Introduction to Creative Writing & Contemporary American Literature (Hargeisa, Somalia)

Course Description

In partnership with Hargeisa University, the IWP Distance Learning Program will offer a six-week online creative writing and literature course from February 21 to March 11, 2013. The course is designed for emerging writers of college age. Structurally, the course will be divided evenly between fiction and poetry, with six sessions allotted to each genre. The course will feature lectures on and discussion of contemporary American poetry and fiction to guide practice-based writing exercises. Readings and texts will be selected with an eye towards contemporary works published in established American literary journals such as Witness, Threepenny Review, The Collagist, and Narrative and include such topics as immigration narrative and cross-cultural exploration. Short readings, responses, and writing exercises will be assigned weekly to facilitate discussion for live sessions between students at the University of Iowa (Iowa City, USA) and Hargeisa University (Hargeisa, Somalia).

Instructors

Rae WINKELSTEIN-DUVENECK graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2012. She has taught creative writing and rhetoric courses at the University of Iowa and worked as a Poetry Editor for The Iowa Review in 2011. Publications include poems in the Lana Turner Journal and Strange Cage and articles in The Iowa Review and The Albany Journal.

Mark MAYER is the Robert P. Dana Emerging Writer Fellow at Cornell College. A former Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is winner of the John Leggett Fiction Prize and the Donald Justice Poetry Prize. His fiction has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and anthologized in New Stories from the Midwest.