Fall 2026 Courses at a Glance
WR-320-01 Fieldwork/Internship – Adrian Shirk – By Appointment
WR 320-02 Stand Up Comedy for Writers – Kath Barbadoro – Monday 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm
WR 320-03 Screenwriting – Don Andreasen – Wednesday 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
WR 320-04 Dystopian Women – Gina Zucker – Wednesday 10:00 am – 12:50 pm
WR 320-05 The Unspeakable – David Gordon – Wednesday 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm
WR 320-06 The Unspeakable – David Gordon – Thursday 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm
WR 320-07 Journalism – Gabriel Cohen – Tuesday 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm
WR 320-08 Journalism – Gabriel Cohen – Thursday 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm
WR 320-09 Body Horror: Abjection as Craft – Dianca Potts – Friday 10:00 am – 12:50 pm
WR 320-10 Graphic Novel – Sofi Thanhauser – Thursday 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm
WR 320-11 Publishing Lab: Ubiquitous – Alysia Slocum Laferriere – Tuesday 4:30 pm – 6:20 pm
WR 320-13 Sickness, Sex, Silhouette: Body Writing – Laura Henriksen – Wednesday 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
WR 320-14 Elegy, Amusement, and Experimentation – Anselm Berrigan – Friday 11:00 am – 1:50 pm
WR 320-15 Children’s Book Writing – Peter Catalanotto – Monday 10:00 am – 12:50 pm
WR 325A-01 – Prattler Workshop I – Eric Rosenblum, Monday 9:30 am – 12:20 pm
WR-360-01, 02, 03 The Art Of Teaching Writing
WR 493-01 – Ecopoetics – Laura Elrick – Monday 1:00 pm – 2:50 pm
WR-320-01 Fieldwork/Internship
Adrian Shirk
By Appointment
This course is designed for BFA Writing students who choose to pursue an independent fieldwork project that relates to an area of professional or artistic development that they want to gain new skills and experience in. Fieldwork allows the student to design a semester-length project with the supervising instructor in light of the students’ goals, which otherwise aren’t reflected in an existing course or internship. These projects may range from starting a literary journal, publishing project, podcast, video series, event, community arts workshop, collaboration with a local organization, performance production, specific form of professional development through research and mentoring (i.e. agenting, running a nonprofit, developing a business plan, etc), and many other possibilities. (All students who wish to register for this course must contact the instructor and declare the specific content and scope of their project for approval).
Similar to Internship/Seminar, this course asks: What can we learn from a fieldwork project if we treat it as an alternative type of classroom? How can we analyze and engage with our experiences “out in the field” with the rigor and curiosity we bring to other kinds of texts?
Viewed this way, the fieldwork project becomes an educational opportunity that allows us to gain experiential knowledge about a particular professional, artistic and/or material sphere, and from which we can determine the kind of work-life conditions we will need as writers/artists, now and in the future. In even more ways than Internship / Seminar, however, this course offers self-reflexive assignments that reflect the project’s progress, and a journal that allows students to look critically and constructively at the content of their lives and work “outside” of their conventional classrooms, specifically pertaining to the parts of their lives that the fieldwork overlaps with.
At its core, this course offers a guided professional exploration while students carry out the labor of their independent fieldwork project. The class is designed around a seminar model with two primary goals: 1) to enable students to get the most out of their own projects as modes of education; and 2) to foster communication between students about their experiences and the fields/skills/vocations they are exploring, so that each comes away with a more nuanced picture of the variety of professions, experiences and choices available to writers in the current culture and economy. Above all, this course asks students to engage critically with their experiences and to complete specific self-styled projects based on the professional and creative inquiries / excursions they’re undertaking, resulting in a significant final project that stands as a measure of their fifteen-week activity.
WR 320-02 Stand Up Comedy for Writers
Kath Barbadoro
Monday 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm
What makes a joke a joke? This class aims to provide a supportive environment to learn and practice the fundamentals of joke writing and comedic storytelling. Through analyzing the work of comedians like Mitch Hedberg, John Mulaney, and Patti Harrison, as well as that of comedians working in New York City today, we’ll learn to identify and use comedic devices like repetition, incongruity, and character-based perspective in our own work. Through structured and unstructured writing and performance exercises, we’ll learn to use the linguistic and performative structures of comedy to help us express our own unique perspectives. In performing our material for each other in class, we’ll get more comfortable speaking in front of others, and the satisfaction of making each other laugh.
