January 2023 Workshops

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                                                    4 credits • 3 weeks

                 Introductory and Intermediate Workshops in Creative Writing

The NYU Creative Writing Program is excited to welcome Thea Matthews, Wo Chan and Emily Skillings to our faculty this winter, along with our beloved fiction instructor Eliza Minot.

INTRODUCTORY WORKSHOPS

This workshop offers an exciting introduction to the basic elements of poetry and fiction—with in-class writing, take-home reading and writing assignments, and substantive discussions of craft. The course is structured as a workshop, which means that students will receive feedback from their instructor and their fellow writers in a roundtable setting, and should be prepared to offer their classmates responses to their work. No prerequisite. 4 points.

CRWRI-UA 815.001: TWRF, 2:00pm-4:55pm 
Introduction to Prose & Poetry
* In-Person Workshop *
Thea Matthews
Provisional Syllabus
Thea Matthews is a poet of African and Indigenous Mexican descent born and raised on Ohlone land, San Francisco, California. She holds an MFA in poetry from New York University and earned her BA in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her poetry has appeared in Southern Indiana Review, Interim, The Rumpus, Tahoma Literary Review, Foglifter Journal, The New Republic, Green Mountains Review, and others.  She has been nominated for Best New Poets in 2022 and Best of the Net in 2021. Her collaboration with micro press & reading series Red Light Lit led to the publication of her book Unearth [The Flowers] in 2020, which was listed as part of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Indie Poetry of 2020. Currently, Thea is also an assistant content producer at the Academy of American Poets and teaches poetry at the Writing Salon. She lives on the land of the Lenape, Brooklyn.

CRWRI-UA 815. 002: TWRF, 2:00pm-4:55pm  
Intro to Creative Writing: Popular Music, Poetry and Prose
* In-Person Workshop *
Wo Chan
Wo Chan, who performs as The Illustrious Pearl, is a poet and drag artist. They are a winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and the author of Togetherness (2022). Wo has received fellowships from MacDowell, New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Poets House, and Lambda Literary. Their poems appear in POETRY, WUSSY, Mass Review, No Tokens, The Margins, and elsewhere. As a member of the Brooklyn-based drag/burlesque collective Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at venues including The Whitney Museum of American Art, National Sawdust, New York Live Arts, and the Architectural Digest Expo. Find them at @theillustriouspearl. 

INTERMEDIATE WORKSHOPS

The intermediate workshops offer budding prose writers and poets an opportunity to continue their pursuit of writing through workshops that focus on a specific genre. The workshops also integrate in-depth craft discussions and extensive outside reading to deepen students’ understanding of the genre and broaden their knowledge of the evolution of literary forms and techniques. Prerequisite: CRWRI-UA 815, OR CRWRI-UA 818, OR CRWRI-UA 9818, OR CRWRI-UA 9828, OR CRWRI-UA 820, OR CRWRI-UA 860 or equivalent. 4 points. Ask about prerequisite waivers at creative.writing@nyu.edu. 

Intermediate Fiction Workshop 
CRWRI-UA 816 001,  TWRF, 2:00pm-4:55pm
* In-Person Workshop *
Eliza Minot  
This workshop will focus on voice. Through reading one another’s work and thoughtfully responding to it, consistently writing new pages, and absorbing and discussing outside readings, we will attempt to join up with the voice within us that is most effective and most engaging. All writers have their varying issues. While one writer might be struggling with issues surrounding character, another might be hung up on problems with pacing, while someone else is overly lyrical to the point of distraction or is grappling with having absolutely nothing to say. In this workshop we will learn from each other what we, both as writers and as readers, respond to. We will encourage one another to write as freely as possible to get the words on the page, and then, from there, we will hopefully begin to discover where it is we would like to be heading.

Intermediate Poetry Workshop
CRWRI-UA 817 001, TWRF, 2:00pm-4:55pm
* In-Person Workshop *
Emily Skillings 
In the Bestiary: Reading and Writing the Animal Poem
It blinds itself. Rolled up in a ball, prickly with spines, vulnerable and dangerous… No poem without accident, no poem that does not open itself like a wound, but no poem that is not also just as wounding. 
-- Jacques Derrida (on the poem as hedgehog) 
In this intensive class, poets will encounter and explore poems that make animals their subject (or magic ingredient)--from antiquity to the romantic poets to the modernists and beyond--taking cues from writers both contemporary, canonical, and overlooked. This course will use the animal poem to track different poetic/political movements and experiment with various poetic forms. Students will leave the class with a portfolio of 6-8 revised poems. 
 

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