Spring 2027 Elective Courses at a Glance
WR-320-01 Fieldwork, By Appointment
WR-320-02 The Cost(s) of Living, Dianca Potts, Fridays 10:00 am – 12:50 pm
WR-320-03 Experimental Girlhood, Rachel Levitsky, Tuesdays 10:00 am – 12:50 pm
WR-320-04 Sex, Drugs and Rock N’ Roll: Writing in Extremis, Max Ludington, Wednesdays 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
WR-320-05 The Art of Crime, David Gordon, Wednesdays 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm
WR-320-06 Screenwriting: Word, Image, Action, David Gordon, Thursdays 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm
WR-320-07 Graphic Novel, Sofi Thanhauser, Wednesdays 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
WR-320-08 Writing With Time, Fulla Abdul-Jabbar, Mondays 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
WR-320-09 Stranger Than Fiction, Dianca Potts, Tuesdays 10:00 am – 12:50 pm
WR-320-10 Publishing Lab: Ubiquitous, Alysia Slocum, Tuesdays 4:30 pm – 7:20 pm
WR-320-11 Introduction to Poetic Forms, Anselm Berrigan, Mondays 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
WR-320-12 The Elements of Storytelling, Daphne Beal, Thursdays 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm
WR-325B-01 Topics in Journalism: Journalism Workshop: Prattler II, Eric Rosenblum, Thursdays 9:30 am – 12:30 pm
WR-360-01 The Art Of Teaching Writing, Gina Zucker, Saturdays 8:30 am – 1:20 pm
WR-390 Internship/Seminar, Laura Henriksen, By Appointment
WR-320-01 Fieldwork
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. However, in even more ways than Internship / Seminar, 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 The Cost(s) of Living
Dianca Potts
Fridays 10:00 am – 12:50 pm
What is labor? How does it shape the body’s experience of language, the sensory, the temporal? In this course, students will delve into and create works of prose that investigate, dismantle, and reimagine the act and cost of labor and its impact on beinghood, belonging, and desire. Through a diverse offering of readings, generative assignments, and craft-focused workshops, students will explore how the confrontation of labor through prose can simultaneously capture the personal as well as the universal. This course will include literary, cinematic, and art-based texts that embody, depict, and/or reimagine the narrative implications of laboring bodies in addition to works that illustrate the potential of crafting stories that fall outside of the binary (in terms of identity, form, and aesthetic). Students will engage with works by Renne Gladman, Simone Weil, Audre Lorde, Halle Butler, Otessa Moshfegh, Mara Faye Lethem, Brandon Taylor, Nicola Dinan, Zinzi Clemmons, Julio Torres, Jordan Harrison, Shara Worden, and others.
WR-320-03 Experimental Girlhood
Rachel Levitsky
Tuesdays 10:00 am – 12:50 pm
We’ll begin this tutorial by listening to an interview with the musician Anohni and writer Naomi Klein that makes connections between gender and environmental precarity, in order to set the stage for some questions: What is a girl and what is the role of the girl? How and what are the forces, the pressures, the myths and the fictions that create and shape girlhood? How is girlhood appropriated and how is it a product? Is it a product of ideology or is it beyond domestication? Through stories, poems, films and essays we read – by Rosmarie Waldrop, Natalie Diaz, Soham Patel, Susan Taubes, Mei-mei Bersenbrugge, Toni Morrison, Arundati Roy, John Keene, Virginia Woolf, Sophie Lewis, Tisa Bryant, Lorraine Hansberry and possibly more, we’ll find our own way to experiment with personal ideas about girlhood and write, write, write.
WR-320-04 Sex, Drugs and Rock N’ Roll: Writing in Extremis
Max Ludington
Wednesdays 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
Sex, intoxication, physical and emotional pain, trauma, violence, mortal fear, spiritual revelation, romantic obsession. These are just some of the extreme experiences that have fascinated writers and readers since stories have been told. Whether positive or negative, these episodes map the depths and horizons of human experience and give us raw insight into our nature. How do we learn to translate those experiences into good writing without becoming melodramatic or overwrought? Great writers have grappled with that question, and have found answers that we can learn from. Students will be asked to draw upon some of their own most extreme experiences in order to find ways to use them in fiction or memoir. Also, we’ll discuss the process of imagining extremes without actually undergoing them. We will read writers past and present, and study them as models. Writers on the syllabus will include: Denis Johnson, Hunter Thompson, Carmen Maria Machado, Jennifer Egan, Edward St. Aubyn, Joyce Carol Oates, and Joy Williams.
