This is a workshop class where students learn the art of reporting and crafting longform creative nonfiction by writing about the mysteries and perplexities of family—our own and others, the ones we’re born into and the ones we observe.

What is poetry’s role in bearing witness to an age of seemingly unremitting emergency? How can poets represent and respond to ongoing crises such as collapsing public health infrastructure, racialized police brutality, and environmental devastation? Conversely, what is poetry’s relationship to highly mediatized “crisis events” like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina? Through literary and cultural analysis, this course will explore and historicize the concept of “emergency” in the United States. What is a state of emergency, and who gets to declare it?

This course will help more advanced fiction writers improve their skills in a supportive workshop context that encourages experimentation and attention to craft. It focuses on technique, close reading, and the production of new work. Students submit manuscripts for discussion, receive feedback from peers, and revise their work. The topic for Fall 2021 is Historical Fiction, defined here as work written by someone who was not alive at the time of the events described, so that the writer approaches the story only by research and imagination.

The goal of this workshop is to help more advanced fiction-writing students become stronger writers in a supportive context that encourages experimentation, contemplation and attention to craft. The workshop will include all the traditional elements of a fiction writing workshop, focusing on writing skills and technique, close reading and the production of new work. In addition, the workshop will include instruction in mindfulness meditation to help students cultivate their powers of concentration, observation, imagination and creative expression on the page.

Taught by the Grace Hazard Conkling Poet in Residence, this advanced poetry workshop is for students who have developed a passionate relationship with poetry and who have substantial experience in writing poems. Texts are based on the poets who are reading at Smith during the semester, and students gain expertise in reading, writing and critiquing poems. Writing sample and permission of the instructor are required. Enrollment limited to 12.

This course invites students with an interest in science to learn skills for creatively communicating science news, concepts and history. Class time is devoted to discussions (call them dissections) of assigned readings, including books, articles, plays, poems and blogs that treat scientific themes. We compare and contrast the writing of practicing scientists with that of science writers, in the hope of appropriating the best elements of both. Class sessions later in the term provide time and space for workshopping and peer editing.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, I Henry IV, Measure for Measure, King Lear, Macbeth, The Tempest, and Shakespeare's sonnets. Enrollment limited to 25. Not open to first-year students.

A study of England's first cosmopolitan poet whose Canterbury Tales offer a chorus of medieval literary voices, while creating a new kind of poetry anticipating modern attitudes and anxieties through colorful, complex characters like the Wife of Bath.Weread these tales closely in Chaucer's Middle English, an expressive idiom, ranging from the funny, sly and ribald to the thoughtful and profound. John Dryden called Chaucer the "father of English poesy," but if so, he was a good one. Later poets laughed with him, wept with him, and then did their own thing, just as he would have wanted.