Creative Writing and Literature
Undergraduate Program
The Bachelor of Liberal Arts degree is designed for industry professionals with years of work experience who wish to complete their degrees part time, both on campus and online, without disruption to their employment. Our typical student is over 30, has previously completed one or two years of college, and works full time.
Students enrolled in the Master of Liberal Arts program in Creative Writing & Literature will develop skills in creative writing and literary analysis through literature courses and writing workshops in fiction, screenwriting, poetry, and nonfiction. Through online group courses and one-on-one tutorials, as well as a week on campus, students hone their craft and find their voice.
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Creative Writing Tips from Harvard’s Faculty
Harvard’s English faculty hosts a powerhouse of acclaimed creative writers. As lecturers and professors, they devote countless hours to passing on the skills of their craft to students. The Crimson asked four faculty members who teach fiction-writing classes to share their creative writing wisdom.
“You can make an entire world up in your head and transmit it to other people with scribbles on a page,” said Claire Messud, a Senior Lecturer. “Making up stories is open to all of us.” While not every Harvard student will have the opportunity to take their classes, anyone can try their hand at creative writing.
Start small, and make time to write.
Paul Yoon, Briggs-Copeland Lecturer, in an email: Start small. Oftentimes when we have an “idea” to write something, we’re operating on a level that is somewhat abstract and leans on the bigger picture. How to begin a story you want to tell? I like starting with just one sentence or focusing on an object or a specific detail, like describing setting or one character trait. Just that. Go micro, focus. Start small. And go step by step from there.
Claire Messud, Senior Lecturer: Learning the habit of making time for writing is the challenge for many people. Almost everybody makes time to exercise now. It’s just the same—you can say, I’m going to sit at my desk for an hour, or write until I have 200 words. You just make a plan. If you do something several times a week for weeks and months, you will get better at it.
Imagine the iceberg, not just the tip.
CM: It isn’t just about figuring out a plot and characters. It’s about really imagining the world, circumstances, and particularities of those characters and that situation—not just what’s going to appear on the page, but the entire world. Hemingway speaks about the tip of the iceberg. The tip of the iceberg is what the story is, but there’s an entire iceberg under the water. You have to make the iceberg to make the story.
Revise for clarity.
Laura M. van den Berg, Briggs-Copeland Lecturer, in an email: In my experience, a common struggle for students is the discomfort of sitting with the uncertainty of the first draft—i.e. I’m not sure where this story is going, I don’t know what this character is up to, I don’t know how it will end . Sometimes students worry that this not-knowing is a sign that they’re doing something wrong, when the not-knowing is very often an essential part of the process.
I tend to write my own drafts very quickly and messily and intuitively—and then spend a lot of time re-shaping and re-casting and re-imagining. In the first draft, the most important question I ask myself is “Why not?“ For every draft after the first, the question is, “Why?”
CM: Revision is really at least 50 percent of the work. Some of the things to think about: How much of what’s in my head have I conveyed on the paper? Have I been clear? It’s great to be beautiful or lyrical or inventive, but none of it matters if you haven’t expressed clearly what you wanted to express. The process of revision is about a clarification and a distillation. If you have three scenes, each of which does one thing, can you figure out a way to have one scene that will do all three things?
Read as if living depended on it.
Jamaica Kincaid, Professor of African and African American Studies in Residence, in an email: It is more important that you read than to write because when you are writing you have first read what you are writing before you write it. So the best thing, so it seems to me, for a writer is to read as if living depended on it. Nothing else really matters.
LMV: If you want to write poems or short stories or essays or novels, it is critically important to have read deeply in the genre—from the canon to what the canon has missed to what’s being written right now to everything in-between. And of course writers should also read expansively, roaming outside the genres they themselves work in.
PY: Always be open to inspiration. “Best American Short Stories” is a fantastic anthology. In terms of literary magazines, I think my current favorite, the ones that feel bold and ambitious and the ones I consistently want to pick up are: Tin House, A Public Space, and Ecotone. Books and stories are our best teachers.
Take your time during the publishing process.
LMV: Take your time getting to know the landscape. Read literary magazines and get a feel for who regularly publishes work that you love. Pay attention to where writers you admire have published/are publishing their work. Make sure you have given your work everything you have before you send it out into the world—an editor (almost always) is only going to read the piece once. Mightily resist the urge to rush.
No writing is wasted.
CM: No writing is a waste of time. You can always write better, and any writing you do is going to teach you how to write. You just have to dive in. You have to be unafraid. The language is ours. What a great freedom.
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Creative Writing
Creative Writing Master Class with Kadahj Bennett
About the creative writing thread.
The Creative Writing thread incorporates Poetry, Print Pressing (word art), Creative Writing, Screen and Script Writing, Fiction Writing, Comedic Improv, and much more. All students will be able to participate in the Creative Writing Masterclass, Keynote Speaker, and Information Session about curricular and extra-curricular Creative Writing opportunities at Harvard. We will also be offering some smaller form elective Workshops in the discipline.
Resident Artist: Kadahj Bennett
Kadahj is performer/writer/musician/spoken word artist. Recent credits include Tyler from THE HALLS (web series, Beyond Measure Productions), and Hank from HOW WE GOT ON (Company One). Kadahj is a Posse Scholar, graduate of Hamilton College and Boston Arts Academy alum. Currently a teaching artist in the Boston area, Kadahj moonlights as a lyricist/vocalist for two bands, Danceluja (Boston) & the Downbeat Keys (Brooklyn).
Harvard Undergraduate Creative Writing Collective
Become part of our vibrant community..
The Harvard Undergraduate Creative Writing Collective is concerned with filling the gap in the creative writing community on Harvard’s campus. Through mentorship, drop-in hours, networking events, book clubs, workshop events, speaker series, and service opportunities, we ultimately seek to create a radically inclusive, tight-knit community for writers of all kinds on campus (& beyond), by: • Providing support and accountability for writers working on projects • Connecting writers with publishers, nonprofits, grants, and each other • Organizing writing & non-writing related events & programming • Partnering with other creative orgs at Harvard • Serving the greater Boston community
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Authors’ aerie.
Fiction and poetry books by creative writing faculty members line the hallway of the new space atop Lamont Library dedicated to the Department of English’s creative writing program.
Photos by Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard Staff Photographer
A new bright, open, inviting home complements the creative writing program
Faculty and students have settled into the new home of creative writing atop Lamont Library. The bright, windowed fourth-floored space featuring a workshop conference room and faculty offices is a move up from the basement of the Barker Center, where most of the program, which is part of the English Department, was previously housed. Michael Pollan, the Lewis K. Chan Arts Lecturer and professor of the practice of non-fiction; Claire Messud, the Joseph Y. Bae and Janice Lee Senior Lecturer on Fiction; Musa Syeed; and Darcy Frey, Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser Director of Creative Writing, are among those who lead small workshops in genres such as fiction, playwriting, nonfiction, screenwriting, and poetry.
“Creative writing has long been at the heart of the Harvard art-making community,” said Frey. “With the Lamont space, we’re now at the heart of the actual campus. A writer — student or otherwise — would be hard put to find more inspiring views than the ones we have from our fourth-floor aerie: sunlight, clouds, the tops of steeples. We feel like we’re looking out on a sky painted by Constable.”
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Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence,” is professor of the practice in Harvard’s creative writing program.
Claire Messud, author of “The Emperor’s Children” and “The Woman Upstairs,” is a senior lecturer in the English Department and host of the Writers Speak series at the Mahindra Humanities Center.
Comfortable chairs for reading are situated at the end of the corridor.
Jamie Halper ’20 (left) and Katherine Li ’21 focus during Frey’s writers’ workshop.
Students, including Pranati Parikh ’21 (right), discuss each other’s work.
Ph.D. student Grigori Guitchounts (left) and Meena Venkataramanan ’21 discuss personal essays around the conference room table.
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Guide to the ALM Capstone Project
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Creative Writing and Literature Capstone
The capstone course for Creative Writing and Literature, CREA E-599, directly follows the precapstone course, CREA E-597, in which students built the world of their books and produced the first story or chapter of them.
The Creative Writing and Literature program offers two capstone sequences: fiction (section 1) and fiction or nonfiction (section 2).
CREA E-599 (Sections 1 and 3): Capstone: Developing the Manuscript: Fiction provides you with an opportunity to complete an additional two stories or chapters of your manuscript for a total of 50-60 pages of original fiction—the equivalent of a thesis.