WR-320-05 The Art of Crime
David Gordon
Wednesdays 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm
Are you ready to plot a heist or commit your first (fictional) murder to paper? In this class, we will explore the art of crime writing and the composition of mysteries, interrogating topics such as the detective as modern hero, creating villains, plotting, constructing clues, red-herrings, twists and suspense. Class will combine reading and discussing a variety of classic works, screening films, and developing our own ideas, moving from rough outline, through character sketching, to plotting and execution. All forms are welcome – story, script, beginning a novel, etc. Authors may include Chandler, Hammett, Christie, Highsmith, Sjowall/Wahloo, and more. Come get a headstart on your career in crime.
WR-320-06 Screenwriting: Word, Image, Action
David Gordon
Thursdays 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm
This course will explore the theory and practice of screenwriting, combining the writing of short scripts, class workshopping of student screenplays, and the viewing and discussion of great movies and episodes, as we develop our ear for dialogue, our instinct for storytelling, our visual sense and our knowledge of structure. Beginning with simple exercises and working toward growing complexity, we will discover how the primary elements of action and speech can lead to an infinite range of expression and limitless depths of character, story and emotion. Open to prose and poetry writers seeking to explore a new medium, as well as film, game, comic, illustration animation students and and all other artists seeking to develop their palate for dialogue, narrative, scene-construction and character development. Screenings may include Kurosawa, Heckerling, Lynch, Chase, Antonioni, Hawks, Hitchcock, Denis, Godard, Zahedi and others.
WR-320-07 Graphic Novel
Sofi Thanhauser
Wednesdays 2:00 pm – 4:50 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-320-08 Writing With Time
Fulla Abdul-Jabbar
Mondays 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
This course will explore the relationship between writing and time through experiments in writing and time-based media. We will spend a portion of the semester thinking about time in page-bound forms such as poetry, nonfiction, and fiction. We will then shift our focus toward experimental film and video, where we will study examples of language that is framed within time and that is animated by bodies, graphics, and space. We will ask questions such as: How much time should we spend with an artwork? How does the frame of time alter your work? How does writing alter perceptions of time? How can writing reflect time—real time and dream time? In this course, we will develop an understanding of time-based writing and initiate time-based projects of our own. We will look at video art, essay films, documentaries, and performances by writers and authors such as Basma Alsharif, Naeem Mohaiemen, Derek Jarman, Kevin B. Lee, Sky Hopinka, Agnes Varda, Marguerite Duras, Harun Farocki, Chris Marker, Frances Stark, Werner Herzog, Martine Syms, and Robin Deacon.
WR-320-09 Stranger Than Fiction
Dianca Potts
Tuesdays 10:00 am – 12:50 pm
How do we make sense of the unexplainable? What do stories about the paranormal reveal about the human condition and our imaginations? In this course, students will delve into tales of extraordinary phenomena, folklore, urban legends, and encounters with the extraterrestrial and supernatural. From UFOs and poltergeists to doppelgängers and premonitions, this course will investigate what the unfathomable can teach us about the power of storytelling and personal truth. Through a multi-genre offering of readings, reflections, and generative prompts, students will examine how strange stories of the past and present explore the complexities of desire, fear, and belonging while crafting extraordinary non-fiction works of their own. Students will read Alexander Chee, Kelly Link, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Elissa Washuta, Claire Cronin, Tira K. Madden, Jordan Kisner, Mira Ptacin, Colin Dickey, Karen Russell, Shannon Taggart, and others.
WR-320-10 Publishing Lab: Ubiquitous
Alysia Slocum
Tuesdays 4:30 pm – 7:20 pm
Publishing Laboratory: Ubiquitous will introduce each student to the creative and editorial process of generating Ubiquitous, a literary and arts magazine with an over 30 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. The course will culminate with one published issue, with each student serving an editorial role.
