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Online workshop course. Historical and contemporary as a broad genre including travel and nature writing, memoir, biography, journalism, and the personal essay. Students use creative means to express factual content.

Issues of poetic craft. How elements of form, music, structure, and content work together to create meaning and experience in a poem.

In this poetry workshop, students will write and read closely, exploring various aspects of poetic craft, including imagery, metaphor and simile, line, stanza, music, rhythm, diction, and tone. The course reading will focus on the rich diversity of contemporary poetry from the global Black diaspora, with a special emphasis on poetry that investigates the intersections of race, cultural identity, nationhood, gender, and sexuality. Note: No prior knowledge of Black poetry and poetics is required.

This writing-intensive workshop will explore the tradition of love poetry, paying attention to how poets have represented the amorous and the erotic in their work - powerful longing, steamy encounters, devastating break-ups - from ancient times to today. As we analyze and interpret the ways poems can record shifting attitudes toward sex, gender, queerness, and relationships, we will also focus on the creative process: generating a sequence of our own poems and developing practical writing skills in group poetry workshops.

Online workshop course in which students explore issues of poetic craft. How elements of form, music, structure, and content work together to create meaning and experience in a poem.

From Whitman to Kerouac, Alec Soth to Georgia O'Keeffe, the lure of travel has inspired many American artists to pack up their bags and hit the open road. In this course we will be exploring the art and literature of the great American road trip. We will be reading and writing in a variety of genres, workshopping our own personal projects, and considering a wide breadth of narrative approaches. Assignments will range from reading Cormac McCarthy's novel, 'The Road,' to listening to Bob Dylan's album, 'Highway 61 Revisited.' We will be looking at films like 'Badlands' and 'Thelma and Louise,' acquainting ourselves with contemporary photographers, going on a number of campus-wide field trips, and finishing the quarter with an actual road trip down the California coast. Anyone with a sense of adventure is welcome!

Gender is one of the great social issues of our time. What does it mean to be female or feminine? How has femininity been defined, performed, punished, or celebrated? Writers are some of our most serious and eloquent investigators of these questions, and in this class we'll read many of our greatest writers on the subject of femininity, as embodied by both men and women, children and adults, protagonists and antagonists. From Virginia Woolf to Ernest Hemingway, from Beloved to Gone Girl (and even "RuPaul's Drag Race"), we'll ask how the feminine is rendered and contested. We'll do so in order to develop a history and a vocabulary of femininity so that we may, in this important time, write our own way in to the conversation. This is first and foremost a creative writing class, and our goals will be to consider in our own work the importance of the feminine across the entire spectrum of gender, sex, and identity. We will also study how we write about femininity, using other writers as models and inspiration. As we engage with these other writers, we will think broadly and bravely, and explore the expressive opportunities inherent in writing. We will explore our own creative practices through readings, prompted exercises, improv, games, collaboration, workshop, and revision, all with an eye toward writing the feminine future.

The Wizard of Oz is one of our most enduring - and durable - American fantasies. The book has been adapted or translated by nearly every culture in the world. This course will investigate the longevity of this classic tale. What drives our fascination with the tale of a lost child? What attracts us to the idea of the wizard? Is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz a cautionary tale, a story of everyday heroes, a premonition of the horrors of the 20th-century, or all of the above? We'll investigate the many iterations of this powerful fable, from the original novel to its musical counterparts. Students will have the opportunity to write a research-based analysis of a version or versions of the story, or to work creatively on a memoir or short story project. This course will coincide with the release of the second "act" of Wicked, which we'll attend together.

Infectious diseases are too small to see and too large to fathom. Biologically, microscopic invaders, viruses even smaller than our cells, can travel across the planet and infect billions of humans. Socially, individual contacts have the potential to devastate families, fracture communities, and decimate whole civilizations. How can we comprehend, let alone make meaningful decisions about, complex multi-scale systems of people and pathogens?The main way we try to understand infectious diseases is putting them into other forms that straddle these scales, in short, representing them. To address the resulting representational problems, this course explores a range of scientific and cultural representations of disease. We will ask: What are the underlying assumptions and limits made in our attempts to describe a pathogen spreading through a population? How can board games, mathematical models, and oral histories show the randomness behind catastrophic outbreaks? Or, how might a network model illustrate the way HIV spreads among characters in a novel? How does the epidemiological case study rely on the same principles as tabloid stories about "superspreaders" like Typhoid Mary?The goal of the course is to understand and critique the ways infectious disease is represented, and especially to understand what and who is excluded in different modes of representation. This course is appropriate for students interested in public health, medicine, life writing, science writing, history of science, and media studies. In addition to scientific papers, course material will include plays, poems, board games, comics, novels, oral narratives, and newspaper articles.