CREA E-599 (Section 2): Capstone: Developing the Manuscript: Fiction and Non-Fiction offers you the opportunity to complete an additional two stories, essays, or chapters of your manuscript for a total of 50-60 pages of original fiction or non-fiction—the equivalent of a thesis.
The capstone sequence provides you with a supportive writing community over the academic year. Your instructor will guide and facilitate workshops as you write your capstone project, and you and your peers will offer feedback for each other in lively group discussion. This environment allows you the opportunity to develop your work while learning from each other in an active and engaging way.
Prerequisites
Registration is limited to officially admitted candidates in the Master of Liberal Arts, creative writing and literature, who have successfully completed the precapstone course, CREA E-597, with the same instructor in the previous fall term. Candidates must be in good academic standing with all degree course requirements successfully completed by the end of the fall term. The only exception to this is the on-campus summer residency which may be completed after the capstone. No other course registration is allowed simultaneously with the capstone. Candidates who do not meet these requirements are dropped from the course.
CREA E-599 (Sections 1 and 3): Capstone: Developing the Manuscript: Fiction
Elizabeth Ames, MFA Katie Beth Kohn, MA
CREA E-599 (Sections 2 and 4): Capstone: Developing the Manuscript: Fiction or Nonfiction
Leah De Forest, MFA, Writer Thomas Wisniewski, PhD, Associate of the Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University
- Course Sequencing
- CREA E-599 (Sections 1 and 3): Capstone: Developing the Manuscript: Fiction
- CREA E-599 (Sections 2 and 4): Capstone: Developing the Manuscript: Fiction or Nonfiction
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Harvard University MA in Creative Writing
How much does a master’s in creative writing from harvard cost, harvard graduate tuition and fees.
| In State | Out of State | |
|---|---|---|
| Tuition | $49,448 | $49,448 |
| Fees | $1,206 | $1,206 |
Does Harvard Offer an Online MA in Creative Writing?
Harvard master’s student diversity for creative writing, male-to-female ratio.
Of the students who received their master’s degree in creative writing in 2019-2020, 50.0% of them were women. This is less than the nationwide number of 66.6%.
Racial-Ethnic Diversity
Around 16.7% of creative writing master’s degree recipients at Harvard in 2019-2020 were awarded to racial-ethnic minorities*. This is lower than the nationwide number of 24%.
| Race/Ethnicity | Number of Students |
|---|---|
| Asian | 2 |
| Black or African American | 0 |
| Hispanic or Latino | 0 |
| Native American or Alaska Native | 0 |
| Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander | 0 |
| White | 10 |
| International Students | 0 |
| Other Races/Ethnicities | 0 |
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Content tagged with Faculty
Education: B.A., University of California, Berkeley (2014) M.A., Harvard University (2016) Ph.D., Harvard (2023) Interests: Asian American Literature, 20 th & 21 st -century Global Anglophone Literature, Affect Theory, Media Studies
Reginald Dwayne Betts
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, lawyer, and the Founder & CEO of Freedom Reads, an initiative to radically transform access to literature in prisons.
The author of a memoir and three collections of poetry, he has transformed his latest collection of...
Andrew Krivak
Education: B.A., St. John's College, Annapolis (1986)
M.F.A., Columbia University (1990)
Ph.D., Rugers University (2003)
Interests: Fiction Writing
Selected Works: ...
Raven Leilani
Raven Leilani is the author of Luster. Leilani is a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, the recipient of the 2020 Kirkus Prize, VCU Cabell Prize, NBCC John Leonard Prize, Dylan Thomas Prize, Clark Fiction Prize, and Center for Fiction first novel...
Melissa Cundieff
Education: B.A. 2009 Arizona State University M.F.A. 2012 Vanderbilt University
Interests: Poetry and Creative Nonfiction writing; visual art and illustration; dream logic; memory and memory loss; grief and haunting
Selected Works: Darling Nova , 2018
Christopher Pexa
Education: BA, Arizona State University MFA, Poetry, Arizona State University PhD, Vanderbilt University
Interests: Očhéti Šakówiŋ Language and Literature; Native American and Indigenous Literatures; Native American and Indigenous Studies; Global...
Louisa Thomas
Education: BA Harvard College (2004)
Louisa Thomas is the author of Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams, a biography of the former First Lady Louisa Catherine Adams (1775-1852), and Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family — A Test...
Maggie Doherty
Education: BA Yale (2007) PhD Harvard (2015)
Interests: Narrative nonfiction, magazine journalism, literary criticism
Maggie Doherty is the author of The ...
Valeria Luiselli
Education: B.A., National Autonomous University of Mexico (2007) PhD, Columbia University (2015)
Valeria Luiselli is the author of Sidewalks (2013), Faces in the Crowd (2014), The Story of My Teeth (2015), Tell Me How It Ends ...
Maria Dikcis
Education: B.A., Loyola University Chicago (2012). B.S., Loyola University Chicago (2012). M.A., University of Chicago (2013). Ph.D., Northwestern University (2021)
Interests: 20th- and 21st-Century American Literature; African American, Asian American...
Workshops are open by application to Harvard College undergraduates, graduate students, staff, and students from other institutions eligible for cross registration. Submission guidelines for workshops can be found under individual course listings; please do not query instructors. Review all departmental rules and application instructions before applying.
Fall 2024 Application Deadline: 11:59 pm ET on Sunday, April 7, 2024. Spring 2025 Application Deadline: 11:59pm ET on Sunday, November 10, 2024.
Please visit our course listings for all the Spring 2025 workshops.
Our online submission manager (link below) will open for Spring 2025 applications on TBD, 2024.
Students who have questions about the creative writing workshop application process should contact Case Q. Kerns at [email protected] .
To apply online:
Click here to Submit
Featured faculty.
Teju Cole is a novelist, critic, and essayist, and is the first Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice. "Among other works, the boundary-crossing author is known for his debut novel “Open City” (2011), whose early admirers included Harvard professor and New Yorker critic James Wood."
The Mountain: Stories by Paul Yoon (2017)
The third hotel by laura van den berg (2018), the woman upstairs by claire messud (2013), the emperor's children by claire messud (2007), once the shore by paul yoon (2009), the last shot: city streets, basketball dream by darcy frey (2004), the burning girl by claire messud (2017), the autobiography of my mother: a novel by jamaica kincaid (1996), spring 2025, english calr. advanced screenwriting: workshop.
Instructor: Musa Syeed Wednesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students The feature-length script is an opportunity to tell a story on a larger scale, and, therefore, requires additional preparation. In this class, we will move...
English CAMR. Advanced Playwriting: Workshop
Instructor: Sam Marks Monday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students. This workshop is a continued exploration of writing for the stage, with an eye towards presentation. The semester will culminate in a staged reading of each...
English CBBR. Intermediate Poetry: Workshop
Instructor: Josh Bell Monday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Initially, students can expect to read, discuss, and imitate the strategies of a wide range of poets writing in English; to investigate and reproduce prescribed...
English CBW. Fiction Workshop: Bending Worlds
Instructor: Laura van den Berg Monday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Julio Cortázar: “The fantastic breaks the crust of appearance … something grabs us by the shoulders to throw us outside ourselves.” This workshop will...
English CCFS. Fiction Workshop
Instructor: Teju Cole Section 1: Wednesday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: TBD Section 2: Thursday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students This reading and writing intensive workshop for students who want to learn to write literary...
English CDB. Poetry Workshop
Instructor: Reginald Dwayne Betts Section 1 Monday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: TBD Section 2 Monday, 6:00-8:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students This workshop will be an exploration into the ways that poets in the past have reckoned in...
English CHCR. Advanced Poetry: Workshop
Instructor: Josh Bell Tuesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students By guided reading, classroom discussion, one on one conference, and formal and structural experimentation, members of the Advanced Poetry Workshop will look to...
English CLAR. Getting the Words Right: The Art of Revision
Instructor: Laura van den Berg Wednesday, 9:00-11:45am | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students A promising draft is of little use to us as writers if we have no idea what to do next, of how to begin again. This course aims to illuminate how...
English CLPG. Art of Sportswriting
Instructor: Louisa Thomas Monday, 9:00-11:45am | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students In newsrooms, the sports section is sometimes referred to as the “toy department” -- frivolous and unserious, unlike the stuff of politics, business, and war...
English CLR. Introduction to Screenwriting: Workshop
Instructor: Musa Syeed Tuesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: TBA Enrollment: Limited to 12 students The short film, with its relatively lower costs of production and expanded distribution opportunities, has become one of the most disruptive, innovative modes...
