Courses

CRWT B159 Introduction to Creative Writing

Fall 2025

This course is for students who wish to experiment with three genres of creative writing: short fiction, poetry and drama, and techniques specific to each of them. Priority will be given to interested first- and second-year students; additional spaces will be made available to upper-year students with little or no experience in creative writing. Students will write or revise work every week; roughly four weeks each will be devoted to short fiction, poetry, and drama. There will be individual conferences with the instructor to discuss their progress and interests. Half of class time will be spent discussing student work and half will be spent discussing syllabus readings.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward: Creative Writing; English.

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CRWT B165 The Writing Practice

Spring 2026

This course is designed for students who are pursuing-or contemplating-a major in Creative Writing. Throughout the semester, we will explore what it means to live a life rooted in writing: how to build a sustainable practice, how to navigate the rhythms of inspiration and discipline, and how to shape raw material into resonant work. Just as importantly, we'll read and discuss published pieces that align with and challenge students' own creative directions, helping to deepen individual projects-in-progress. At its heart, this course is about cultivating a creative community. We'll share work, struggles, breakthroughs, and strategies, learning how to support one another as artists committed to growth. By semester's end, students will be more grounded in their own voices and better equipped to take the next steps in their writing journey. Pre-requisite: Any CRWT Class

Writing Intensive

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward: English.

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CRWT B220 Political Journalism: Reporting, Analysis and Influence

Spring 2026

This course examines the role of journalism in shaping political discourse, public opinion, and governance. Students will analyze how journalists cover elections, policy, and political movements by studying historical and contemporary political reporting. The course will explore ethical considerations, media bias, investigative reporting, and the impact of digital media on political journalism. Students will develop their political reporting skills through news writing, op-eds, and multimedia projects while discussing press freedom, misinformation, and the evolving relationship between the media and democracy.

Course does not meet an Approach

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CRWT B250 Monument Writing: Poetry, Public Memory and The Art of Ackno

Fall 2025

This course, led by former Philadelphia poets laureate and community arts practitioners Trapeta B. Mayson and Yolanda Wisher, is an exploration of the themes and stories that inspired Don't Forget to Remember (Me), Nekisha Durrett's monumental artwork on Bryn Mawr's campus uplifting the names and lives of Black caretakers whose work was critical to building and operating the College, particularly in its early decades, but whose contributions were historically unrecognized. Through readings and film, guest speakers, poetry writing prompts, visits to the artwork, interactive tours of related campus sites, and the creation of a group public art project, students will intimately and collaboratively explore the truth-telling, healing, and ongoing acknowledgment at the center of Durrett's installation as well as the question: What stories are missing from Bryn Mawr College?

Critical Interpretation (CI)

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CRWT B260 Writing Short Fiction I

Fall 2025, Spring 2026

An introduction to fiction writing, focusing on the short story. Students will consider fundamental elements of fiction and the relationship of narrative structure, style, and content, exploring these elements in their own work and in the assigned readings in order to develop an understanding of the range of possibilities open to the fiction writer. Weekly readings and writing exercises are designed to encourage students to explore the material and styles that most interest them, and to push their fiction to a new level of craft, so that over the semester their writing becomes clearer, more controlled, and more absorbing.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward: Creative Writing; English.

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CRWT B261 Writing Poetry I

Fall 2025

In this course students will learn to "read like a writer," while grappling with the work of accomplished poets, and providing substantive commentary on peers' work. Through diverse readings, students will examine craft strategies at work in both formal and free verse poems, such as diction, metaphor, imagery, lineation, metrical patterns, irony, and syntax. The course will cover shaping forms (such as elegy and pastoral) as well as given forms, such as the sonnet, ghazal, villanelle, etc. Students will discuss strategies for conveying the literal meaning of a poem (e.g., through sensory description and clear, compelling language) and the concealed meaning of a text (e.g., through metaphor, imagery, meter, irony, and shifts in diction and syntax). By the end of the course, students will have generated new material, shaped and revised draft poems, and significantly grown as writers by experimenting with various aspects of craft.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward: Creative Writing; English.

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CRWT B263 Writing Memoir I

Spring 2026

This course offers students a hands-on, reflective engagement with the art of memoir-the act of shaping lived experience into narrative form. We'll explore how memory, language, and identity intersect as students write about the people, places, and pivotal moments that have shaped their lives. Through an open-ended inquiry into what we think we know-about ourselves and the world-and how we've come to know it, students will grapple with the slipperiness of truth and the complexity of self-representation. While the course does not center on the canonical tropes of American memoir-redemption, confession, captivity, and slavery-it remains critically attuned to their enduring influence. Throughout, we will challenge and reimagine the legacy of these narrative frameworks in order to make space for new voices and forms of life writing.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward: English.

