Creative Writing Studies
This semester I’m teaching a graduate seminar aimed at providing an introduction to the institutional and cultural contexts of “creative writing” as a specific discipline. Our overarching goal is to familiarize ourselves with the contemporary landscape by studying, discussing, and writing around current key issues in the field. Given the limitations of a fifteen week schedule, I decided to focus our attention on five main issues: race, gender, genre, pedagogy, and publishing. Here are the nine books I assigned:
- Citizen Claudia Rankine Graywolf Press (2014)
- Bad Feminist Roxane Gay Harper Perennial (2014)
- Fiction’s Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation Eds. R.M. Berry & Jeffrey R. Di Leo State University of New York Press (2007)
- Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction Eds. Margot Singer & Nicole Walker Bloomsbury; 1 edition (2013)
- The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults Joyelle McSweeney University of Michigan Press (2014)
- Uncreative Writing Kenneth Goldsmith Columbia University Press (2011)
- Architectures of Possibility: After Innovative Writing Eds. Lance Olsen & Trevor Dodge Guide Dog Books (2012)
- Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century John B. Thompson Plume; 2 edition (2012)
- The Little Magazine in Contemporary America Eds. Ian Morris & Joanne Diaz University Of Chicago Press (2015)
Image: Christopher Wool’s “Studio, Marfa, Texas” (2008) (via The Guggenheim)