Teaching

University of Washington, Bothell (2012-present)

BCWRIT 501: “Between Fact and Imagination”

Srikanth Reddy, Voyager

As the second required creative writing workshop for the MFA core curriculum, this course addresses diverse definitions and understandings of fact and imagination and how these figure into creative works. Students explore work by a number of contemporary writers for whom invention is spurred by, and in some cases supplanted by, research and even appropriation. Mapping a poetics of contemporary modes where fact and imagination intersect (through documentary poetics and conceptualism, to procedural writing) students develop a repertoire of techniques for grappling with the slippage between fact and imagination—a starting point from which to create.

BISIA 483: “Advanced Arts Workshop: Chapbooks and Artists’ Books”

This interdisciplinary writing workshop explores the juncture between writing and the hand-made book. Through experimental writing exercises and hands-on bookbinding tutorials, students consider the way a poem’s form and content might be put into fruitful dialogue. Students learn several bindings and attempt to write into and against them, creating new structures of their own along the way. By intertwining a study of artists’ books and chapbooks, students push their writing practice and engage with contemporary small-press publishing.

BISIA 401: “Literary and Arts Journal”

Clamor 2013 cover by Vildana Ramic

This course provides students the opportunity to learn about publishing by serving as the editorial and production staff of Clamor, UW Bothell’s Literary and Arts Journal. Students gain skills in communication, assessing and editing literary texts, layout design, technology for creating and disseminating multi-media work, project management, and teamwork.

BISIA 310: “Creative Writing: Poetry”

Harryette Mullen, “Sleeping With the Dictionary”

The goal of this workshop is to encourage students to see themselves as part of a larger conversation in contemporary poetry. We read recent books (the reading list changes each quarter) by writers who are pushing the boundaries of the lyric poem as part of the dialogue surrounding the place of the “personal” in poetry, including a range of experimental approaches, from typographic and visual methods that perform on the page, to “somatic exercises” that make bodily performance part of the act of writing, to persona and constraint poems that allow the poet to speak in another’s voice. In considering what the various forms of their writing enable these poets to do, we lay a foundation for talking about what we each want to do in our writing.

BIS 208: “Experimenting Through the Arts: Visual Poetry and Poetics”

Kay Rosen, Leak (1997)

This class explores the way artists and writers have used visual approaches to text for social, political, and aesthetic ends. Examining and experimenting alongside creative works that challenge the dichotomy between art and language, students will consider the ways words can be visual and images can be legible.

BISIA 207: “Introduction to Creative Writing: Words, Stories, Dialogues”

The Verve, “Bittersweet Symphony,” music video

This introductory class asks students to examine how writers, historically and across genres, create a self in literature, whether through confession, persona, unreliable narrator, pastiche, or any number of devices. Students learn to develop regular writing habits, read one another’s work generously, and cultivate an engagement with language and sense of play. They also ask fundamental questions about the nature of self and self-representation in art.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2010-2012)

21W.762: “Poetry Workshop”

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”

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”

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.