Hello First Years!
See below for information from Professor Ken Chen, the Associate Director of Creative Writing at Barnard, about enrolling in a creative writing class!
Dear students,
We have a few fiction, poetry, and fiction writing workshops that still have spaces if you want to apply and enroll before the shopping period ends this Friday. It's an opportunity for you to nurture your imagination and meet other young writers in a creatively stimulating, supportive space. Our fabulous instructors include:
- Kate Zambreno, author of the autofiction cult classic Heroines, who The New Yorker described as being "among a cohort of female writers who explore abjection"
- Farnoosh Fathi, a playful, surrealist poet whose last book was called "the Tower of Babel of our generation" and whose class invokes Zen Buddhist practices, Oulipo games, and in-jokes;
- Zaina Arafat, whose novel was Roxane Gay's favorite book of the year and whose new book explores the "complexities and heartache of Palestinian diasporic life."
- Patricia Spear Jones, a recent Poet Laureate of New York, whose poems are "homecomings" for the "rhythms and caresses... from Memphis and Manhattan."
- Nellie Herman, whose writing investigates narrative medicine and whose novel about Van Gogh sent "a shaft of light into that darkness" (NY Times);
- Breezy Janae, whose poems about family violence, mental health, and black history have won awards from the NEA and Cave Canem;
- Nina Sharma, a New Yorker humor writer and stand-up comic whose essay collection explores "Afro-Asian intimacy in all its beauty and complexity" (Wash. Post).
HOW TO APPLY TO CREATIVE WRITING WORKSHOPS
Take a look at the list below and email the professor to ask if you can attend. Make sure to attach a writing sample (4-6 pgs. for a fiction/nonfiction workshop, 3-4 pages for a poetry workshop). Waitlist the class on Vergil. If the professor approves your application and there's space, you will be added to the workshop.
ENGL BC3105.2 Fiction & Personal Narrative - Zaina Arafat
Th 11:00am - 12:50pm 101A BARNARD HALL
"Plot is the bone you throw the dog while you rob the house." I once heard this quote at a writing retreat, and it stuck with me. Really, it's a way of saying that while plot is important, and an aspect of writing we will certainly study here, some of the best pieces of writing are driven by character. In this course, we will read and excavate short stories and essays that explore identity on the page, helping us to create narrators and characters that reflect how the various facets of our personas and characters overlap, intersect, and often contradict themselves. Through close analysis of both published works and our own writing, we will excavate the craft and other elements of short stories and essays, including plot/sequence of events, place/setting, pacing, voice, point of view, structure, time/distance, and theme, all with the goal of generating and improving our own work. We will read the work of authors who explore identity on the basis of ethnicity, cultural heritage, gender, sexual orientation, race, and interests, including Jumpha Lahiri, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, Jenny Zhang, Alice Walker, Carmen Maria Machado, Jamel Brinkley, Junot Diaz, and others.
Zaina Arafat (zarafat@barnard.edu) is a queer Arab-American writer. She is the author of the novel, You Exist Too Much, which won a 2021 Lambda Literary Award and was named Roxane Gay's favorite book of 2020. Her essay collection, Our Arab, is forthcoming from Little, Brown. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, Granta, The Believer, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harper's Bazaar, BuzzFeed, VICE, Guernica, Literary Hub and NPR. She was awarded the Arab Women/Migrants from the Middle East fellowship at Jack Jones Literary Arts and named a Champion of Pride by The Advocate. She holds an M.F.A. from Iowa and an M.A. from Columbia University. She teaches writing at Barnard College, The School of the New York Times and LIU Post, and has also taught at the University of Iowa, the International Writing Program, the Center for Fiction, Tin House, and Sackett Street Writers', as well as abroad in Jordan, Egypt and Eritrea, as part of a U.S. State Department/International Writing Program delegation.