WR 320-03 Screenwriting
Don Andreasen
Wednesday 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
This course will introduce students to the fundamental techniques of screenwriting. We will study formatting, the use of setting, location, narrative structure, conflict, character development and dialogue. In the first half each student will write short scenes in order to explore and develop various aspects of screenwriting. In the second half students choose one scene to develop into a script for a short film approximately 7-15 minutes in length. Throughout the semester, students will read and discuss their work in class as well as view and discuss various films and topics. The class will be divided into 2 groups who submit their work on alternating weeks. Each script is read aloud by fellow classmates who are assigned their characters by the writer of the script. A discussion and critique immediately follows each reading.
WR 320-04 Dystopian Women
Gina Zucker
Wednesday 10:00 am – 12:50 pm
We continue to live in a time of extreme ideological conflict, as retrograde power rages against new waves of feminism, activism, liberalism and social change. In the ongoing struggle to find our common humanity, some writers use dystopian and speculative narratives, as well as elements of fantasy, magic realism or fabulism, to tell stories that signal the fears and anxieties of our time. In her groundbreaking novel The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood made it a point to ensure that everything that occurred in The Republic of Gilead had already happened in the real world. Of her feminist revenge fantasy, The Power, Naomi Alderman said, “nothing happens to a man in [this book] that’s not happening to a woman right now . . . if my novel is a dystopia, we’re living in a dystopia today.”
These imagined worlds reflect on the status of oppressed people in our society and those who abuse, or misuse, their power. Some explore what it means to be considered female, to have the body of a woman, to question traditional gender roles and dynamics, to love in a world engulfed by ecological disaster, violence and inequality. They show us how the unthinkable becomes thinkable, how our worst nightmares can slowly become part of daily life. Sometimes they show us the resilience of humanity. Through reading, writing, presentations and other projects, we’ll discover what these invented worlds have to teach us about literary craft and language as well as how we as authors can create narratives that raise uncomfortable questions about our current lives. Inspired by our reading, we’ll attempt to contextualize our own experiences existing in our bodies, communities and histories, within a physical and socio-political landscape.
Readings may include texts by established feminist speculative and sci-fi authors such as Atwood, Octavia Butler, and Ursula K. Le Guin, and more recent fiction by contemporary writers such as Alderman, Carmen Maria Machado and Samanta Schweblin.
WR 320-05, WR 320-06 The Unspeakable
David Gordon
320-05 Wednesday 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm, 320-06 Thursday 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm
Many people feel the presence of feelings, experiences, truths and intuitions that seem beyond the rational and which we are unable to put our finger on directly. Artists and writers in particular often struggle to find ways to articulate these realms of experience or memory that seem to escape or be excluded from conventional discourse. Perhaps it is an otherworldly experience, or an idea that eludes rational thought, or perhaps it is a secret truth that has been repressed. Perhaps it is too disturbing or taboo to be allowed out into the light. This course will focus on literature and other artworks that attempt to articulate experience beyond the threshold of what can be directly apprehended or recounted: the uncanny, the mysterious, the mystical, the unreal, the irrational, the terrifying and the haunting. We will examine work by Dickinson, Stevens, Stein, Lispector, Sebald, Fitzgerald, Beckett, Breton; texts by Freud, Benjamin, Bataille; films from Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, Bunuel; visual art and music. Students will be encouraged to explore and experiment with means and methods of uncovering and expressing their own unspeakable truths.
WR 320-07, WR 320-08 Journalism
Gabriel Cohen
320-07 Tuesday 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm, 320-08 Thursday 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm
Do you want your writing to have a positive effect in the world? These days, good journalists are more important than ever: they help defend our democracy, preserve the environment, champion the oppressed, and give readers a deeper understanding of what’s going on in our volatile world. In this course we’ll read powerful examples of journalistic writing, and you’ll get a chance to practice essential skills, including how to come up with interesting topics for articles—we’ll find them in Pratt, our local neighborhoods, and our fascinating city. Students will also learn how to do research, conduct interviews, write lively prose, and make strong arguments. Last but not least, you’ll find out how to pick appropriate venues for your story ideas and how to pitch them to editors. Who knows: you might even get published!
