The Virginia G. Piper
Center for Creative Writing

Most authors know how to write—until it comes to writing about themselves and their work. This intensive workshop will go through the ins and outs of writing a query letter, synopsis, and creating an in-person pitch from the perspective of an acquiring editor. In the second week, students will have the opportunity to share their work, get feedback, and leave with all the skills to get their submission package to the top of the pile.

The area of creative writing that is literary memoir has the potential of creating a historical narrative. Channeling the chronology of US history, write your own family history. Whether a descendant of the early British settlers or later and more recent immigrants, or descendent of enslaved Africans or a Native nation, the individual story is a unit of social history. After oral presentations of individual stories, write a brief narrative. Voluntary readings and critiques follow.

How can poetics serve our most socially urgent writing? Writing about race [for example] is a polemic,” writes Cathy Park Hong, “but also a lyric, in that our inner consciousness is knotted with contradictions.” To investigate this convergence, this course explores the creative nonfiction resistance essay. We will read contemporary works by Aisha Sabatini Sloan, José Orduña, Sarah de Leeuw, and Lina María Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas—and, in honor the essay’s genre-defying roots, we will also read hybrid/fluid/genre-contested works by writers such as Tommy Pico and Claudia Rankine.