English CMCO. Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Comedy and Creative Nonfiction
Instructor: Melissa Cundieff Thursday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students In this workshop-based class, students will be asked to use humor as the bedrock of their creative nonfiction writing. Humor connects us as human...
English CMFG. Past Selves and Future Ghosts
Instructor: Melissa Cundieff Thursday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students As memoirist and author Melissa Febos puts it: “The narrator is never you, and the sooner we can start thinking of ourselves on the page that way, the...
English CNFJ. Narrative Journalism
Instructor: Darcy Frey Course Site Spring 2025: Thursday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students. In this hands-on writing workshop, we will study the art of narrative journalism in many different forms: Profile writing...
English CNFR. Creative Nonfiction: Workshop
Instructor: Darcy Frey Course Site Spring 2025: Wednesday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Whether it takes the form of literary journalism, essay, memoir, or environmental writing, creative nonfiction is a powerful genre...
English CPY. Fiction Writing: Workshop
Instructor: Paul Yoon Monday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students. An introductory workshop where we will learn to read as writers and study all aspects of the craft of fiction writing, including such topics as character...
English CRLC. Fiction: Craft and Workshop
Instructor: Raven Leilani Section 1: Monday, 9:00-11:45am | Location: TBD Section 2: Monday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students In this creative writing workshop, we will read/annotate workshop pieces and assigned readings. We...
English CWNM. Nonfiction Writing for Magazines
Instructor: Maggie Doherty Monday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students This course will focus on the genres of nonfiction writing commonly published in magazines: the feature, the profile, the personal essay, and longform arts...
English CACD. The Art of Criticism
Instructor: Maggie Doherty Wednesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site This course will consider critical writing about art–literary, visual, cinematic, musical, etc.—as an art in its own right. We will read and...
English CACF. Get Real: The Art of Community-Based Film
Instructor: Musa Syeed Wednesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 student Course Site “I’ve often noticed that we are not able to look at what we have in front of us,” the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami said, “unless it’s inside...
English CAFR. Advanced Fiction Workshop: Writing this Present Life
Instructor: Claire Messud Thursday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site Intended for students with prior fiction-writing and workshop experience, this course will concentrate on structure, execution and revision...
English CAKV. Fiction Workshop: Writing from the First-Person Point of View
Instructor: Andrew Krivak Tuesday, 9:00-11:45 1m | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site This course is a workshop intended for students who are interested in writing longer form narratives from the first-person point of view. The...
Instructor: Josh Bell Monday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: Barker 018 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site Initially, students can expect to read, discuss, and imitate the strategies of a wide range of poets writing in English; to investigate and...
English CCSS. Fiction Workshop: The Art of the Short Story
Instructor: Laura van den Berg Tuesday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site This course will serve as an introduction to the fundamentals of writing fiction, with an emphasis on the contemporary short story. How...
Instructor: Reginald Dwayne Betts Section 1: Tuesday, 9:00-11:45 am | Location: TBD Section 2: Tuesday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site- Section 1 Course Site- Section 2 This workshop will be an exploration...
English CFE. Advanced Fiction
Instructor: Neel Mukherjee Wednesday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site The course will consist of two halves. In the first hour of each class, we will be doing close readings/literary-critical analyses of an...
Instructor: Josh Bell Tuesday, 12:45-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students. Course Site By guided reading, classroom discussion, one on one conference, and formal and structural experimentation, members of the Advanced Poetry Workshop...
English CIHR. Reading and Writing the Personal Essay: Workshop
Instructor: Michael Pollan Monday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site There are few literary forms quite as flexible as the personal essay. The word comes from the French verb essai, “to attempt,” hinting at the...
English CLLW. Life Writing
Instructor: Louisa Thomas Tuesday, 9:00-11:45am | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site How does one tell -- vividly, interestingly -- the story of a life? How do we access a private life, or situate it in a public world? What if...
Instructor: Musa Syeed Tuesday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site The short film, with its relatively lower costs of production and expanded distribution opportunities, has become one of the most disruptive...
English CMMU. Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Using Music
Instructor: Melissa Cundieff Tuesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site In this workshop-based class, students will think deeply about how music is often at the center of their experiences, may it be as a song, an...
English CNSR. Narrative Science Journalism: Workshop
Instructor: Michael Pollan Wednesday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site The arc of this writing workshop will follow, step by step, the process of researching and writing a single long piece of science journalism...
English CNYA. Creative Nonfiction Workshop: Young Adult Writing
Instructor: Melissa Cundieff Thursday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site In this workshop-based class, students will consider themes that intersect with the Young Adult genre: gender and sexuality, romantic and...
Instructor: Paul Yoon Section 1: Monday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: TBD Section 2: Monday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students. Course Site- Section 1 Course Site- Section 2 An introductory workshop where we will learn to read...
English CSJM. Who Do You Think You Are: A Creative Nonfiction Workshop
Instructor: Saeed Jones Thursday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students People don’t just happen. In this workshop-based class, students will explore the capacity of memoir and cultural criticism to illuminate their...
English CTV. Writing for Television: Developing the Pilot: Workshop
Instructor: Sam Marks Monday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site This workshop introduces the television pilot with a focus on prestige drama and serialized comedy. Students will excavate their own voice and...
Spring 2024
Instructor: Melissa Cundieff Wednesday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: Barker 316 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site As memoirist and author Melissa Febos puts it: “The narrator is never you, and the sooner we can start thinking of ourselves on the...
English CACW. Advanced Fiction Workshop
Instructor: Paul Yoon TBD | Location: TBD Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Advanced fiction workshop for students who have already taken a workshop at Harvard or elsewhere. The goal of the class is to continue your journey as a writer. You will be...
English CMCC. Covid, Grief, and Afterimage
Instructor: Melissa Cundieff Wednesday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: Barker 269 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site In this workshop-based course we will write about our personal lived experiences with loss and grief born from the Covid-19 pandemic...
English CVLL. Art of Listening. The Politics and Aesthetics of Sound
Instructor: Valeria Luiselli Wednesday, 12:45-2:45 pm | Location: Lamont 401 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site This is a course for anyone who is interested in the politics and aesthetics of sound. We will work on developing listening...
English CRGS. The Surrounds: Writing Interiority and Outsiderness
Instructor: Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah Thursday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: Lamont 401 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site The essayist, the writer of non-fiction, has historically been an oracle of opinions that most often go unsaid. They do not...
English CNFD. Creative Nonfiction
Instructor: Maggie Doherty Tuesday, 12:00-2:45 pm | Location: Sever 205 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site This course is an overview of the creative nonfiction genre and the many different types of writing that are included within it: memoir...
English CCIJ. Intermediate Fiction Workshop
Instructor: Jesse McCarthy Thursday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: Barker 269 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site This is an intermediate course in the art of writing literary fiction. Previous experience with workshopping writing is encouraged but...
English CCEP. Ekphrastic Poetry: Workshop
Instructor: Tracy K. Smith Wednesday, 3:00-5:45 pm | Location: Lamont 401 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site What can a poem achieve when it contemplates or even emulates a work of art in another medium? In this workshop, we'll read and write...
English CFMR. Interiority & Experience: Writing Character-Driven Fiction: Workshop
Instructor: Claire Messud Wednesday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: Barker 269 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students This course approaches the writing of fiction with character at its center. If fiction is an exploration of what it’s like to be alive on the planet...
English CCFC. Poetry Workshop: Form & Content
Instructor: Tracy K. Smith Tuesday, 12:00-2:45pm | Location: Sever 112 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site In this workshop, we’ll look closely at the craft-based choices poets make, and track the effects they have upon what we as readers are...
English CGF. Genre Fiction Workshop: Sci-Fi, Speculative Fiction, Horror, The Ghost Story, The New Weird
Instructor: Neel Mukherjee Wednesday, 3:00-5:45pm | Location: Barker 018 Enrollment: Limited to 12 students Course Site The course will consist of two halves. In the first hour of each class, we will be doing close readings of an assigned text, with the...
Write an Honors Creative Thesis
Students may apply to write a senior thesis or senior project in creative writing, although only English concentrators can be considered. Students submit applications in early March of their junior year, including first-term juniors who are out of phase. The creative writing faculty considers the proposal, along with the student's overall performance in creative writing and other English courses, and notifies students about its decision in early mid-late March. Those applications are due, this coming year, on TBA .