Gabriel Cohen is the author of a literary novel, four crime novels, and 2 nonfiction books, and was a finalist for an Edgar award. He has written for the New York Times, Poets & Writers, TimeOut New York, Gourmet. com, and many other publications. Now in his 16th year of teaching at Pratt, he has also taught writing at New York University, the Center for Fiction, and Long Island University; worked as a staff writer at the New Haven Advocate weekly newspaper; and was profiled in the New York Times for publishing three different kinds of books in one year.
WR 320-09 Body Horror: Abjection as Craft
Dianca Potts
Friday 10:00 am – 12:50 pm
Through a diverse selection of creative works, revelatory prompts, and engaged discussion, students will collectively explore the possibilities of abjection, body horror, and the sensory as generative and analytical praxis. Students will unearth and excavate new ways to invoke and center the body through narrative design and experimentation with form. Throughout this course, students will be encouraged to uncover new approaches to their creative practice and spark the cultivation of new works and approaches to revision and craft. Participants will also learn how to incorporate artifacts, new media, and theory into their work to further excavate, channel, and conjure new thresholds and topographies within their writing. Together, we’ll uncover the narrative potential of what disturbs, rattles, and haunts. Students will engage with works by Natalie Diaz, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Claire Cronin, Jennifer Reeder, Audre Lorde, Julia Kristeva, Barbara Creed, Michelle Garza Cervera, Rachel Yoder, Agustina Bazterrica, and more.
WR 320-10 Graphic Novel
Sofi Thanhauser
Thursday 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm
Is a picture worth a thousand words? What is the relationship between prose & pictures? In this course, students will read and dissect some of the best graphic novels of our time, from Art Spiegelman’s biography of his holocaust survivor father, Maus, to Alison Bechdel’s groundbreaking memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Students may create their own “script” for a graphic novel drawing upon novels, films and personal experience.
WR 320-11 Publishing Lab: Ubiquitous
Alysia Slocum Laferriere
Tuesday 4:30 pm – 6:20 pm
Publishing Laboratory: Ubiquitous will introduce each student to the creative and editorial process of making a new issue of Ubiquitous, a literary and arts magazine with an over 40 year history at Pratt Institute. The literary magazine’s aim is to publish original works from the Pratt Institute community in areas of poetry, prose, visual arts, and design. Previous issues have included themes such as: Commune, Yearning and Devotion, Emergence, Salvage, and Homecoming. The course will culminate with one published issue, with each student serving an editorial role.
WR 320-13 Sickness, Sex, Silhouette: Body Writing
Laura Henriksen
Wednesday 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
In this poetics course, we will approach the challenge of writing in relation to, about, alongside, inside, through our own bodies, and the bodies of the figures who populate our texts.
Our weeks will be organized around different states or conditions that bodies move through in a day and a lifetime: sick bodies, tired bodies, pregnant bodies, sexual and sexualized bodies, racial and racialized bodies, growing and aging bodies, bodies in motion, bodies at rest. We will move dialectically towards exploring the strong body’s vulnerability, and the vulnerable body’s strength. We won’t take for granted that we know what a body is, and we will seek all opportunities to expand that category.
Some of our guides may include: Saidiya Hartman, Judith Butler, M. Murphy, Dodie Bellamy, Simone White, Valerie Hsiung, Audre Lorde, Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, Susana Thénon (trans. Rebekah Smith), Brandon Shimoda, Carolyn Lazard, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Mohammed El-Kurd, Farnoosh Fathi, Rodrigo Quijano (trans. Judah Rubin), Rachel James, Nora Treatbaby, Jamaica Kincaid, Megan Milks, and Lyn Hejinian
WR 320-14 Elegy, Amusement, and Experimentation
Anselm Berrigan
Friday 11:00 am – 1:50 pm
The longer version of this elective title could be: When the Sad and Strange Fuse & Freak Out in Poems — and so we’ll be reading and writing out of a range of poems that are elegiac at heart (source) but move across a wide range of surfaces and tones, ranging from humor to dirge to droll ambivalence. The point being to address grief, in public and/or in private, without giving into received (i.e. conventional) notions of how mourning and loss are supposed to sound. We’ll be reading work by John Keats, Emily Dickinson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, John Yau, Claire Hong, W.H. Auden, John Keene, Alice Notley, Akilah Oliver, John Milton, and Geoffrey Chaucer, among others. Dreams will have some things to say along the way.
