Letters and Conversations

At this transforming moment of pandemic and
uprising, what can letters and conversations do?
What forms of letters can we circulate? What
conversations do we need? Grounded in black
feminist texts and pedagogy, this creative writing
class invites students to read and compose a broad
range of letters and to conduct, join, and listen
to a broad range of conversations. Letters and
conversations here encompass fiction, nonfiction,
poetry, and hybrid writing as well as performance,
visual art, tweets, podcasts, and more. Key course
topics include ancestors, childhood, friendship,
love, family, sexuality, gender, race, sexual
violence, police brutality, trauma, and coming of
age. The main course project will embody or spark
from "a letter you need write but have never
written or a conversation you need to have but
have never had." We will write letters to former
and future selves. We will claim voice and risk
vulnerability. From social media posts to talk
experiments, we will navigate forms of address,
intimacy and attention, audience, expression, and
occasion.