending, please email [email protected] for more information.

• Aleksandar Hemon (fiction)
• David Lazar (nonfiction)
• David Trinidad (poetry)
• Brian Zimmerman
• Gillian Douple

Past speakers of Columbia College Chicago's Creative Writing Reading Series include: 

• Lindsay Hunter
• Matthew Rohrer
• Benjamin Balint
• Sue Sinclair
• Mort Castle
• Daniel Kraus
• Ingrid Rojas Contreras
• Durga Chew-Bose
• Daniel Harris
• David Lazar
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• T. J. Jarrett
• Camille T. Dungy
• Sharon Solwitz
• David Trinidad
• Desiree Cooper
• Ishion Hutchinson
• Patricia Ann McNair
• Bonnie Jo Campbell
• Nina Revoyr
• John Gallaher
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• Aleksandar Hemon
• Aviya Kushner
• Joshua Clover
• T Clutch Fleischmann
• Adam Johnson
• Ruth Ellen Kocher
• Douglas Kearney
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• Kwame Dawes
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• Peter Gizzi
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Imagine. Create. Find your voice. Hone the fundamentals of craft in a variety of genres in our BFA and Minor Programs.

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Learn from leading professors and authors without the commitment of a degree program.

Study with our faculty of internationally renowned, award-winning authors in a student-focused program that blends the best of traditional workshop and leading edge pedagogy.

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Land Acknowledgement

Featured event, 2024 alumni summer residency with zac hug, featured news, education through comics: exploring the pedagogical value of comic art with sarah leavitt, ubc creative writing seeks submissions for 2024 prize for best new fiction, mfa alumni kailash srinivasan and vivian li make the 2024 cbc short story prize longlist, faculty highlights, see recent publications and productions from our faculty..

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From Chaos to Creativity: One Teacher’s Path to a Writing Degree

Heather hein.

Senior Editor

Former high school teacher and lifelong writer Ellie Moran finds her perfect fit in the Professional Creative Nonfiction Writing program at University College.

Ellie Moran will never forget the day she decided to go to graduate school.

It was the fall of 2021, and she was in her classroom at Denver’s East High School, where she taught English. Suddenly, the school was placed on lockdown, and Ellie was stuck with her rowdiest class of seniors, waiting for two hours while a dozen police officers, a SWAT team and bomb-sniffing dogs went through the building.

“And I said to myself, that’s it, I’ve got to go to grad school. That was quite literally the moment I decided. I went home that day and applied to DU,” she says.

Ellie had been teaching at East, her alma mater, for five years—an experience she calls both “delightful” and “tumultuous.” She loved her students, her colleagues and the field of education, but the pressures of being a teacher were too much—and not just because of lockdowns.

“I was only in my fifth year, and I felt like I was drowning, like I didn’t have the brain space or capacity to learn or be creative,” she says. The curriculum she taught had started to feel monotonous, and she wanted to spend more time writing.

As an undergraduate, she double majored in creative writing and secondary education at the University of Colorado Boulder. A couple years into her job at East, she decided to get a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction but, just before she was set to start the program, she had an “aha” moment.

“I was walking to a coffee shop and, I don’t know why, but I just asked myself, ‘Why are you going to grad school?’ And the only answer I had was to make more money. And I was like, ‘What?’ I can’t do something I’m not passionate about,” Ellie says. That afternoon, she says, she deferred her enrollment and removed herself from the pool completely about a week later.

'I have to write every day'

She realized that writing was what she wanted to do. “It’s like survival to me. I don’t know how to navigate the world without it,” Ellie says. “I have to write every day. I observe so many things in a day, there’s so many things in [my head], that I have to expel them.”

In the fall of 2022, Ellie enrolled in University College’s Professional Creative Nonfiction Writing program, which she says is a perfect fit for the memoir style of writing she enjoys most. “I have the memory of an elephant. I remember everything and enjoy writing about the things I remember,” she explains. “I don’t necessarily enjoy writing about things that haven’t happened.”

The creativity comes in, she says, by embedding her nonfiction with poetry and figurative language or adding images and “kind of just visually playing around” on the page.

“It feels like weaving, weaving creativity into the truth. It’s essentially making your personal story universal, taking the stories I see in my everyday life and pulling out the universal truths,” she says.

Now working as an enrichment coordinator for a Montessori academy in Denver, Ellie says her long-term goal is to get into publishing. The University College program, she says, was an easy choice because of its flexible schedule and virtual option.

“There are times where I’ve been wildly overwhelmed—because it’s grad school—but for the most part, it’s been really accessible, which I’m so thankful for,” she says.

That accessibility has allowed her to zero in on her writing. “I know how to write, but I wanted to get better. I wanted professors to look at my work and say, ‘That’s terrible’ or ‘That makes no sense.’ I wanted to learn how to structure my writing better, to work on the process.”  

