Spring 2026 Courses at a Glance
WR-320-01 – Fieldwork – Adrian Shirk – By Appointment
WR-320-02 – Sex, Drugs, and Rock N’ Roll: Writing in Extremis – Max Ludington – Wednesdays 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
WR-320-03 – At World’s End – Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts – Mondays 3:00 pm – 5:50 pm
WR-320-04 – Graphic Novel – Sofia Thanhauser – Wednesdays 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
WR-320-05 – Understories – Laura Elrick – Mondays 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
WR-320-06 – Publishing Laboratory: Ubiquitous – Alysia Slocum – Tuesdays 4:30 pm – 7:20 pm
WR-320-07 – The Novella – Samantha Hunt – Mondays 9:30 am – 12:20 pm
WR-320-08 – Young Writers Going Mad In Big Cities – David Gordon – Wednesdays 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm
WR-320-09 – Art of Crime – David Gordon – Thursdays 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm
WR-320-10 – M/Ekphrastic Writing – Rachel Levitsky – Thursdays 11:00 am -1:50 pm
WR-320-11 – Plays and Movies – James Hannaham – Tuesdays 10:00 am – 12:50 pm
WR-320-12 – Thematic Screenwriting – Don Andreason – Wednesdays 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
WR-320-13 – Monstrous Femme – Dianca London – Friday 10:00 am – 12:50 pm
WR-320-14 – Elegy, Experimentation & Amusement – Anselm Berrigan – Fridays 10:00 am – 12:50 pm
WR-320-15 – Burnouts and Dropouts – Claire Donato – Tuesdays 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm
WR-320-16 – Cult Classic – Eric Rosenblum – Wednesdays 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
WR-320-17 – Writing for Young Adults – Sincere Brooks – Wednesdays 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
WR-320-B1 – Berlin Fieldwork – Christian Hawkey – By Appointment
WR-325B – Topics in Journalism: Journalism Workshop: Prattler II – Eric Rosenblum – Mondays 9:30 am – 12:30 pm
WR-360-01 Sat 8:30-1:20 The Art Of Teaching Writing – Leia Bradley – Saturdays 8:30 am – 1:20 pm
WR-390 Internship/Seminar – Laura Henriksen – By Appointment
WR-320-01 Fieldwork
Adrian Shirk
By Appointment
Fieldwork
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 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-320-03 At World’s End
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
Mondays 3:00 pm – 5:50 pm
In this elective seminar, we will encounter history, mythology, literature, visual art, film and music that contemplates the endings and beginnings of worlds. From stories of creation and religious viewpoints on eschatology, to testimonies of historical events perceived as both world-ending and world-beginning (chiefly, the European encounter with the so-called New World), we will reflect on how artists, thinkers and chroniclers have recorded the expectation of existential shifts and how the impulse for survival and resistance demonstrates possibilities for continuation. Including texts and artworks by Aimé Césaire, Etel Adnan, Nat Turner, Wovoka, John of Patmos, Extinction Rebellion, Exuma, David Bowie, Jeanne Lee, Albrecht Dürer, Ed Roberson, Anna Kavan, Chris Marker, Octavia Butler, Gerald Vizenor, and Mary Shelley, among others.
WR-320-04 Graphic Novel
Sofia 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-320-05 Understories
Laura Elrick
Mondays 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
The word understory is taken from forestry and refers to the shaded, dense growth hidden below the upper canopy, a place where creatures of all sort find sustenance and refuge. This course enters the dappled realm here, but soon moves on to explore the imagination and experiences of myriad “below” places in order to be sustained by and to perhaps renew them. Some of the topoi that might interest us include underworlds, undergrounds, the unconscious, subtexts, upwellings, and uprisings (both literal and metaphorical), urban tunnel systems & sewers, the theory and practice of writing “histories from below,” underground cultural movements, spiritual journeys to the underworld, lands of the dead, mycorrhizal fungal networks, mines & mining. We’ll read and write through a poetics lens, but prose writers are also welcome.
WR-320-06 Publishing Laboratory: 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. Previous issues have included themes such as: Commune, Yearning and Devotion, Emergence, and Salvage. The course will culminate with one published issue, with each student serving an editorial role.
WR-320-07 The Novella
Samantha Hunt
Mondays 9:30 am – 12:20 pm
The universe is contained in a drop of water and similarly the novella—a powerfully compressed book between 50 to 160 pages—may be the most perfectly concentrated form prose can take. In this course we will look deeply into the novella, thinking about the precision of language, voice and structure and how these ideas can unlock work that, as Shakespeare writes, though she be but little, she is fierce.
The first half of the semester will be spent reading and discussing seven novellas from North and South America, as we create outlines for our own short projects. The second half of our semester will be spent writing and workshopping our own novellas.