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CRWT B264 News and Feature Writing

Fall 2025

Students in this class will learn how to develop, report, write, edit and revise a variety of news stories, beginning with the basics of reporting and writing the news and advancing to longer-form stories, including personality profiles, news features and trend stories, and concluding with point-of-view journalism (columns, criticism, reported essays). The course will focus heavily on work published in The Philadelphia Inquirer and The New York Times. Several working journalists will participate as guest speakers to explain their craft. Students will write stories that will be posted on the class blog, the English House Gazette.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward: English.

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CRWT B265 Creative Nonfiction

Not offered 2025-26

This course will explore the literary expressions of nonfiction writing by focusing on the skills, process and craft techniques necessary to the generation and revision of literary nonfiction. Using the information-gathering tools of a journalist, the analytical tools of an essayist and the technical tools of a fiction writer, students will produce pieces that will incorporate both factual information and first person experience. Readings will include a broad group of writers ranging from E.B. White to Anne Carson, George Orwell to David Foster Wallace, Joan Didion to James Baldwin, among many others.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward: Creative Writing; English.

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CRWT B266 Screenwriting

Spring 2026

An introduction to screenwriting. Issues basic to the art of storytelling in film will be addressed and analyzed: character, dramatic structure, theme, setting, image, sound. The course focuses on the film adaptation; readings include novels, screenplays, and short stories. Films adapted from the readings will be screened. In the course of the semester, students will be expected to outline and complete the first act of an adapted screenplay of their own.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward: Creative Writing; English; Film Studies.

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CRWT B267 Sentence Workshop

Section 001 (Fall 2025): Sentence Composition
Section 001 (Fall 2026): Sentence Composition

Fall 2025

This topics-based course alternates each semester between a focus on sentence-level writing and prosody.

Current topic description: Current topic: This course introduces prosody, the study of the rhythmic and intonational aspects of poetry and spoken language. We will explore the technical components of meter, rhythm, stress, intonation, and sound patterns across various poetic traditions. By examining classical and contemporary texts, students will learn to analyze and appreciate the auditory dimensions of language and poetry. The course will also include practical exercises in scansion and the composition of original verse, with an emphasis on understanding the effects of different prosodic choices.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward: Creative Writing.

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CRWT B355 The Art of Prose Poetry

Fall 2025

This course explores the rich and hybrid form of prose poetry, a genre that defies the boundaries between poetry and prose. Through close readings, writing exercises, and workshops, students will investigate how prose poetry functions as a unique mode of expression-combining the lyricism, intensity, and compression of poetry with the expansiveness and narrative possibilities of prose. We will examine works by contemporary and historical prose poets, analyze craft elements such as rhythm, voice, image, and structure, and create our prose poems through generative writing exercises. By the end of the course, students will have produced a portfolio of original work and developed a critical understanding of prose poetry's place in literary tradition. Prerequisite: CRWT B159 or CRWT B261.

Course does not meet an Approach

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CRWT B360 Writing Short Fiction II

Not offered 2025-26

An exploration of approaches to writing short fiction designed to strengthen skills of experienced student writers as practitioners and critics. Requires writing at least five pages each week, workshopping student pieces, and reading texts ranging from realist stories to metafictional experiments and one-page stories to the short novella, to explore how writers can work within tight confines. Prerequisite: CRWT B260.

Counts Toward: English.

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CRWT B361 Writing Poetry II

Spring 2026

This course assumes that reading and writing are inextricably linked, and that the only way to write intelligent and interesting poetry is to read as much of it as possible. Writing assignments will be closely connected to syllabus reading, including an anthology prepared by the instructor, and may include working in forms such as ekphrastic poems (i.e. poems about works of visual art or sculpture), dramatic monologues, prose poems, translations, imitations and parodies. Prerequisites: CRWT B261: Writing Poetry I

Counts Toward: Creative Writing; English.

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CRWT B364 Longer Fictional Forms

Spring 2026

An advanced workshop for students with a strong background in fiction writing who want to write longer works: the long short story, novella and novel. Students will write intensively, and complete a long story, novel or novella (or combination thereof) totaling up to 20,000 words. Students will examine the craft of their work and of published prose. Suggested Preparation: ARTW B260 or proof of interest and ability. Prerequisite: CRWT B260.

Counts Toward: Creative Writing; English.

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CRWT B400 Senior Thesis

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CRWT B425 Praxis III: Independent Study

Praxis III courses are Independent Study courses and are developed by individual students, in collaboration with faculty and field supervisors. A Praxis courses is distinguished by genuine collaboration with fieldsite organizations and by a dynamic process of reflection that incorporates lessons learned in the field into the classroom setting and applies theoretical understanding gained through classroom study to work done in the broader community.

Counts Toward: Praxis Program.

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