This course will integrate intermediate level drawing assignments with two student defined half semester long independent projects. Articles, slide lectures and field trips to area art museums and drawing sites will inform work in the studio. Drawing as a visual practice will be defined broadly to allow for the exploration of forms and imagery across multiple genres, media and dimensions. Group critiques will aid in the development of a cohesive and ambitious body of independent work. Prerequisite: at least one drawing course at the college level.

This creative writing seminar centers contemporary works by African authors. Contemporary African literatures in English and translation are flourishing, with many authors active in global literary communities and increasingly shaping the course of literature in English. Although most of our readings will be fiction, we will also read poetry and creative non-fiction. Class members will produce two creative pieces in a mode of their choice, and a reflexive essay. Members will also research and do a class presentation on some aspect of contemporary arts in Africa.

This course connects the ecology of New England and ongoing environmental changes with field-based scientific research integrated with art-making. The course goal is to foster the understanding that artistic expression contextualized through a rigorous scientific lens can be a tool for analysis, critical inquiry, and environmentalism that may stimulate novel forms of public engagement. Students will be introduced to natural and human-modified environments across the region through weekly field trips, primary scientific literature, and surveys of artists concerned with land use and ecology.

Who are your elders? Family members or ancestors? Artists, activists and intellectuals who have paved the way for you? Someone - younger than you - who has the insight of an elder? Elements of your world: a tree, the sidewalk, the wind, a familiar laugh that goes back generations? In this course, you'll create an ensemble-based theater piece inspired by your elders. You'll research the piece (through interviews and the gathering of stories, gestures, and images) then develop a work-in-progress performance.

About the prose poem, poet Campbell McGrath asks, "Do the formal fields end where the valley begins, or does everything that surrounds us emerge from its embrace?" We will explore this well-established (yet liminal) form in workshop. Assignments will include weekly readings and responses to published and peer work, imitations, and writing exercises. Each workshop member is required to maintain a course journal and to complete one formal presentation of the work of a published (prose) poet.

The sonnet is one of our oldest and most ubiquitous poetic forms. For centuries, writers as disparate as William Shakespeare, Marilyn Nelson, Wanda Coleman, and David Wojahn have dabbled, innovated, succeeded, and sometimes failed with the form. In this course, we will explore the demands and nuances of the sonnet, in an effort to discover what has attracted and continues to attract so many practitioners.

What does it take to produce, book and tour a theatre for young audiences (TYA) production? The answers to this question will be explored while producing New Canadian Kid by Dennis Foon. The course will begin with researching TYA practices with a focus on touring. Next, students will serve as producers, actors, designers, publicity directors, company managers, education directors, stage managers, build and run crew, and creative drama workshop leaders for Seedling Productions (the TYA branch of Hampshire College Theatre).

This course is an introduction to drawing that will expand into more experimental and concept driven practices. In class drawing exercises will build a skill-set of drawing practices using traditional drawing media such as graphite and charcoal, working from observation in various techniques. The later part of the course will explore performance, conceptual, and using non-traditional media and will culminate in a self-directed project. Prerequisite: One studio art course.

This class will explore solo theatre through contemplative practice. Solo theatre includes the wide realm of solo performance and theatre made for one audience member. The experiential class will practice in various traditions of contemplative practice, including meditation, noble silence, devotion, reading and other methods of reflection. It will require rigorous vulnerability and deep searching as a way towards building artistic practice.

Our focus will be on recognizing, analyzing, and developing the different narrative techniques used to write the short story. Each technique will be studied individually, as well as in relation to the work as a whole. As David Lodge writes in The Art of Fiction, "Effects in fiction are plural and interconnected, each drawing on and contributing to all the others." We will take apart these "effects" in order to better appreciate how they are linked, both when reading and writing.