WR 320-15 Children’s Book Writing
Peter Catalanotto
Monday 10:00 am – 12:50 pm
This course will focus on writing a timeless story that will appeal to children and resonate with adults. Through exercises, in-class assignments, and the workshop method, students will mine their lives and imaginations for a story that will enchant and empower children; a story that will provoke discussion stemming from the adult and child’s shared experience. Students will discover the importance of brevity, pattern, and cadence, and how to create writing that inspires, supports, and enhances imagery. This course will also offer avenues for submitting stories to agents and editors for those interested in publishing.
WR 325A-01 The Prattler
Eric Rosenblum
Monday 9:20 am – 12:20 pm
This unique journalism workshop gives students the chance to think broadly about the art of newspaper and magazine writing and to develop their own articles for Pratt’s nearly century-old publication, The Prattler. Most classes take the form of editorial meetings in which the group discusses the upcoming Prattler issue and workshops student contributions, often consisting of personal essays, opinion pieces, news stories, and art, music and film criticism. Assigned readings from publications such as The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and Vice, as well as visiting journalists, help students to understand the ethics and process of writing for publication.
WR 360-01 The Art Of Teaching Writing
TBA
Saturday 8:30 am – 1:20 pm
Pratt’s Saturday Writing School is a teaching laboratory that provides writing classes for local adolescents. Depending on program enrollment, each pair of writing major undergraduates is assigned a class of between three and six middle school students. Writing undergrads are responsible for the planning and teaching of a ten-week sequence of writing lessons guided by the theory and strategies presented by the instructor. The instructor supervises and advises student teachers and will visit them in their classroom during each two-hour session. A seminar immediately following each class is a forum for reflection on common issues and problems, both classroom and societal, emerging from the Saturday Writing School experience.
WR 493-01 Ecopoetics
Laura Elrick
Monday 1:00 pm – 3:30 pm
Terra forms make a planet habitable. In this course, we both tend and imagine systems and processes of earthly entanglement. Writing with, against, in, and on the field (both literally and figuratively), we develop an urban ecopoetics of interspecies relation. Readings will be encountered from an array of fields (including poetry and poetics, philosophy, critical theory, ecology, history, art writing, botany, music, science fiction) and will encourage speculative and experimental works that collaborate with, for example, bacterial processes, rogue plants, birds that migrate over militarized human political borders, and the more-than-human urban infrastructures that make and unmake life. Together, we’ll develop new (art)forms of attention, opening our writing to the influence of life-worlds around us, in whose ongoing stories we become conscious participants. Key terms: experimental, process-based, somatic, conceptual.
Also open to MFA students under the course code WR-593
Practice:
320-01 Fieldwork/Internship
320-02 Stand Up Comedy for Writers
320-03 Screenwriting
320-07 and 08: Journalism
320-11: Publishing Lab
320-15 Children’s Book Writing
325A Prattler Workshop
Inquiry:
320-04 Dystopian Women
320-05 and 06: The Unspeakable
320-09 Body Horror
320-10 Graphic Novel
320-13 Sickness, Sex, Silhouette
320-14 Elegy, Amusement, and Experimentation
WR 493-01 Ecopoetics
Writing Lives:
*any of the courses listed below automatically count for this requirement in the degree. However you are welcome to fulfill this requirement by selecting any other Pratt course that specifically supports your creative and/or professional goals post-graduation. That could include, for example, our electives in screenwriting, stand up comedy, journalism, or other subjects; or it could include a course in another program that helps you prepare for your working and writing life after graduation. Talk with your academic advisor or the department chair if you have any questions about fulfilling this requirement.
320-01 Fieldwork/Internship
320-11 Publishing Lab
WR 325A Prattler Workshop
WR 360-01 The Art of Teaching Writing