Massachusetts Institute of Technology
21W.762: “Poetry Workshop,” Spring 2012.
Cotner and Fitch, Ten Walks/Two Talks
The goal of this intermediate writing workshop is to encourage students to see themselves as part of a larger writing community, both at the Institute and beyond it. To that end we emphasize revision, reading contemporary work, attending readings, and collaborating with peers. Students work in groups to curate a web-based chapbook of contemporary writers, write and present weekly poems, and respond to recently-published books by younger poets.
CMS 405: “The Material Text: Towards a Visual Poetics,” Fall 2011
Tom Philips, A Humument
This class explores the way artists and writers have historically used visual approaches to text for social, political, and aesthetic ends. Taking poetry as our case study, we examine visual writing practices from a historical and cross-cultural perspective to ask what is at stake in the mediation and remediation of text. Students engage in both critical reading and analysis of texts and hands-on creative projects.
21W.772: “Digital Poetry,” Spring 2011
Jhave, "Death" (2009)
This workshop investigates the theory and practice of new media poetry, exploring the idioms inherent in the technologies through which poetry can be created. Each week we examine works of digital poetry, tracing their aesthetic principles across the arts to see them in relation to historic and contemporary work. Students create their own work in response to these pieces, which we discuss using a taxonomy of terms generated by our exploration of other texts.
University of Southern California
The Loudest Voice Workshop, Fall 2009
This cross-genre undergraduate workshop, hosted by The Loudest Voice reading series, offers students an intimate community in which to share work outside of the English department’s courses. In 2009, I team-taught the class with Andrew Allport. In addition to supportive critique, we offer students advice about graduate study, publishing, and making writing part of their daily lives.
ENGL 599: “Chapbooks and Artists’ Books,” Fall 2009
In this special topics seminar for poets in the Ph.D. program, which I team-taught with Genevieve Kaplan, we examine the history of chapbooks and artists’ books, considering the relationship between form and content in print media and the changing needs of publishers and the reading public. We merge scholarship and creative work, binding our own limited-edition chapbooks, visiting hand-made book collections in Los Angeles, and hosting guest lectures by Johanna Drucker and Marjorie Perloff.
Earlier
- ENGL 299: “Introduction to the Genre of Poetry: From Shakespeare to Hip Hop,” Teaching Assistant to Professor Susan McCabe, USC, Fall 2008.
- Consultant, The Writing Center, USC, Jan. 2007 – May 2007.
- ENGL 599: “Altered Egos: Found, Purloined, and Plagiarized Poetry,” team-taught with Andrew Allport, USC, Fall 2006.
- WRIT 140, The Writing Program, USC, Aug. 2005 – Dec. 2006 and Jan. 2009 – May 2009.
- Lab Assistant, Otis Laboratory Press, Otis College of Art and Design, August 2007 – August 2009.