Students applying for a creative writing thesis or project must have completed at least one course in creative writing at Harvard before they apply. No student is guaranteed acceptance. It is strongly suggested that students acquaint themselves with the requirements and guidelines well before the thesis application is due. The creative writing director must approve any exceptions to the requirements, which must be made in writing by Monday, February 7, 2022. Since the creative writing thesis and project are part of the English honors program, acceptance to write a creative thesis is conditional upon the student continuing to maintain a 3.40 concentration GPA. If a student’s concentration GPA drops below 3.40 after the spring of the junior year, the student may not be permitted to continue in the honors program.
Joint concentrators may apply to write creative theses, but we suggest students discuss the feasibility of the project well before applications are due. Not all departments are open to joint creative theses.
Students who have questions about the creative writing thesis should contact the program’s Director, Sam Marks .
Events Gallery
Writers in the parlor: michael pollan (october 2015).
Writers in the Parlor: Margaret Atwood (May 2014)
Annie Baker and Sam Gold (April 2014)
Writers in the Parlor: Laura van den Berg & Paul Yoon (March 2014)
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ADMINISTRATION
Thomas Jehn
Sosland Director of the Harvard College Writing Program
Fields: English Literature and Academic Writing
Research and Writing Interests : Secondary school and college writing pedagogy, Institutional histories of literary studies, academic activism, and 60s culture
Tom Jehn is the Sosland Director of the Harvard College Writing Program, where he has taught and administered for more than 20 years. He has served on the Standing Committee on Admissions and Financial Aid, the Committee on Academic Integrity, and the Ad Hoc Committee on Writing and Speaking. He has directed the Harvard Writing Project, a professional development and publications program for faculty members and graduate student instructors across the disciplines at the University. He designed and oversaw Harvard’s first community outreach writing and speaking program at the Harvard Allston Education Portal, where he now serves as a member of its Advisory Board. He has also directed the writing center for Harvard’s Extension School. He has been a contributing author for a series of best-selling composition textbooks published by Bedford/St. Martin’s Press. As the program officer and board member for the Calderwood Writing Initiative at the Boston Athenaeum, an arts and education charity, he designed and led financing for university-partnered writing centers at eight Boston city high schools serving more than 3,000 students. He has taught numerous professional development courses on writing pedagogy for secondary school and college instructors across the country and has collaborated with the National Writing Project. He also advises university writing programs and conducts communications training for companies and non-profits. He holds a BA from the University of Chicago and an MA and a PhD in English from the University of Virginia.
Karen Heath
Associate Director of the Harvard College Writing Program
Senior Preceptor
Fields: Creative Writing and Literature
Research and Writing Interests : Fiction
Karen Heath received her MFA in fiction from Indiana University and her EdM from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is a Senior Preceptor in the Harvard College Writing Program, where she works on issues of program pedagogy and faculty development, as well as the Associate Director of the program. She is the course head for Expos Studio 10. She also teaches fiction writing at the Harvard Extension School.
James Herron
Director, Harvard Writing Project
Fields: Cultural and Linguistic Anthropology
Research and Writing Interests : Pragmatics, linguistics, Latin America, Colombia, political economy, race, class
James is director of the Harvard Writing Project and has taught at Harvard since 2004. He has a PhD in cultural and linguistic anthropology from the University of Michigan. At Harvard he has taught courses on Latin American history and culture, the anthropology of race, social class, capitalism, "the culture of the market," ethnographic and qualitative research methods, and anthropological linguistics. Herron has held research fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, among others.
Jane Rosenzweig
Director, Harvard Writing Center
Field: Creative Writing
Research and Writing Interests : Fiction, cultural criticism
Jane Rosenzweig holds a BA from Yale University, an MLitt from Oxford, and an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has been a staff editor at the Atlantic Monthly and a member of the fiction staff at the New Yorker . Her work has appeared in Glimmer Train , Seventeen , The May Anthology of Oxford and Cambridge Short Stories , The American Prospect , the Boston Globe , the Boston Phoenix , Utne Reader , and The Chronicle Review . She is the director of the Harvard College Writing Center.
Rebecca Skolnik
Assistant Director of Administration for the Academic Resource Center and the Harvard College Writing Program
Rebecca Skolnik manages all Program budgets and payroll; faculty and staff appointments and re-appointments; technology needs for Program administration and faculty; and Program operations.
Aubrey Everett
Program Coordinator, Harvard College Writing Program
Aubrey Everett provides the Writing Program’s faculty and leadership team with overall support, primarily in the areas of course registration, the Writing Exam, Harvard Writing Project and Writing Center, digital projects, various curricular initiatives, and faculty development events and resources. Her background is in print journalism and she has experience working in both publishing and higher education.
Gregory Collins
Staff Assistant, Harvard College Writing Program
Gregory Collins manages all onsite operations, departmental communications, and hiring processes. His background is in creative writing and communications. He has worked with the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the New York City Economic Development Corporation, The New School MFA Program, WHYY Public Radio, and the Playwrights' Center.
Fields: Near Eastern Studies, Comparative Literature, Orality, Scripture & Literary Theory
Research and Writing Interests : Comparative Religion, International Law, Linguistics, Fiction, and Children’s Literature
Sheza Alqera holds an honors degree in English and Economics from Brown University (BA) graduating Magna cum Laude, and a Masters from Harvard Divinity School (MTS). She is presently completing her PhD in Near Eastern Studies and Civilizations (NELC) from Harvard University. Before joining the Harvard College Writing Program, Sheza worked as a Writing Tutor for the Harvard Extension Writing Program for over three years, and more recently, as a Departmental Writing Fellow and Senior Thesis Advisor for the College. She has been awarded Certificates of Excellence in Teaching by Harvard University's Derek Bok Center and has served as a liaison between faculty, staff, and students in her role as Student Representative and member of the Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DIB) Committee for her program.
Fields: History of Science; Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality
Research and Writing Interests : Nineteenth-century transatlantic history; Victorian medicine & science; women & gender in science
Katie Baca completed her MA and PhD in the History of Science at Harvard with a secondary field in WGS. Her research focuses on the intersections of nineteenth century science and studies of women, gender, and sexuality. She has worked for the Darwin and Tyndall Correspondence Projects. Before entering academia, Baca worked in equity research. She received her AB from Harvard College in History and Science with a secondary field in Economics.
Doug Bafford
Fields: Anthropology
Research and Writing Interests: Anthropology of religion; evangelical Christianity; epistemology; conservatism; language and culture; race and multiculturalism; contested authority; creationism; South Africa
Website: https://www.dougbafford.com
Doug Bafford is a cultural anthropologist who studies the intersection of religion, authority, and language in Southern Africa. His recent ethnographic research projects trace changes within evangelical Christianity in post-apartheid South Africa, the semiotics of young-earth creationism in the United States, and the dynamics of conservative responses to racism. This work centers on how Christians produce knowledge and authority amid rapid social transformation and is currently being developed into a monograph examining the ambiguous role of culture in conservative lifeworlds. He has taught undergraduate courses in anthropology, expository writing, and interdisciplinary social sciences at several institutions, most recently at the College of the Holy Cross. Originally from Maryland, he received a PhD in anthropology from Brandeis University, with undergraduate degrees from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) and Carroll Community College.
Erika Bailey
Fields: Theater, Voice, Public Speaking
Research and Writing Interests: Rhetoric, Teaching and Performance, Dialect and Accent Acquisition
Erika Bailey is the Head of Voice and Speech at American Repertory Theater and is a long-time faculty member of the Theater, Dance, and Media concentration at Harvard. She also serves as a member of the Committee on Commencement Parts, choosing student speakers for commencement, and is a faculty advisor at the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. She has taught voice and speech classes at Princeton University, the Juilliard School, Williams College, and Boston Conservatory among others. She gives workshops across the schools of Harvard University on public speaking and performance. She holds a BA from Williams College, an MFA from Brandeis University and an MA in Voice Studies from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London.
Pat Bellanca
Fields: English and American Literature
Research and Writing Interests : Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century English Literature; Gothic fiction; critical theory; journalism.
Pat Bellanca holds degrees in English from Wellesley College (B A ) and Rutgers University (M A, PhD). In addition to teaching in the Harvard College Writing Program, where she is a Head Preceptor, she directs the master’s degree programs in journalism and in creative writing at Harvard's Division of Continuing Education. She is also co-author of The Short Guide to College Writing , currently in its fifth edition.
