General Resources
- Words Without Borders Campus (good for models)
- The Paris Review “The Art of …” series (good for manuals)
- Poets and Writers
- AWP
- Writer Magazine Link
- Anne Lamott “Shitty First Drafts” Link
- Revision: Peter Ho Davies
- Readings from a previous semester class based on Students choices. All works listed are available for free online). Document below.
- OER Creative Writing Textbook Write or Left Sybil Priebe. Link
Craft
- Matthew Salesses “25 essential notes on craft” Link
- “Redefining craft terms (ongoing)” Link
- Rivka Galchen and Zoe Heller “Can Writing be Taught?” Link
- James Baldwin “the Creative Process” Link
- Joan Didion “On Keeping a Notebook” Link
- Mary Gannon and Kevin Larimer “How Having a Community stimulates creativity”
- Annie Dillard “write til you drop” Link
Poetry
General
Poetry Foundation
Academy of American Poets
Manuals
- Adrienne Rich “Someone is Writing a Poem” Link
- Rachel Richardson “Learning Image and Description” Link
- Rebecca Hazelton “Learning the Poetic Line” Link
- Ursula K Le Guin “In pursuit of the Gorgeous sound of Language” Link
- Matthew Zapruder “Understanding Poetry is more Straightforward than you think” Link
- Maggie Smith “How to Revise Poems without losing the initial spark” link
- Barbara Guest “Invisible Architecture” Link
Models
- Baseball and Writing” by Marianne Moore
- Natalie Diaz “My Brother at 3 A.M.”
- Elizabeth Acevedo “Rat Ode”
- Edna St. Vincent Millay “Sonnet XLIII”
- Rafael Campo “Love Songs for Love Songs”
- Sarah Kay and Phil Kaye “When Love Arrives”
- Walt Whitman “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
- Olivia Gatwood “Backpedal”
- Hieu Minh Nguyen “Confessional” Link
- Terrance Hayes, “American Sonnet for my Past and Future Assassin [I lock you in an american sonnet that is part prison]. Link
- Melissa Lozada Oliva, “Yolanda and Selena don’t talk anymore” Link/Picture of Poem Form Link
- Claudia Rankine, “From Citizen, VI [My brothers are notorious]”: Link
Fiction
Manuals
- Zadie Smith “That Crafty Feeling” Link
- Wayne C Booth “What Every Novelist needs to know about Narrators” Link
- David Corbett “How to Craft Compelling Characters” Link
- Emily Barton “Literary or Genre, it’s the plot that counts” Link
- Teddy Wayne “Tips for Writing Great Dialogue” Link
- Charles Johnson “The art of revision: most of what you write should be cut” Link
- Kerrie Flanagan “The Long and Short of the short story form” Link
- Joan Didion “Why I write” Link
- George Orwell “Why I write” Link
Models
Flash Fiction
- George Saunders “Sticks”
- Sofia Samatar “The Huntress”
- Victoria McCurdy “This is How you Fail to Ghost him”
- Virginia Wolf “A Haunted House”
- Sejal Shah “Curriculum”
- Ed Park “The Wife on Ambien”
- Lydia Davis “The Visitor”
- Eric Cofer “Sorry Dan, but it’s no longer necessary for a human to serve as CEO of this company”
- Peter Orner “My Dead”
- Joyce Carol Oats “Where are you?”
Drama
- Scene from Suzan Lori Parks “Topdog | Underdog”
- Scene from Phoebe Waller-Bridge “Fleabag” (play version)
Short Stories/Excerpts
- Aoko Matsuda, “Smartening Up” Link
- Elif Batuman, The Idiot excerpt Link
- Jamil Jan Kochai, “Playing Solid V: The Phantom Pain” Link
- Victor LaValle excerpt from The Changeling Link
- Nicole Dennis-Benn excerpt from Here Comes the Sun Link
- Sally Rooney, Normal People Excerpt Link
Creative Nonfiction
General
Manuals
- Toni Morrison “the Site of Memory” Link
- Liz Stephens “Lies I Tell my Nonfiction Students” Link
- Jill McCabe Johnson “Getting Lost — and Found — in Personal Essays” Link\
- Sonya Huber “The Sounds of Your Self” Link
- Heather Lanier “Getting honest about Om: A Brief Essay on Audience” Link
- Roy Peter Clark “the Line between fact and fiction” Link
- Lee Gutkind “The 5 Rs of Creative Nonfiction”
- “The Lyric Essay” by Deborah Tall and John D’Agata Link
Models
Short Essays/Excerpts
- Abigail Thomas “How to Do Nothing”
- Habibe Jafarian “How to be a Woman in Tehran”
- Kenyon Review Short Nonfiction Link
- Colson Whitehead the colossus Link
Long form Essays
- Esme Weijun Wang “Perdition Days: on experiencing psychosis” Link
- Michelle Zauner, “Crying in H Mart” Link
- Marjane Satrapi “the Veil” from Persepolis Link