ENGLBC3107 Introduction to Fiction Writing - Kate Zambreno
Tu 9:00am - 10:50am 403 BARNARD HALL
This class is an introduction to writing fiction, with a focus on shorter works. The initial weeks will focus on writing exercises and also deep reading of published short stories and other hybrid texts, in order to attempt to understand the space we enter when we enter writing, what does it mean to move through it, how is it moving. Later, student work will become the main text as the focus shifts into workshop. Stories likely on the syllabus include Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Bhanu Kapil's The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Octavia Butler’s “Speech Sounds,” Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," Renee Gladman's Calamities, Han Kang's "The Fruit of My Women," Jen George's "The Babysitter at Rest," Carmen Maria Machado’s “The Husband Stitch,” Jenny Zhang's "We Love You, Crispina," and the flash of Lydia Davis and Anne Carson.
Kate Zambreno (kzambren@barnard.edu) is the author of ten books, most recently The Light Room, a meditation on art and care, from Riverhead, and Tone, a collaboration with Sofia Samatar, from Columbia University Press. Animal Stories, reports on zoos and Kafka, is forthcoming from Transit's Undelivered Lectures series. They are at work on a series on precarity, interiors, and community. They are a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Nonfiction.
ENGL BC3110.02 Introduction to Poetry Writing - Farnoosh Fathi
Fr 12:10pm - 2:00pm 407 BARNARD HALL
The Beginner’s Mind. “In the beginner’s mind, possibilities are many, in the expert’s mind, there are few.” — Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
In this introductory poetry writing workshop, we will cultivate an ardently playful approach to writing, one committed to honoring “beginner’s mind.” Embarrassment, error and amateurism will be embraced as values and fertile grounds (rather than obstructions) for writing.
Together we will explore poetry writing as the pursuit and expression of a liberatory language–the language of our highest attention and freedom–shared between reader and writer.
In addition to workshops, we will alternate between classes centered on formal and thematic studies with others focused on contemplative practices and the writing process. Formal and revisionary explorations will be guided by the experiments of Bernadette Mayer, Inger Christensen, Dadaists and the Oulipo; by generative varieties of translation as practiced by Mónica de la Torre and Sawako Nagasaku–homophonic and self-translation; the role of inside jokes and an innocent attention to our environment, inspired by Gertrude Stein and Wadih Saadeh.
Drawing on teachings by Corita Kent, art exercises by Kim Beom and Zen Buddhist rituals we will learn contemplative practices that help us create, combine and consider our attention in order to see how receptive, open, beginner’s mind effort, rather than forced determination toward a particular outcome, underpins our deepest work in writing.
Farnoosh Fathi (ffathi@barnard.edu) is the author of the poetry collections Great Guns (read an excerpt from Great Guns here) and Granny Cloud (2024), editor of Joan Murray: Drafts, Fragments, and Poems (2018), and founder of the Young Artists Language and Devotion Alliance (YALDA). She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Brazil, a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Her poetry has appeared in BOMB, Guernica, Boston Review, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. She lives and teaches in New York.
ENGL BC3115 Story Writing - Nellie Hermann
Tu 11:00am - 12:50pm 403 BARNARD HALL
Story Writing I is an advanced workshop in prose writing, with emphasis on the short story. Some experience in the writing of fiction is required. Students will share at least two pieces of their own work with the class over the course of the semester. In addition, each week we will read and analyze a variety of published short stories with an eye for craft and writerly decisions that might be applied to our own work. Exercises and in-depth workshop letters will push students to think more deeply about their own choices and the many layers that make up their work. Conference hours to be arranged.
Nellie Hermann (nhermann@barnard.edu) has published two novels, The Cure for Grief (Scribner, 2008) and The Season of Migration (FSG, 2015), a New York Times Editor's Choice. Her non-fiction has appeared in an anthology about siblings, Freud’s Blind Spot (Free Press: 2010), as well as in Academic Medicine. Over the last ten years she has taught fiction and narrative medicine to undergraduates, medical students, graduate students, and clinicians of all sorts, and has given conference addresses in Iowa, California, Seoul, Korea, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2016 NEA Literature fellowship and a 2017-18 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library.
ENGL BC3134 Creative Non-fiction - Nina Sharma
Tu 5:40pm - 7:30pm 403 BARNARD HALL
In this section of creative nonfiction, we will focus on the essay. We will consider the essay in the original and most capacious sense of the term – coming from French, essai, meaning “attempt.” We will read and discuss the work of a diverse variety of essayists, identifying in their work key writerly moves that we may adapt as we attempt to write into our own lives. Phillip Lopate writes that the essay “sets up a relationship with the reader, a dialogue— a friendship.” Throughout our drafting and revision, we will explore how the relationship a writer crafts with the audience is informed by the relationship the writer has to language. We will write and revise with the hope of fostering an enduring relationship with the page.