Collier Brown
Field: American Studies
Research and Writing Interests: Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century American Literature; Form and Theory of Poetry; Aesthetics of Waste and Wastelands; History of Photography
Website: http://scbrownjr.com
Collier Brown is a poet, photography critic, and literary scholar. He holds a PhD in American Studies from Harvard and an MFA in Poetry from McNeese State University. Brown’s essays on photography have appeared in more than twenty books, including Eyemazing : The New Collectible Art Photography (Thames & Hudson) and Beth Moon’s Ancient Trees: Portraits of Time (Abbeville Press). His latest poetry collection, Scrap Bones , is out now with Texas Review Press.
Kate Clarke
Kate has worked in the fields of theater and education for over twenty years. She has taught in the Theater Departments at Salem State University and the Boston Conservatory. She worked for the educational branch of the Commonwealth Shakespeare Company and has worked extensively in organizations such as the Boys and Girls Club of Boston and the Mayor’s Program, developing classes that focus on promoting communication skills in at-risk youth. Overseas, Kate has co-developed and directed theater/writing programs for projects in Jordan, Palestine and Israel. Kate holds an MFA in Theater Arts from Brandeis University and a BA in Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Nick Coburn-Palo
Field: Political Science
Research and Writing Interests: International Diplomacy, Conflict Resolution, Political Rhetoric, and American Political Development
Nick Coburn-Palo earned his M A and PhD from Brown University in Political Science. He has over thirty years of instructional and lecturing experience at independent schools and universities on four continents, including Yale University (as a Program Dean for International Security Studies), the Open University of Catalonia (Barcelona), San Jose State University, and the Taipei American School. He has longstanding professional relationships with the United Nations (UNITAR), including work at the Security Council level, as well as with a leading continental economic think tank, European House – Ambrosetti, where he will be delivering a lecture series in Turin and Milan this fall. His academic interests include celebrity politics, East Asian security studies, and leadership training. He also teaches graduate courses in Management and Government for the Harvard Extension School.
Field: American Literature
Research and Writing Interests : Political novels, history and theory of the novel, American studies
Tad Davies received his PhD in English from University of California, Irvine and before coming to Harvard taught an array of literary and cultural studies courses at Bryant University. His academic interests lay in the intersection between literature and politics—particularly as they meet in the U.S. of the 1960s.
Margaret Deli
Research and Writing Interests : 19th- and 20th-century English and American literature, aesthetic expertise, museum studies, celebrity studies
Maggie completed her MA and PhD in English Language and Literature from Yale University. Her research focuses on art, snobs, and expertise. She received her BA from Johns Hopkins University and holds degrees in English and American Studies and the History of Art and Art-World Practice from Oxford and Christie's Education London respectively.
Samuel Garcia
Fields: History
Research and Writing Interests : Early Modern Europe (Spain in particular); Colonial Latin America; Religious History; Protestant and Catholic Reformations; History of Witchcraft and Magic
Samuel García is a historian of early modern Europe and colonial Latin America. He holds a PhD in History from Yale University, a Master of Theological Studies (MTS) degree from Harvard Divinity School, and a BA from St. John’s College (Annapolis). His research interests include topics such as the Spanish Inquisition, witchcraft and magic, and the development of early modern Catholicism. His current project is about the use of exile as a punishment by the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. Prior to Harvard, he taught at Wesleyan University (History Dept. and College of Letters) and, most recently, in the Princeton Writing Program.
Joseph Gauvreau
Field: Comparative Literature
Research and Writing Interests: 16th-Century Literature and Music; Lyric Poetry; Performance Studies; Translation
Joseph Gauvreau holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and a BA from Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection of music and literature in Early Modern Europe, particularly on the many ways in which songs were used (and abused) as they circulated through society and across boundaries of language, culture, and confession. He is also a singer and violinist, and is dedicated to integrating performance into his scholarship.
Terry Gipson
Fields: Public Speaking, Communications, Public Relations, Visual Arts, Political Communication
Research and Writing Interests : Art and Perception, Political Communication
Website: https://www.terrygipsonny.com
Terry Gipson has over 25 years of experience in communications, public relations, government affairs, marketing, mass media, experiential design, and he is a former New York State Senator. He previously served as a Director for MTV Networks where he collaborated with producers to develop live shows and promotional events for MTV and Nickelodeon. Terry is a regular commentator on the WAMC Public Radio Roundtable and teaches public relations and strategic communication for Harvard’s Division of Continuing Education. Before coming to Harvard, he taught public speaking, public relations, political communication, persuasion, and campaign communication as a lecturer at the State University of New York at New Paltz and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His interest in using art as a communication teaching tool has been featured on the Academic Minute and published in Communication Teacher. Terry has an MFA in Theatre Arts from Pennsylvania State University and a BFA in Theatre Arts from Texas Tech University. In addition, he is a member of the National Communication Association and the Public Relations Society of America.
J. Gregory Given
Fields: Study of Religion, Classics
Research and Writing Interests : Early Christianity, late antiquity, Coptic language and literature, ancient letter collections, history of scholarship
Greg Given is a historian of the ancient Mediterranean world, with broad interests in the development of Christian literature and culture from the second to sixth centuries CE. His current book project focuses on the various collections of letters attributed to the second-century martyr-bishop Ignatius of Antioch. He holds a PhD from Harvard in the Study of Religion, a MTS from Harvard Divinity School, and a BA in Classics and Religion from Reed College. Prior to joining the Writing Program, he held a postdoctoral appointment at the University of Virginia and also taught courses at the University of Mary Washington, Stonehill College, Harvard Divinity School, and Yale Divinity School.
Alexandra (AJ) Gold
Research and Writing Interests : post-1945 American poetry and visual art; visual-verbal collaborations; gender studies; popular culture; critical pedagogy
Website : www.alexandrajgold.com
Alexandra Gold received her PhD in English from Boston University. She earned a BA in English and Political Science and MA in English from the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to Harvard, she taught course in writing composition, gender studies, and poetry at Drexel and Boston Universities and worked as a tutor in BU’s Writing Center. Her writing and research focuses on post-45 American poetry and visual art, a subject that also informs her book, The Collaborative Artists' Book: Evolving Ideas in Contemporary Poetry and Art (University of Iowa, Contemporary North American Poetry Series, 2023). In addition to work her in Expos, she also serves as a first-year academic advisor in the college.
Ethan Goldberg
Fields: Literature, Film, Urban Studies, Creative Writing
Research and Writing Interests : Post-1945 Literature, Film, and Culture; The City; Literature and Psychology; Visual and Media Culture; Continental Philosophy and Theory
Ethan Goldberg completed his PhD in English at the Graduate Center, CUNY. He has taught English and core humanities courses at Queens College, Lehman College, and NYU, as well as English language classes in Madrid. His research focuses on the representation of cities in contemporary literature and film. He has also published English translations of Spanish-language poetry, and is currently working on an urban, autotheoretical work in the style of Walter Benjamin and Olivia Laing.
Field: Cultural Anthropology
Research and Writing Interests : Multispecies relations, care, race, affect, cuteness, wildlife conservation, chimpanzees, postcolonism, Africa
Amy Hanes is a cultural anthropologist whose work focuses on multispecies relationships between humans and great apes and the politics of wildlife conservation in Central and West Africa. Important themes in her work include care, race, affect, and cuteness. She earned her PhD in Anthropology and her dual MA in Sustainable International Development and Women’s and Gender Studies from Brandeis University. Apart from academia, she has worked as a development editor and with non-governmental organizations in youth education, wildlife conservation, and gender-based violence prevention in the U.S., Niger, the Central African Republic, and Cameroon. Her research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.
Jodi Johnson
Fields: British, Irish, Italian, and American Literature; Creative Writing
Research and Writing Interests : The History of Poetry; Creative Writing; Renaissance and Restoration Literature; Victorian Literature; Risorgimento Literature; American Literature; and Irish Literature.
Jodi Johnson is a poet and literary scholar from Ireland. He was educated at Oxford (BA), the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (MFA), and the University of Louisiana at Lafayette (PhD), where his dissertation focused on spectral image formation in Renaissance literature. He is a Poetry Editor at Tampa Review , and his work has appeared in The Nation , Prelude , and elsewhere. Prior to Harvard, he taught in the writing departments of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Tampa, the University of South Florida, and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. His research is particularly interested in developmental poetics, creative writing, and phenomenology .
Jonah Johnson
Fields: German Studies and Comparative Literature
Research and Writing Interests : Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment German literature and philosophy, lyric, genre theory, reception of classical antiquity
Jonah Johnson received his PhD in German and Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan in 2009. His research focuses on the relationship between literature and philosophy, particularly among German thinkers in the decades following the French Revolution. He is currently working on a book project in which he follows the emergence of tragedy as a discursive strategy within post-Kantian philosophy and explores the consequences of this discourse for early Romantic drama. He has taught courses on literature and culture in the German Department and Great Books Program at Michigan. He holds a BA in Ancient Greek Language and Literature from Oberlin College.