WR-320-08 Young Writers Going Mad In Big Cities
David Gordon
Wednesdays 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm
This course explores works that revolve around young writers slowly losing their grip on sanity in a modern metropolis. What are the origins of this theme? How has it changed and mutated over time? What other formal and thematic developments come into play (collage, fragmentation, black humor, subjective first person, autobiography, etc.)? Class will combine close examination and discussion of the readings and screenings with written and creative responses and work-shopping student submissions. Writers and artists considered include Baudelaire, Rilke, Hamsun, Fante, Didion, Lispector, Baldwin, Genet, Cassavetes, Tawada, Ginsberg, Bolaño.
WR-320-09 Art of Crime
David Gordon
Thursdays 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-320-10 M/Ekphrastic Writing
Rachel Levitsky
Thursdays 11:00 am -1:50 pm
Ekphrasis, according to its most basic definition, is writing that addresses art. The M in front of the word in the course title presumably stands for: MEDIA. But it also might be: ME. By shifting the emphasis from the fixed art object to the moving image and interactive forms of electronic media, the writer gains a dynamic opportunity to move and merge with works of art. In M/Ekphastic writing, the writer, the writing and the media defy fixity, each becoming an ever-altering form. In this elective, students will create their own personal media stories, respond to digital and analog moving images, invent their own (deterritorialized) media-based projects. Students will also read and interact with numerous antecedents of work that can be called mekphrasic by writers such as Raul Ruiz, Jean Cocteau, Lisa Robertson, Holly Melgarde, Jean Genet, Fred Moten, Bernadette Mayer, Vidhu Aggarwal, Katz Tepper, Renee Gladman, Cecilia Vicuna and Anne Waldman. ALL types of writers and writing welcome.
WR-320-11 Plays and Movies
James Hannaham
Tuesdays 10:00 am – 12:50 pm
In this class, students will read plays and film scripts out loud, occasionally in goofy voices. No acting skills are required, but reading skills will be appreciated. Please be eager to embarrass yourself. Some of the scripts will have been written by known playwrights and screenwriters, others will be written by you. We may read transcripts of real events. Some of the movies will have been made by professionals, some of the movies will be made by you. A portion of the material will be suggested/chosen by the class. As we read, we will also do research. Before we make movies or finish plays, we will read and revise scripts. The final project will be a short play or a short film made by you. There might be special guests.
WR-320-12 Thematic Screenwriting
Don Andreason
Wednesdays 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
This course continues the path of Screenwriting I in terms of creating short film scripts further exploring the use of visual storytelling, setting, conflict, character development and dialogue. Additionally, we will examine and explore theme-based, non-linear approaches to screenwriting (as opposed to the linear method explored in Screenwriting I). This course will also concentrate on streamlining scripts, ridding scripts of exposition and editing scripts in much greater detail for a “tighter” and more focused script – in other words, eliminating the unnecessary yet enhancing visual impact. In the first half we will write short scenes in order to explore and develop various aspects of screenwriting. In the second half we will work on and develop a script for a short film approximately 7-15 minutes in length. Throughout the semester students will read and discuss their work in class along with screenings and discussions of various films and topics.
WR-320-13 Monstrous Femme
Dianca London
Friday 10:00 am – 12:50 pm
Inspired by Barbara Creed’s seminal text The Monstrous-Feminine, this course will examine a diverse selection of literary, cinematic, and works of art that embody, explore, and reimagine the narrative possibilities of feminism, monstrosity, otherness, and subversion. Students will foster new ways to invoke and center the monstrous-femme and the body through narrative design and experimentation with form by crafting works that intentionally bloom outside of the binary (in terms of identity, tradition, form, and aesthetics). Throughout this course, students will be encouraged to develop new approaches to their creative practice while cultivating innovative works and approaches to revision and craft. Students will also learn how to incorporate archival material(s), new media, and theory into their work to further develop new terrain within their creative practice. Together, we’ll uncover the narrative potential of the monstrous-femme, otherness, and the power of fierce subversion. Students will engage with works by Agustina Bazterrica, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Eliza Clark, David Cronenberg, Natalie Diaz, Barbara Creed, Sasha Rainbow, Otessa Moshfegh, Alexandra Kleeman, Alice Maio Mackay, Lucille Clifton, Julia Armfield, Coralie Fargeat, and more.
WR-320-14 Elegy, Experimentation & Amusement
Anselm Berrigan
Fridays 10:00 am – 12:50 pm
The longer version of this elective title could be: When the Sad and Strange Fuse & Freak Out in Poems — and so we’ll be reading and writing out of a range of poems that are elegiac at heart (source) but move across a wide range of surfaces and tones. The point being to address grief, in public and/or in private, without giving into received (i.e. conventional) notions of how mourning and loss are supposed to sound. We’ll be reading work by John Keats, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsberg, John Yau, Claire Hong, Ross Gay, John Keene, Alice Notley, Akilah Oliver and Jack Whitten, among others. Dreams will have some things to say along the way.