Nina Sharma's (nsharma@barnard.edu) essays have been featured in journals such as Electric Literature, Women’s Studies Quarterly, Longreads, and The Margins. Nina’s satire has been featured in The New Yorker and Flexx Mag. She is a co-founder of Not Your Biwi, an all-South Asian women's improv group. Nina is formerly the Programs Director at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and with Quincy Scott Jones she co-created Blackshop, a column that thinks about allyship between BIPOC people. Her debut collection of personal essays, The Way You Make Me Feel: Interracial Love in Black and Brown was published by Penguin Press in 2024.
ENGL BC3110.01 Introduction to Poetry Writing - Brionne (Breezy) Janae
Tu 6:10pm - 8:00pm 406 BARNARD HALL
In this Introduction to Poetry workshop we’ll work on finding our voices while exploring the building blocks of poetry: language, the line and line break, musicality, form and function, timing, narrative and lyric elements, as well as experiments with translation. Together we’ll generate and workshop 6 poems each. And observe how what we learn manifests in our own writing and that of guiding poets such as Toi Derricotte, Ada Limón, Dianne Seuss, Shane McCrae, Vievee Francis, Cathy Linh Che and others.
Brionne (Breezy) Janae (bthompso@barnard.edu) is a poet and teaching artist living in Brooklyn. They are the recipient of the 2016 St. Botoloph Emerging Artist award, a Hedgebrook and Vermont Studio Center Alumni and proud Cave Canem Fellow. Their poetry and prose have been published by the Academy of American Poets, the American Poetry Review, the Sun Magazine, the Los Angeles Review, Rattle, Bitch Magazine, The Cincinnati Review, jubilat, Sixth Finch, Plume, Bayou Magazine, The Nashville Review, Waxwing, and Redivider among others. They are the author of Because You Were Mine (2023), Blessed Are the Peacemakers (which won the 2020 Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize), and After Jubilee.
ENGL BC3118.01 Advanced Poetry Writing - Patricia Spears Jones
Th 11:00am - 12:50pm 403 BARNARD HALL
Muriel Rukeyser remarked that “American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict.” Indeed, culture worldwide is in conflict. This course will explore “the necessity of poetry” from a phrase by Adrienne Rich. It is organized to ensure the development of new work and further study of poetic practice for committed student writers. We will examine mostly contemporary poetry using specific poetry collections from poets as varied as John Keene, Rosa Alcalá, Megan Fernandes, Harryette Mullen, Ilya Kaminsky and Emily Lee Luan as well as ancestors: Rich, June Jordan, Gertrude Stein. In the classroom, student poems and ideas about poetics are shared, questioned, and critiqued. These selected readings explore different strands of poetics that will inform the in-class and assigned prompts allowing student writers to expand their interrogation of the genre and its many forms. You will read, listen, write, and make your own voice seen and heard.
Patricia Spears Jones (pjones@barnard.edu) is a poet, playwright, educator, cultural activist, anthologist, and recipient of 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize. She is the author of A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems, three full-length collections, and five chapbooks. Her poems have been published in Plume, The New Yorker, and The Brooklyn Rail. Her essays, memoir, and interviews have been published in The Black Scholar, Bomb, www.tribes.org, Pangyrus, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Rumpus and The Writers Chronicle, among others. She curated programs at The Poetry Project of St. Marks Church and created WORDS Sunday series in Brooklyn. She has taught Creative Writing at Hunter College, Barnard College, Adelphi University and Hollins University as the 2020 Louis H. Rubin Writer in Residence. She received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts; New York Foundation for the Arts; Foundation of Contemporary Art; a Robert Rauschenberg Residency and residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Millay Colony, Yaddo, and the Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France via the BAU Institute. She is Emeritus Fellow for Black Earth Institute and organizer of the American Poets Congress. In May 2025, she received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Hartwick College.
We encourage you to give it a shot!
Best,
The First Year Team