Hannah Kauders
Fields: Creative Writing, Translation
Research and Writing Interests : Translation Theory and Craft, Comparative Literature, 20th and 21st Century Latin American and Iberian Literature, Contemporary American Literature, Applied Linguistics
Hannah holds an MFA in writing and literary translation from Columbia University. Before coming to Harvard, she taught in the University Writing program at Columbia and the department of Comparative Literature at Barnard College. Her fiction and essays appear in The Drift , Astra Magazine , Gulf Coast Magazine , Fiction International , and more, and she is currently editing a memoir about the intersection of grief and translation. She translates from Spanish with a focus on contemporary Colombian fiction and poetry, queer narratives, and cross-genre literature. .
Katherine Kennedy
Field : English & American Literature; Politics, Policy, and Negotiation
Research and Writing Interests: British 18th and 19th Century Literature, American 19th and 20th Century Literature, Children's Literature, Romantic Poetry, the Novel, Gender Studies, LGBTQIA+ Studies, Policy, Negotiation
Katherine Kennedy received a PhD in English and American Literature from Rutgers University, an AB from Harvard College, an MA from the University of Utah, and, most recently, an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Her interests are British Romantic and Victorian literature, American nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, children’s literature, policy analysis, negotiation, and leadership. Her dissertation focused on representations of women’s bodies in British literature from 1770-1840. Before coming to the Harvard Kennedy School, she served as an elected member of the Salt Lake City School Board for eight years. After receiving her MPA, she was a fellow in the Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Collaboratory at the Center for Public Leadership. She has taught writing and literature at Rutgers, the University of Utah, and Randolph College and coached negotiators at Harvard.
Isabel Lane
Fields: Comparative Literature, Environmental Humanities
Research and Writing Interests : Russian and American twentieth- and twenty-first-century fiction; energy production and nuclear technologies in literature and culture; environmental humanities; prison and incarceration.
Isabel Lane holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Yale University and a BA in Russian Studies from NYU. Before coming to Harvard, she taught literature and writing at Yale and the Bard Prison Initiative, and she was the founding director of the Boston College Prison Education Program. Isabel's scholarly research focuses on cultural representations of energy production and use (especially nuclear), intersecting human and environmental harm, and incarceration. In parallel with her scholarly research, she is currently working on a public humanities project, Products of Our Environment ( ofourenvironment.org ), that brings together people inside and outside of prison around environmental justice and the arts.
Taleen Mardirossian
Fields: Creative Writing
Research and Writing Interests : Histories of violence, human rights, race, memory, gender, identity
Taleen Mardirossian holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University, where she’s taught undergraduate writing. In the early part of her career, she studied law and worked in the legal field with a concentration in criminal law. From teaching street law to creative writing, she has extensive experience designing courses for students in her local community and abroad. She is currently working on a collection of essays about the body and identity.
Ross Martin
Fields: Early and Antebellum U.S. American ideas and culture
Research and Writing Interests : Nineteenth-century science, philosophy, and law
Ross Martin received his PhD from the University of Michigan where, prior to teaching in the Harvard College Writing Program, he was a Frederick Donald Sober Postdoctoral Fellow. As a scholar he focuses on U.S. American intellectual history up to 1865, specializing in the comparative study of philosophical, scientific, and legal ideas.
Keating McKeon
Fields: Classics, Achaemenid Persia
Research and Writing Interests : Ancient autocracy, generic intertextuality, Attic tragedy
Keating McKeon holds his PhD in Classical Philology from Harvard and completed his undergraduate studies in Classics at Columbia and the University of Cambridge. His research is especially concerned with the manifestations and receptions of autocracy in the ancient world. Keating’s current projects approach these concepts from two perspectives: the first probes the role of nostalgia in democratic Athenian constructions of autocracy, while the second explores how epic models for rulership are mediated through the act of Homeric quotation across Greco-Roman antiquity. Keating has published on the Greek adaptation of Old Persian sources as well as on the historian Herodotus’ narrative interest in the performative manipulation of time.
Shannon Monaghan
Fields: History
Research and Writing Interests : Military history; modern Europe; war and society
Shannon Monaghan earned degrees in History from Yale (BA) and Boston College (MA, PhD). Her academic interests are in the history of modern warfare, and her teaching emphasizes the use of a wide range of primary sources. She is the author of A Quiet Company of Dangerous Men , which follows a group of British special operations soldiers throughout the Second World War and Cold War (Viking/Penguin Random House, Sept. 2024). Hurst will publish her next book, To Die With Such Men: Frontline Stories From Ukraine’s International Legion , in February 2025. Dr. Monaghan is also the author of Protecting Democracy from Dissent: Population Engineering in Western Europe 1918-1926 (Routledge, 2018). She maintains a long-term project on the history of shell shock and combat stress.
Field: Public Speaking
Research and Writing Interests : Dramaturgy; Theatre History; Performance; Personal Storytelling
Website : https://www.phillipjamesmontano.com/
James Montaño is a dramaturg, educator, critic, and playwright. He has taught theater and public speaking at Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin, and Brandeis University. He has also worked in literary management and special projects producer at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, and in education and community engagement at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, MA. He has served as a dramaturg for productions at ART, Harvard University, and Boston Conservatory as well as freelance projects around New England, New Mexico, and Texas. His artistic training is from UMass Amherst, ART/Harvard, and the Moscow Art Theatre. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Performance as Public Practice at The University of Texas at Austin.
Cody Musselman
Field: Religious Studies
Research and Writing Interests: Ethnography of Religion; American religious history; popular culture; sports, fitness, and wellness; religious and social theory; consumerism and capitalism.
Website: https://codymusselman.squarespace.com
Cody Musselman is a scholar of American religion. She holds a PhD in Religious Studies from Yale University and a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. Before coming to Harvard, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research focuses on religion in the contemporary U.S., consumerism, popular culture, and health wellness. Her writing has appeared in Religion Dispatches, The Conversation, and the journal Religions. She is currently writing a book about religion in American fitness culture.
Ryan Napier
Field: British literature
Research and Writing Interests : Nineteenth-century literature; contemporary fiction; theory of the novel; religion and literature
Ryan Napier holds a PhD in English from Tufts University and an MAR in religion and literature from Yale Divinity School. His writing has appeared in Jacobin , and a collection of his short fiction, Four Stories about the Human Face , is available from Bull City Press.
Lee Nishri-Howitt
Field: Voice, Speech, Accents, Shakespeare, Theater
Lee Nishri-Howitt teaches and coaches vocal production, speech, accent acquisition, and Shakespearean text. He has taught in the Theater, Dance, and Media concentration at Harvard, and at Boston Conservatory at Berklee, Emerson College, and the Moscow Art Theatre School. As a coach, he has worked with the American Repertory Theater, Huntington Theatre, New Repertory Theatre, SpeakEasy Stage Company, and others. Lee is a graduate of the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York, and of the masters program in vocal pedagogy at the American Repertory Theater Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard.
Field: Creative Writing and Literature
Ben Parson received his MFA in fiction from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he taught first year writing with the UMass Writing Program as well as courses in creative writing for both the UMass English department and the Juniper Institute for Young Writers. Since then, Ben has taught literature and writing at a private boarding school for learning diverse students. His short fiction has been published in The Cape Cod Poetry Review , and he is currently working on a novel.
Brian Pietras
Field: Literature; history; gender and sexuality studies
Research and Writing Interests : Medieval and early modern literature; the history of sexuality; feminist and queer theory; twentieth-century LGBTQ+ cultures
Pietras holds a PhD in English Literature from Rutgers University. His scholarly articles have been published in The Journal of the History of Sexuality , Renaissance Drama , Spenser Studies , and elsewhere.
Trained as an early modernist, his work on the history of sexuality has led to a new project that investigates queer life in America before Stonewall. Prior to coming to Harvard, he taught in the Writing Program and Freshman Seminars Program at Princeton.