One of her main writing outlets is a SubStack she started last year called Mis(s) Education . She writes narrative nonfiction essays on the state of education, including topics like school shootings (including one at East High School in 2023), teacher burnout and the “epidemic of ego” in educational leadership.

She plans to continue combining her love of writing and her love of education when she moves to New York City in the fall. She has applied to several publishing houses but is also applying to some schools and community colleges for non-classroom positions in areas like student engagement and community event planning.

“The biggest thing that I've learned is that you can’t change a system while you're in it. Teachers are too tired to write about their experiences. I want to have the time to, on their behalf, talk to them, take their words, write them down and get them out there.”

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APSU creative writing professor named finalist for Midwest Book Awards

By: Kara Zahn May 24, 2024

Dr. Raymond (RS) Deeren, assistant professor in APSU’s Department of Languages and Literature. | Photo by Sean McCully

CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. — On the heels of winning a 2024 Michigan Notable Book award, Austin Peay State University (APSU) assistant professor Dr. Raymond (RS) Deeren has been named a Midwest Book Award finalist for his debut collection of short stories, Enough to Lose.

Deeren is being recognized in the Short Story/Anthology category of the 34th Annual Midwest Book Awards. The winners will be announced during a gala hosted on June 22, 2024, at the Mall of America in Minneapolis. 

“ It means the world to me that these stories from my neck of the woods have resonated with readers across the country,” Deeren said. “It’s humbling to know there is a desire for working-class storytelling.” 

The Midwest Book Awards are presented by the Midwest Independent Publishers Association (MiPA), a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting independent publishers in the Midwest. The awards are open to all books published in the Midwest in the year leading up to the event. 

MiPA founders organized the first Midwest Book Awards in 1989, and it has grown into one of the country’s longest-running literary recognition programs. Judges include booksellers, university staff and librarians who are subject matter experts representing each of MiPA’s 12 states. 

The public is invited to attend the event on June 22, 2024, and all the finalists can be viewed at https://mipa.org/midwest-book-awards/2024-finalists.

About RS Deeren:  

Dr. Raymond Deeren, better known as RS Deeren, is an assistant professor in the Department of Languages & Literature. He writes about odd jobs that helped him and others like him pay the bills. Originally from the rural working-class Thumb Region of Michigan, his fiction focuses on how social class plays to and through aspects of American life such as race, gender and sexuality. Deeren is part of the Center of Excellence for the Creative Arts at Austin Peay as the coordinator of the creative writing program and the fiction editor for Zone 3 Press (APSU's internationally distributed literary magazine). He is also the faculty representative for the Creative Writing Club. 

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GOP advances Garland contempt charges after White House exerts executive privilege over Biden audio

The White House has blocked the release of audio from President Joe Biden’s interview with a special counsel about his handling of classified documents, arguing Thursday that Republicans in Congress only wanted the recordings “to chop them up” and use them for political purposes.

Two House committees moved ahead with contempt charges against Attorney General Merrick Garland for refusing to turn over audio from Pres. Biden’s interview with a special counsel, after the White House’s decision to block release of the recording.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, speaks during the House Judiciary Committee markup hearing to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress, Thursday, May 16, 2024, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

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FILE - Attorney General Merrick Garland speaks during the 36th Annual Candlelight Vigil to honor the law enforcement officers who lost their lives in 2023, in Washington, on May 13, 2024. House Republicans are set to advance contempt of Congress charges against Garland for his refusal to turn over unredacted audio of a special counsel interview with President Joe Biden. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)

President Joe Biden, right, sitting next to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, left, speaks at the beginning of his meeting with the Combatant Commanders in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, May 15, 2024, before hosting them for a dinner. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

President Joe Biden speaks at a memorial service to honor law enforcement officers who’ve lost their lives in the past year, during National Police Week ceremonies at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, May 15, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)

Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., speaks during the House Judiciary Committee markup hearing to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress, Thursday, May 16, 2024, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., speaks during the House Judiciary Committee markup hearing to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress, Thursday, May 16, 2024, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Rep. Jeff Van Drew, R-N.J., speaks during the House Judiciary Committee markup hearing to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress, Thursday, May 16, 2024, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Rep. Glenn Ivey, D-Md., speaks during the House Judiciary Committee markup hearing to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress, Thursday, May 16, 2024, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Two House committees moved ahead Thursday with contempt charges against Attorney General Merrick Garland for refusing to turn over audio from President Joe Biden’s interview with a special counsel , advancing the matter after the White House’s decision to block the release of the recording earlier in the day.

In back-to-back hearings that nearly spilled into early Friday, the House Judiciary and Oversight and Accountability committees voted along party lines to advance an effort to hold Garland in contempt of Congress for not turning over the records. But the timing of any action by the full House, and the willingness of the U.S. attorney’s office to act on the referral, remained uncertain.