WR-320-15 Burnouts and Dropouts
Claire Donato
Tuesdays 5:00 pm – 7:50 pm
This course explores burnout, failure and quitting as potent sites for creative inquiry. Burnout names the compulsion to keep going even when one can’t; dropping out, by contrast, gestures toward renunciation and disinvestment. Both arise from states of exhaustion.
From the worker who can’t keep up to the artist who opts out, the addict who can’t stop to the “loser” who abandons the game entirely, we’ll ask what it means to live and write at the threshold between wanting and not wanting, doing and giving up. Drawing on literature, performance art, theory, and psychoanalytic thought, our reading list may include texts by Byung-Chul Han, Tehching Hsieh, Adrian Piper, Hannah Proctor, Lauren Berlant, Ling Ma, Joan Didion, Allan Kaprow, Jenny Odell, Lee Lozano, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Agnès Varda, Leslie Jamison, Chelsey Minnis, Vincenzo Latronico, Bas Jan Ader, Sheila Heti, Sara Ahmed, and others.
Students will write across forms—autofiction, diary entries, fragments, performance scores, and more—that approach collapse and recovery as creative problems. Together, we’ll explore how burnout and dropout might reveal not only psychic impasse, but also desire’s strange persistence: the ways wanting continues even in the wish to stop.
WR-320-16 Cult Classic
Eric Rosenblum
Wednesdays 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
Some books develop passionate and intense followings yet never break into the mainstream. But what makes a ‘cult classic’? Is it a new and unusual voice? Sordid subject matter? Depiction of too-human characters and shocking events? In this course, students will examine cult classics such as Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love, William Burrough’s Naked Lunch, Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle, and Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman as they devise and begin to write their own cult classics.
WR-320-17 Writing for Young Adults
Sincere Brooks
Wednesdays 2:00 pm – 4:50 pm
This course will explore what “young adult” means; what the genre is saying to its audience—and why; how themes of love, sex, family, friendship, and existential angst are packaged for young readers; and how history, race, gender, media, and technology shape those themes. We will also examine how authors of young adult literature craft their work to engage readers.
Students will read and analyze books written for young adults, considering what elements are essential to creating a meaningful YA narrative and why the genre resonates with audiences far beyond its intended readership. Along the way, students will reflect on their own experiences as young readers—what characters and themes spoke to them, and why—as a way of understanding how to write about the human condition in ways that transcend age.
WR-320-B1 Berlin Fieldwork
Christian Hawkey
By Appointment
Berlin Fieldwork invites students to explore their practice and professional goals by pairing them with an outside organization or cultural institution in Berlin. Berlin is a city with numerous reading series, cultural centers, bookstores, magazines, writers, and activist organizations, many of which operate across numerous languages, including English. This is your chance to get hands-on experience in a chosen artistic nd/or professional field.
WR-325B Topics in Journalism: Journalism Workshop: Prattler II
Eric Rosenblum
Mondays 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 Sat 8:30-1:20 The Art Of Teaching Writing
Leia Bradley
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.
Spring 2026 Practice, Inquiry, and Writing Lives menus (for Writing Majors)
Practice:
WR 320-01 and 1B Fieldwork and Berlin Fieldwork
WR 320-04 Graphic Novel
WR 320-06 Publishing Lab
WR 320-07 The Novella
WR 320-09 Art of Crime
WR 320-11 Plays and Movies
WR 320-12 Thematic Screenwriting
WR 320-17 Writing for Young Adults
WR 325B Prattler II
WR 360 Art of Teaching Writing
Inquiry:
WR 320-02 Sex, Drugs, and Rock N’ Roll
WR 320-03 At World’s End
WR 320-05 Understories
WR 320-08 Young Writers Going Mad in Big Cities
WR 320-10 M/Ekphrastic Writing
WR 320-13 Monstrous Femme
WR 320-14 Elegy, Experimentation and Amusement
WR 320-15 Burnouts and Dropouts
WR 320-16 Cult Classic
Writing Lives:
*any of the courses listed below automatically count for this requirement in the degree. However you are welcome to fulfill this requirement by selecting any other course that specifically supports your creative and/or professional goals post-graduation. That could include, for example, our electives in screenwriting, stand up comedy, journalism, or other subjects; or it could include a course in another program that helps you prepare for your working and writing life after graduation. Talk with your academic advisor or the department chair if you have any questions about fulfilling this requirement.
WR 320-01 and 1B Fieldwork and Berlin Fieldwork
WR 320-06 Publishing Lab
WR 325B Prattler II
WR 360: The Art of Teaching Writing