MG Prezioso
Field: Education, Children's and Young Adult Literature
Research and Writing Interests: Story World Absorption, Reading Motivation and Engagement, Children’s and Young Adult Literature, Philosophy of Literature, English Literature/Language Arts Education, Psychology of Reading, Literature and Ethics, Literature and Civic Engagement, Literature and Climate Awareness
Website: www.mgprezioso.com
MG Prezioso received her PhD in Education from Harvard University, her EdM in Language and Literacy from Harvard's Graduate School of Education, and her AB in English literature from Harvard College. Her research focuses on children's story world absorption - how children become “lost,” or immersed, in stories - and how absorptive reading can be leveraged in K-12 education to improve reading outcomes. Her academic work has been featured in Education Week, The Boston Globe, and The Harvard Gazette. MG is also a children's book author, and her first series—picture books for kids with chronic conditions and food allergies—launched in 2023.
Kelsey Quigley
Field: Clinical Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Psychophysiology
Research and Writing Interests : Clinical and developmental psychology, stress and trauma, resilience, psychophysiology, parenting, gender
Kelsey Quigley completed her PhD in Clinical Psychology at Penn State University, with secondary fields in Developmental Psychology and Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience. In her research, she examines biobehavioral pathways by which early adversity influences health outcomes. In the clinic, she works primarily with children, women, and gender-expansive individuals who have experienced stress or trauma. Quigley has taught courses in the Harvard and Penn State Psychology Departments and as part of the Harvard University Committee on Human Rights Studies. She has worked previously as an Early Childhood Mental Health consultant and a Federal Policy Analyst at Zero to Three: National Center for Infants, Toddlers, and Families in Washington, DC. She earned her AB in Social Studies at Harvard University.
Emilie J. Raymer
Field: The History and Philosophy of Science
Research and Writing Interests : the modern life and environmental sciences, evolutionary theory, intellectual history, philosophy
Emilie holds graduate degrees from the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins University, where she taught classes offered through the Program in Behavioral Biology, the Department of the History of Science and Technology, and the Program in Expository Writing. Her scholarly interests include the development of the modern life sciences, evolutionary theory, the environmental humanities, and the philosophy of science. At Harvard, she teaches writing courses focused on biomedical and environmental ethics. She also serves as the faculty director of the Writing and Public Service Initiative and on the Board of First-Year Advisers. She worked for the National Academy of Sciences before she began her doctorate.
Field: Government
Research and Writing Interests : International relations, women and politics, political psychology, group-based violence, survey experiments
Website : www.sparshasaha.com
Sparsha Saha received her PhD and MA from the Department of Government at Harvard, and her BA from the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation examines the causes of severe protest policing violence in Iran since 1979, and her current research focuses on the effects of gender and dress on women in politics and society.
John Sampson
Fields: American literature
Research and Writing Interests: Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and culture; urban history; composition and writing center studies.
John Sampson holds a PhD in English from Johns Hopkins University. He has published articles in NOVEL , American Literary Realism , and the Henry James Review . He also has a book chapter forthcoming in Paris in the Americas , an interdisciplinary edited volume, which traces the French influences on the built environment of Washington, D.C. Before coming to Harvard, he served as Director of the Johns Hopkins Writing Center and was a writing instructor and administrator with the West Point Writing Program.
Research and Writing Interests: Nonfiction, autofiction, satire, and cultural criticism
Ian holds an MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa and BA degrees in History and Italian Studies from Brown University. Before coming to Harvard, he taught courses on creative nonfiction and rhetoric at the University of Iowa and helped lead the Brown University Writing Fellows Program. His work has been published in the Los Angeles Review of Books , DIAGRAM , Atlas Obscura , and Artsy , among other publications. He is a native of St. Paul, Minnesota.
Gillian Sinnott
Field: Law; political theory
Research and Writing Interests: Constitutional law; theories of liberalism; privacy
Gillian Sinnott received her undergraduate degree from University College Dublin. She also has an MPhil from the University of Oxford and an SJD from Harvard Law School. Her doctoral dissertation examined the application of the political philosophy of John Rawls to questions in constitutional law. Prior to joining the Writing Program, she practiced law in New York and London.
Stephen Spencer
Field: English Literature
Research and Writing Interests: Early modern literature; Gender, sexuality, and affect studies; Utopian/dystopian literature; History of science fiction
Stephen Spencer is a scholar-teacher focusing on early modern literature. He holds a PhD in English from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His research investigates the gender(ed) politics of religious affect in Milton and his contemporaries. He has published on John Donne's figuration of the hermaphrodite and Andrew Marvell's poetry of weeping.
Tracy Strauss
Field: Creative Writing, Literature, and Film
Research and Writing Interests: trauma literature and film, the bildungsroman, prose and poetry of war, screenplay as dramatic literature, literary adaptations, public humanities
Tracy Strauss holds an MFA in Film from Boston University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. She is the author of I Just Haven’t Met You Yet , a memoir that landed on Harvard Bookstore’s “Bestseller Wall” in 2019. Former essays editor of The Rumpus , she has written creative nonfiction, scholarly works, and writing craft articles for publications such as Newsweek , Oprah Magazine , Glamour , New York Magazine , Ploughshares , Poets & Writers Magazine , Writer’s Digest Magazine , Publishers Weekly , The Southampton Review, Cognoscenti, and War, Literature & the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities . She has also been a guest speaker on local and national television talk shows, podcasts, and Ms. Magazine’s Facebook “Live Q&A."
Zachary Stuart
Field: Public Speaking, Film/Video, Mulit-arts education, Social Justice
Zachary Stuart has worked in arts education and film production for 20 years in the Boston area. He was Lead-facilitator and curriculum officer for the innovative theater education program Urban Improv and the Director of the theater department at CAAP summer arts Experience in Brookline. He produced the documentary Savage Memory about the Early anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and is currently finishing post production on a new Feature documentary Die Before You Die , looking at female leadership in Islamic mysticism. With a focus on interdisciplinary collaboration, youth development and social justice, the public speaking component of his work relies heavily on embodied pedagogy and storytelling. He has also taught and developed curriculum in ceramics and photography with a fine art and community building orientation, mainly working with youth and urban communities.
Brian Sweeney
Field: American Literature
Research and Writing Interests: Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. literature; African American literature and print culture; periodical studies; cultures of professionalism; nineteenth-century music and literature
Brian Sweeney is a literary scholar, digital humanist, editor, and educator. He holds a PhD in English from Brown University. Before coming to Harvard, he taught at Brown, the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth (where he received the Chancellor's Innovation in Teaching Award), and The College of Saint Rose, where he was Professor of English and served as department chair. He was formerly Review Editor for American Periodicals and serves on the Advisory Board for the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. He cofounded and codirects The Digital Colored American Magazine (coloredamerican.org), a digital humanities project focused on one of the most significant pre-Harlem Renaissance Black periodicals, and is coeditor of the Broadview Press edition of Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood (2023). He was the 2021 recipient of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize.
Julia Tejblum
Fields: British Literature, Romanticism, poetry and poetics, narrative theory
Julia Tejblum holds a PhD in English Literature from Harvard, an MA from Oxford University, where she studied as a Clarendon Scholar, and a BA in English and Theater Arts from Brandeis University. Her current research focuses on the relationship between autobiography and form in Romantic and Victorian poetry. She has published criticism and reviews in Essays in Criticism, Romanticism, and The Wordsworth Circle. Other research interests include travel writing, narrative theory, literature and science, and literary influence.
Elliott Turley
Field: Theatre, Literature, Performance
Research and Writing Interests: Modern Tragicomedy, Theatre History and Theory, Performance Studies, Professional Rhetoric, Pedagogy
Elliott Turley is a scholar and teacher of literature, theatre, performance, and rhetoric. His peer reviewed articles can be found in Modern Drama, the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and Modern Language Quarterly, as well as the Routledge Companion to Absurdist Literature. He has also published book and performance reviews in Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. His most recent work includes an article on Suzan-Lori Parks’s rewriting of American myth and a monograph-in-progress on modern tragicomedy.
Peter Vilbig
Fields: Creative writing, journalism, songwriting
Research and Writing Interests : fiction, songwriting
Peter Vilbig has covered war and refugees in Central America as a stringer for The Boston Globe , crime and politics as a staff writer for the Miami Herald , and the Congress and federal agencies as an investigative reporter for a Washington DC-based news service distributed to 200 papers nationally. His short fiction has appeared in Tin House , Shenandoah , and 3:AM Magazine, among many other publications in the US and Europe. He holds an MFA from Columbia University and an MA in English teaching from Brooklyn College and has taught first-year writing at New York University and CUNY’s Baruch College. As a public high school teacher in New York City, he taught advanced placement English at Midwood High School in Brooklyn. Most recently he has been writing songs and has performed in small venues in New York and Providence, and at the Rhode Island Folk Festival.