WR-320-11 Introduction to Poetic Forms
Anselm Berrigan
Mondays 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
Form, sound, materials, subject matter – all of these elements of poetry tend to be talked about separately, but they are in fact completely bound up together. In this elective we will read and write in different forms each class, blending older forms with contemporary inventions and reinventions (i.e. all the different ways the sonnet form has been transformed over the centuries) – and we will aim to make a few forms up as we go. Lists, signs, insults, puns, rhyme schemes, songs, collage, exclamation, and translation will all be on the formal table, so to speak. Harryette Mullen, Ron Padgett, John Yau, Courtney Bush, John Wieners, Alice Notley, Emily Dickinson, Terrence Hayes, Frank O’Hara, Hafiz of Shiraz, Petrarch, Fanny Howe, and Mónica de la Torre will be among the many poets we read for inspiration, amusement, and influence.
WR-320-12 The Elements of Storytelling
Daphne Beal
Thursdays 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm
How do we tell stories, human-to-human, that move, entertain, and persuade?
This course invites Communications Design students to draw on the same creativity that informs their visual work and translate it into words. Through weekly writing exercises and a final project, students will use memory and imagination to craft authentic, engaging stories for varied purposes and audiences. Coursework will grow students’ capacities for internal reflection and external observation and allow students to explore narrative styles, ranging from humorous and iconoclastic to serious and contemplative. They will learn techniques of structure, pacing, and point-of-view, while using vivid, metaphorical language. By the end, students will gain confidence to write creatively about their work—by humans and for humans—in nuanced, memorable prose singular to them.
WR-325B-01 Topics in Journalism: Journalism Workshop: Prattler II
Eric Rosenblum
Thursdays 9:30 am – 12:30 pm
This course is intended to familiarize students working on the Prattler with all aspects of generating, editing and designing the content of the school magazine, as well as the managerial skills required to coordinate such efforts. Most classes take the form of editorial meetings, and multiple writing assignments will be required of all students, pertaining to their respective functions in the production of the magazine.
WR-360-01 The Art Of Teaching Writing
Gina Zucker
Saturdays 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-390 Internship/Seminar
Laura Henriksen
By Appointment
Each student is placed in an internship for one semester. Internship venues are usually publishing houses, agents’ offices, newspaper offices, Internet publishers, film studios, television stations and other work sites that have in-house publishing capabilities.
“Practice” Writing Electives: The Practice menu includes thoughtfully designed elective courses that invite students to develop active understandings of literary genres and writing-related practices not emphasized in the core studio sequence but relevant in the rapidly changing literary world.
“Inquiry” Writing Electives: The Inquiry menu includes courses that are investigations into specific theoretical, literary, and aesthetic questions, giving students the opportunity to deepen their understandings of the many fields of inquiry in which they participate as writers, with an emphasis on inclusive study and opportunities to further their creative practice.
**Please note that while four Practice/Inquiry electives are required overall in the BFA, you can choose your four courses freely from either or both menus: in other words, you are not required to take a certain number of Practice electives nor a certain number of Inquiry electives. You should be guided by your own interests and goals in choosing from these menus.
“Writing Lives” Electives: The Writing Lives Pathway threads consideration of professional preparation, community engagement, and sustainable, lifelong creative practice across the degree. The pathway begins with Community as Classroom and continues through Writer as Worker (both required courses) and then concludes with two courses selected from the Writing Lives Menu, a menu that includes Internship Seminar and Internship II as well as other opportunities for hands-on community engagement and/or professional preparation. Please consult with the Internship Coordinator/Writer as Worker instructor, as well as with your department advisor, for guidance and approval regarding your choices from the menu. If a student wishes to take a non-Writing class rather than a course from the Writing Lives menu because a select course serves their specific professional goals, they may discuss that option and seek approval for it with the Internship Coordinator and department advisor.
Inquiry:
WR 320-02: The Cost(s) of Living
WR 320-03: Experimental Girlhood
WR 320-04: Sex, Drugs and Rock N’ Roll
WR 320-05: The Art of Crime
WR 320-08: Writing with Time
WR 320-09: Stranger than Fiction
Practice:
WR 320-01: Fieldwork
WR 320-6: Screenwriting
WR 320-07: Graphic Novel
WR 320-10: Publishing Lab
WR 320-11: Introduction to Poetic Forms
WR 320-12: The Elements of Storytelling
Writing Lives:
WR 320-01: Fieldwork
WR 320-10: Publishing Lab
WR 325b: Topics in Journalism: Prattler
WR 360: The Art of Teaching Writing
WR 390: Internship/Seminar