“The department has a legal obligation to turn over the requested materials pursuant to the subpoena,” Rep. Jim Jordan, the GOP chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said during the hearing. “Attorney General Garland’s willful refusal to comply with our subpoena constitutes contempt of Congress.”

The rapid sequence of events Thursday further inflamed tensions between House Republicans and the Justice Department, setting the stage for another round of bitter fighting between the two branches of government that seemed nearly certain to spill over into court.

If House Republicans’ efforts against Garland are successful, he will become the third attorney general to be held in contempt of Congress. The White House slammed Republicans in a letter earlier Thursday, dismissing their efforts to obtain the audio as purely political.

“The absence of a legitimate need for the audio recordings lays bare your likely goal — to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes,” White House counsel Ed Siskel wrote in a scathing letter to House Republicans ahead of scheduled votes by the two House committees to refer Garland to the Justice Department for the contempt charges.

“Demanding such sensitive and constitutionally-protected law enforcement materials from the Executive Branch because you want to manipulate them for potential political gain is inappropriate,” Siskel added.

Garland separately advised Biden in a letter made public Thursday that the audio falls within the scope of executive privilege, which protects a president’s ability to obtain candid counsel from his advisers without fear of immediate public disclosure and to protect confidential communications relating to official responsibilities.

The attorney general told reporters that the Justice Department has gone to extraordinary lengths to provide information to the committees about special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation, including a transcript of Biden’s interview with Hur. But, Garland said, releasing the audio could jeopardize future sensitive and high-profile investigations. Officials have suggested handing over the tape could make future witnesses concerned about cooperating with investigators.

AP AUDIO: White House blocks release of Biden’s special counsel interview audio, says GOP is being political

Speaking with reporters, Attorney General Merrick Garland says the audio from President Biden’s special counsel interview that Republicans have requested will not be released.

“There have been a series of unprecedented and frankly unfounded attacks on the Justice Department,” Garland said. “This request, this effort to use contempt as a method of obtaining our sensitive law enforcement files is just most recent.”

The Justice Department warned Congress that a contempt effort would create “unnecessary and unwarranted conflict,” with Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte saying, “It is the longstanding position of the executive branch held by administrations of both parties that an official who asserts the president’s claim of executive privilege cannot be held in contempt of Congress.”

Siskel’s letter to lawmakers comes after the uproar from Biden’s aides and allies over Hur’s comments about Biden’s age and mental acuity, and it highlights concerns in a difficult election year over how potentially embarrassing moments from the lengthy interview could be exacerbated by the release, or selective release, of the audio.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson slammed the White House’s move, accusing Biden of suppressing the tape because he’s afraid to have voters hear it during an election year.

“The American people will not be able to hear why prosecutors felt the President of the United States was, in Special Counsel Robert Hur’s own words, an ‘elderly man with a poor memory,’ and thus shouldn’t be charged,” Johnson said the during a press conference on the House steps.

House Democrats defended Biden’s rationale during the back-to-back hearings on Thursday, citing the massive trove of documents and witnesses who have been made available to Republicans as part of their more than yearlong probe into Biden and his family.

Rep. Jerry Nadler, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said on Thursday that Republicans want to make it seem like they’ve uncovered wrongdoing by the Justice Department.

“In reality, the Attorney General and DOJ have been fully responsive to this committee in every way that might be material to their long dead impeachment inquiry,” the New York lawmaker said. “Sometimes, they have been too responsive, in my opinion, given the obvious bad faith of the MAGA majority.”

The contempt effort is seen by Democrats as a last-ditch effort to keep Republicans’ impeachment inquiry into Biden alive, despite a series of setbacks in recent months and flailing support for articles of impeachment within the GOP conference.

A transcript of the Hur interview showed Biden struggling to recall some dates and occasionally confusing some details — something longtime aides say he’s done for years in both public and private — but otherwise showing deep recall in other areas. Biden and his aides are particularly sensitive to questions about his age. At 81, he’s the oldest-ever president , and he’s seeking another four-year term.

At a news conference, House Speaker Mike Johnson says the American people will not get to hear the president’s special counsel interview.

Hur, a former senior official in the Trump administration Justice Department , was appointed as a special counsel in January 2023 following the discovery of classified documents in multiple locations tied to Biden.

Hur’s report said many of the documents recovered at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, in parts of Biden’s Delaware home, and in his Senate papers at the University of Delaware were retained by “mistake.”

However, investigators did find evidence of willful retention and disclosure related to a subset of records found in Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, house, including in a garage, an office and a basement den.

The files pertain to a troop surge in Afghanistan during the Obama administration that Biden had vigorously opposed. Biden kept records that documented his position, including a classified letter to Obama during the 2009 Thanksgiving holiday. Some of that information was shared with a ghostwriter with whom he published memoirs in 2007 and 2017.

Associated Press reporters Zeke Miller and Eric Tucker in Washington contributed.