Rob Willison
Fields: Social Science
Research and Writing Interests: Philosophy of Language, Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, and Philosophy of Education
Rob Willison is a philosopher with broad interests, but his recent research has focused on philosophy of language and ethics—especially where those fields intersect. He has published work on the nature and ethics of irony, and has ongoing projects on the nature of concepts, and on the ways that a theory of meaning in general can be used to understand meaning’s particular kinds (for example, linguistic meaning and meaning in life). He also has long-standing interests in the philosophy of education, democratic theory, and the philosophy of social science. Before joining Expos, Rob served as a Lecturer in Social Studies at Harvard; as the Associate Director of the Parr Center for Ethics and Research; Assistant Professor of Philosophy at UNC-Chapel Hill; as the Director of Education Policy for a New York City Council Member; and as a high school Social Studies teacher in the New York City public schools. He has also worked as a consultant for UNICEF, co-leading a Social Norms Workshop addressing violence against women and children in Harare, Zimbabwe, and helping to develop “A Fieldworker’s Toolkit for Social Change.” Rob received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in 2017, and his AB in Social Studies from Harvard in 2003.
Mande Zecca
Fields: American literature & creative writing
Research and Writing Interests : American modernist and postwar literature; poetry and poetics; material culture and book history; radical political movements; literary subcultures
Mande Zecca holds a PhD in English from Johns Hopkins University, an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a BA in English from Wesleyan University. Before coming to Harvard, she taught in the Johns Hopkins Program in Expository Writing for four years, two of them as a postdoctoral fellow. She writes poetry and scholarship about poetry, the latter in the form of a book project: Undersongs: Left Elegies and the Politics of Community . She’s also published writing (both scholarly and creative) in Modernism/modernity , Post45 , Jacket2 , Ploughshares , Colorado Review , CutBank , and elsewhere. Her chapbook of poems, Pace Arcadia , was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2017.
By Will Orwig and Daniel Schacter
Creativity in the Age of AI (generated by DALL-E)
What makes for a compelling story? Do computers have the capacity to be creative? These are evocative questions, especially with the recent explosion of interest in the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI); however, there has been surprisingly little scientific research to address them. We tried to fill this gap by studying creative expression in the context of story writing. We conducted several studies comparing short stories written by humans and Large Language Models (LLMs). Specifically, we looked at GPT-3 and GPT-4, which are two of the most powerful LLMs that have fueled the recent fascination with the capabilities and limits of AI. In our experiments, both humans and the LLMs were prompted with three-word cues and instructed to write a five sentence creative story that includes and elaborates upon those cues. The stories were then rated by both humans and AI on a scale from 1 (very uncreative) to 5 (very creative).
We found that a broad range of ideas, or increased “semantic diversity,” as well as the presence of perceptual details, resulted in stories that were rated as more original and imaginative. This was true for stories written by humans and those generated by AI. Furthermore, AI ratings of creativity were largely consistent with those provided by humans. Stories written by human participants and LLMs did not differ in terms of their creative quality, suggesting that current AI systems can replicate aspects of human creativity. Such findings can potentially reshape our fundamental beliefs about creativity and raise the possibility that LLMs could function as collaborative partners in crafting engaging narratives. They also provide new insights into what makes a compelling story and hint at potential applications for these AI tools in creative industries. In short, our study suggests that the integration of human imagination with AI capabilities represents a new frontier in storytelling, challenging traditional views of the creative process.
Will Orwig is a PhD candidate in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. Daniel Schacter is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Psychology at Harvard University.
Learn more in the original research article: The Language of Creativity: Evidence from Humans and Large Language Models. Orwig, W., Edenbaum, E.R., Greene, J.D. and Schacter, D.L. J Creat Behav. 2024 Jan 11
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Creative Writing. The vital presence of creative writing in the English Department is reflected by our many distinguished authors who teach our workshops. We offer courses each term in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, screenwriting, playwriting, and television writing. Our workshops are small, usually no more than twelve students, and offer writers ...
Harvard University is devoted to excellence in teaching, learning, and research, and to developing leaders in many disciplines who make a difference globally. ... Students enrolled in the Master of Liberal Arts program in Creative Writing & Literature will develop skills in creative writing and literary analysis through literature courses and ...
Through the master's degree in creative writing and literature, you'll hone your skills as a storyteller — crafting original scripts, novels, stories, and works of creative nonfiction. In small, workshop-style classes, you'll master key elements of narrative craft, including characterization, story and plot structure, point of view ...
The English Department is proud to be a home for creative writing at Harvard. The vital presence of creative writing in the department is reflected by our many distinguished authors who offer small, intensive workshops each term in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, screenwriting, playwriting, and television writing. ... Weleyan University (1991) M.A ...
The Master of Liberal Arts, Creative Writing and Literature degree field is offered online with 1 course on campus. A one-week option is available for the on-campus requirement. ... Nearly all courses can be taken online, but the degree requires an in-person experience at Harvard University where you enroll in our summer Writers' Residency.
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Novelist, critic, and essayist Teju Cole will teach creative writing courses in the spring as the first Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice. The boundary-crossing author is known for his debut novel "Open City," among other works. (Early admirers of the 2011 book included Harvard professor and New Yorker critic James Wood.) Cole received the PEN/Hemingway Award in 2011, the Windham ...
Through a series of imaginative writing prompts, generative exercises, and longer form projects, our semester culminated in a finished one act play with a plot entirely of our own choosing. The playwriting workshop is easily one of my favorite classes I've ever taken at Harvard. Having a creative outlet in one of my classes felt fulfilling ...
Welcome from the Director of Graduate Studies. Our graduate students come from across the globe, with a huge range of life experiences, tastes, and talents. Graduate education in the Harvard English Department is about helping each of our unique students become the scholar, teacher, writer, reader, mentor, and citizen they want to be.
The senior creative project offers students the opportunity to write a substantial work of creative writing in a single genre: around 10,000 words of fiction, comprised of one or several short stories, each complete in its own right; a chapbook of poetry; a portfolio of two short film scripts, totaling ca. 30 pages; a television pilot or play ...
A new bright, open, inviting home complements the creative writing program. Faculty and students have settled into the new home of creative writing atop Lamont Library. The bright, windowed fourth-floored space featuring a workshop conference room and faculty offices is a move up from the basement of the Barker Center, where most of the program ...
The Creative Writing and Literature program offers two capstone sequences: fiction (section 1) and fiction or nonfiction (section 2). CREA E-599 (Sections 1 and 3): Capstone: Developing the Manuscript: Fiction provides you with an opportunity to complete an additional two stories or chapters of your manuscript for a total of 50-60 pages of ...
Rhetoric: The Art of Persuasive Writing and Public Speaking. Gain critical communication skills in writing and public speaking with this introduction to American political rhetoric. Free *. Available now. Humanities. Online.
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Harvard Master's Student Diversity for Creative Writing. 12 Master's Degrees Awarded. 50.0% Women. 16.7% Racial-Ethnic Minorities*. In the 2019-2020 academic year, 12 students received their master's degree in creative writing. The gender and racial-ethnic breakdown of those individuals is shown below.
Education: B.A. 2009 Arizona State University M.F.A. 2012 Vanderbilt University. Interests: Poetry and Creative Nonfiction writing; visual art and illustration; dream logic; memory and memory loss; grief and haunting. Selected Works: Darling Nova, 2018
The vital presence of creative writing in the English Department is reflected by our many distinguished authors who teach our workshops. We offer courses each term in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, screenwriting, playwriting, and television writing. ... Workshops are open by application to Harvard College undergraduates, graduate students, staff ...
Through the Harvard University master's degree in the field of Creative Writing and Literature you will: Master key elements of narrative craft, including characterization, story and plot structure, point of view, dialogue, and description. Develop skills across multiple genres, including fiction, nonfiction, and dramatic writing.
Based on his courses in the Writing Program at Harvard University, Jeffrey R. Wilson's Academic Writing is a no-nonsense guide to the long and complex writing process. Packed with concrete examples, helpful visuals, and practical tips, the book is an essential guide for academic writing at the highest level.
Karen Heath. Associate Director of the Harvard College Writing Program. Senior Preceptor. [email protected]. Fields: Creative Writing and Literature. Research and Writing Interests: Fiction. Karen Heath received her MFA in fiction from Indiana University and her EdM from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
We tried to fill this gap by studying creative expression in the context of story writing. We conducted several studies comparing short stories written by humans and Large Language Models (LLMs). Specifically, we looked at GPT-3 and GPT-4, which are two of the most powerful LLMs that have fueled the recent fascination with the capabilities and ...