8-Week: Hybrid Essay Forms—The Critic and the Lyricist

This course will be a deep dive into two very different niches within nonfiction: the long-form critical or reported essay and the lyric essay. Writers will engage with these seemingly opposite ends of the essayistic spectrum in order to probe the core craft elements that unite all nonfiction writing and to expand their vocal ranges on the page. This workshop will be generative in focus, with verbal feedback offered in-class from your instructor and peers; we'll also read and discuss works by such masters as Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, John Berger, Sherman Alexie, David Foster Wallace, Claudia Rankine, Hanif Abdurraqib, and Olga Tokarczuk, among others.