Course Description
Workshops are a central mode of learning in creative writing programs. In this course, we will study the history of creative writing workshops in the United States and contribute to ongoing efforts to decolonize the poetry workshop and cultivate more anti-racist and feminist approaches to feedback. Throughout the semester, students will develop and revise original poems and facilitate at least two workshops of their writing. By the end of the course, each student should also expect to complete a workshop philosophy (4-5 pages), a craft essay (4-5 pages), a chapbook of original poems (10 pages), and a press kit. This graduate course will also consider practical dimensions of creative writing, such as submitting your work for publication, promoting your work, and earning positive relationships with writing mentors. For students who are writing creative theses or dissertations, this course is designed to help you produce poems as well as useable content for your critical introduction. For students who are not writing creative theses or dissertations, this course will energize your scholarship with creative modes of inquiry, expressive tools, and diverse writing community.
Student Learning Outcomes
- Build a safe and brave writing community and the tools for continuing that community beyond the course.
- Refine and develop a critical vocabulary for your writing practice while you draft and share a chapbok-length poetry project.
- Demonstrate written and oral ability to place creative work within broader artistic, critical, and/or activist traditions.
- Engage frameworks and writing practices that are attentive to our cultural location in Hawaiʻi.
- Cultivate and apply foundational knowledge of creative writing workshop history, with an emphasis on anti-racist, decolonial, and feminist approaches of the last thirty years.
- Advance close reading skills that articulate connections between craft, audience, and culture with a range of texts.