Combining seminar and workshop formats, the course introduces students to the art and craft of writing poetry. Students experiment with a variety of poetic forms, read the work of poets from many eras, study versification and free verse, expand their range of subjects, and explore different strategies of revision. By the end of the semester, students will assemble a portfolio of their original poetry. May be used to satisfy an elective unit for the Creative Writing Focus.

Combining seminar and workshop formats, the course introduces students to the interstices of imagination and narrative theory. Students read examples of literary fiction and write several short stories of their own. Students also take one or more stories through deep revision. May be used to satisfy an elective unit for the Creative Writing Focus.

This course immerses students in the craft of journalism to develop the skills and critical discernment required for writing as a journalist. The course is designed to equip students with an understanding of what news is, help students develop the two key journalism skills of reporting and writing of the news, and engage students in critically examining journalists' responsibilities in reporting and shaping public understanding and opinion. The course will introduce the fundamentals of journalistic writing, interviewing, and editing, as well as journalism ethics.

This course is designed for students who intend to pursue a major or minor in English, and should be taken in the first or second year, or as soon as an English major is declared. The course provides a foundation for the study of literature through reading, analyzing, and writing about a variety of literary and non-literary texts.

Discoveries about Covid-19, climate change, CRISPR, and the Webb Space Telescope all demand thoughtful translators between the science that has produced the research and the public that is curious about them. This is the task of the reporter and writer who covers the science beat, inclusive of science, health, the environment, and technology. Science Journalism develops skills of translation and interpretation: how to identify, report, and write stories about science, health, the environment, and technology for the public.

This course for non-majors examines the work of women writers anywhere from the Medieval Period to the present, with attention to the historical and cultural context of texts. It asks such questions as the following: what are the canonical issues that arise from a study of women's literature? Is women's literature different from literature by men in some essential way? What forces have worked against women writers and what strategies have they often employed to make their voices heard? How have those strategies shaped the literature that women have produced?

Participation in Crosscurrents, the student literary and visual arts magazine, requires reading manuscripts, discussing submitted work, and collaboratively selecting the literature and visual art work that will appear in each semester's issue. Required weekly meetings also involve active promotion and publicizing of Crosscurrents and managing the Crosscurrents organization as a whole.

Under faculty supervision, students create academic and community programming to strengthen the English major.

This non-majors course is an exploration of graphic narratives, which bring together the verbal and visual as a way of telling a story. The course begins by investigating the nature and grammar of comics: How do graphic narratives work? What techniques and strategies do writer-artists use to produce meaning? In what ways do colors, shapes, panels, borders, gutters, perspective, page-layout, and speech bubbles influence content? What is the role of the reader in constructing meaning from these verbal and visual texts? How does literary analysis inform our readings of the verbal and visual?

This course examines the origins, rise, and prevalence of true crime narratives. Emerging from execution sermons, sensational journalism, and hard-boiled detective fiction, true crime is legitimated by Truman Capote's 1966 In Cold Blood, which sets in motion a wave of serious and even literary works dealing with criminality and violence. Recent decades have seen the rapid expansion of the genre via multiple media including weekly television "newsmagazines," documentary films and series, and, of course, podcasts.