Spring 2019 Course Spotlight
October 24, 2018
We’re excited for the following spring 2019 courses being taught and organized by Sachs Program grant recipients!
Intro to Creative Writing: Writing and Performance
Janice Lowe, English 010.301, W 2:00-5:00 PM
This introductory creative writing workshop includes the study of interdisciplinary work. From the Beats to the Black Arts Movement to the Language poets, writing as a multimedia entity has offered exciting ground for experimentation. Through writing, discussion, and sound work, including recording studio time at Kelly Writers House’s Wexler Studio, you will explore hybrid, multimedia texts by twentieth- and twenty-first-century writer-performers and installation artists, including Márcio-André, Jonathan Skinner, Julie Patton (visual and sound), Joy Harjo, Anne Waldman, LaTasha N. Diggs, Douglas Kearney (sound), Ntozake Shange (theater, dance), Harmony Holiday (sound and dance), Kate Tempest, and Kendrick Lamar (hip-hop) as well as Tracie Morris and musician Susie Ibarra (text-sound collaboration). You will write and make your own experiments with writing, sound, and other media. Practice will include cross-genre collaboration, playing with possibilities of music-text interaction, and critical engagement.
“Art is essentially beyond category. This course’s immersive look at interdisciplinary art making is an invitation to student practitioners to explore hybridity as a possible response to this interconnected and global moment.” —Janice Lowe
Walt Whitman and the People’s Press
David Comberg and Catherine Turner, English 210.302, M 02:00-05:00 PM
Students will design and program a mobile poetry printing press, as part of the celebration of the 200th birthday of poet Walt Whitman.
“Inspired by Whitman at 200, a region-wide celebration, “Walt Whitman and the People’s Press” is a spring 2019 seminar that seeks to recognize the importance of Whitman as a printer, poet and activist.
In addition to traditional academic scholarship, students will be working with and as artists, responding to Whitman’s words and spirit in a range of methods and media. Artists participating with students include visual artists and printmakers to design and print broadsides, poets to write and perform readings, sound artists to compose spoken podcasts, and artist/designers to outfit, brand and program a mobile poetry printing facility.” —David Comberg
Creative Writing and World: Community Writing
Rachel Zolf, English 127.301, R 1:30-4:30 PM
Community Writing combines theory with practice: students will first study critical and creative writing pedagogy, and then visit a range of Philadelphia communities to write creatively together and form new kinds of community through writing. Students will have the opportunity to work and write with community members from Sayre High School, the FreeWrite Prison Writing Program, Mighty Writers West, the transcribez Writing Group for Trans and Gender Nonconforming Youth, the Write On! program with Lea middle school students, or the Writing a Life program at Kelly Writers House for people with cancer diagnoses. Community Writing is an Academically Based Community Service (ABCS) course.
“Like creative writing? Want to change how you think about education? Tired of folks not letting Philly speak for itself? We will study nonhierarchical creative writing teaching techniques, such as spoken word and hip-hop pedagogy, and we will learn how to develop community-appropriate creative writing prompts that inspire people to write. We will also study a number of classic texts in radical pedagogy and generate ideas about how to harness the power of education—and creative writing in particular—for personal and social change.” —Rachel Zolf