barnard college creative writing

Writing and Literature

The Writing and Literature track encourages writers to find their voice and share it with the world. Students will spend their mornings learning from Barnard instructors in courses such as Screenwriting, Dystopia in the Margins, and Poetry, on the same campus where writers like Greta Gerwig, Zora Neale Hurson, Jhumpa Lahiri got their start. Afternoons will be spent in intensives focused on developing a writing portfolio, getting published, and careers for writers.

Program Structure

Classes take place on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.

Office Hours, Junior Junction and Leadership in Action Workshops will be held on Monday and Friday.

Student life activities will be held in the evenings after class.

The Curriculum

Dystopia in the margins (session 1).

Dystopia in the Margins

Instructor: Mimi Wong

“Dystopia in the Margins” will explore dystopian fiction from the perspective of minority writers, specifically those belonging to the Asian diaspora. Over the course of three weeks, we will read and discuss three contemporary novels: Severance by Ling Ma, Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, and On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee. The course is designed to cultivate critical reading and writing skills, while engaging with topics such as identity, race, class, globalization, and the impact of capitalism.

Screenwriting: The Art of Storytelling Through Film (Session 1&2)

Screenwriting: The Art of Storytelling Through Film

Instructor: Bess Frankel

This course will give you the empowering tools to recognize a creative idea in your imagination, and use the medium of screenwriting to make it come to life. You will write, workshop, or refine your voice as a screenwriter, while watching films that will inspire and challenge you. We will explore the foundations of three-act structure, beat sheets, and the Young Hero’s Journey, before interrogating how to best tell stories in our own way. Throughout this course, we will explore questions like: What makes a great opening scene you can’t turn off? How can genres like science fiction or horror enhance a story about the human experience? How do we uplift our personal experiences through memoir writing? We will study almost a dozen films, widely varied in style and approach, but almost all of them exclusively made by and starring women. In addition to classroom screenings, we will make use of incredible opportunities across New York City; past field trips have included the Museum of Modern Art and the Metrograph Theater. By the end of the course, you will have written 3-4 short screenplays. Between watching, discussing, and writing, this course is an all-encompassing love letter to film and women’s place in it.

Introduction to Writing about Literature and Culture (Session 1&2)

Introduction to Writing about Literature and Culture

Instructor: Tara Needham

What does it mean to “close read”? Does the author’s biography matter in understanding a novel? What about the time and place that the text was written? This course will introduce students to a range of habits, practices, and approaches to writing about literature and culture that will deepen how one can respond to and interpret a novel, a poem, and various other cultural artifacts. At the same time, we will engage in writing practices that empower students to locate and express what interests them about a particular piece of writing or culture, to make a claim about it, and to articulate that claim against other interpretations. Foundational to this endeavor is re-envisioning the writing process, from an isolated, individual experience to one that involves collaboration and conversation; copious in-class writing; peer workshops; drafts and revision; and the inclusion of research and theoretical frames. We will use Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as one of our main texts to open up questions of humankind’s relationship to science, technology, and progress (among many other themes!), accompanied by additional readings, films, visits to the Barnard library and Archives as well as excursions that expand the world of our writing and the objects we seek to understand.

The Instructors

Dystopia in the Margins

Mimi Wong writes about art, culture, and literature. For her work engaging with contemporary art by artists from the Asian diaspora, she was awarded the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Her writing has been published in The Believer , Catapult , Electric Literature , Hyperallergic , Literary Hub , and Refinery29 . She is Editor-in-Chief of the literary magazine The Offing and a part-time lecturer at The New School. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Bess Frankel

Screenwriting

Bess Frankel is a director, writer, and teaching artist based in New York City. Her work has been a finalist for the O'Neill Playwrights Conference, Playwrights Realm Fellowship, Actors’ Theatre of Louisville Heideman Award, Jewish Plays Project, the Drama League’s Beatrice Terry Residency, and twice the Columbia@Roundabout Reading Series. As an associate/assistant director, Bess has worked on Broadway, the Public Theater, the Signature Theater, the Goodman Theater, among others. She was the long-term assistant to playwright Lynn Nottage and was the Manager of New Work Development for Ms. Nottage’s production company, Market Road Films. Bess is also the Co-Director and Head of Playwriting for CreateHER, a free theatre education program for girls and non-binary high school students, and teaches Screenwriting at Barnard College’s summer high school program. Bess received a BFA in Theatre Directing from the University of Michigan (Go Blue) and an MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University. Member: SDC; Dramatists Guild.

Tara Needham

‘Tara Emelye Needham is a Ph. D candidate in Literary Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. She has taught extensively in the fields of literature, writing, and critical theory at diverse institutions, including Skidmore College, Bilkent University in Ankara Türkiye, and most recently at Bard College, where she also served as Assistant Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. Tara’s poems and essays have appeared in several print and online journals and the archives of her 90’s feminist zine Cupsize are held in the Barnard Special Collections.

Bridging Curriculum and Community

We believe student life does not start and end in the classroom. Each night after class, students can participate in activities led by our residential student staff.

Community Office Hours

Each Monday, students are invited to meet with any member of our Pre-College Programs team. Office hours emphasize PCP’s open door office policy and gives students a space to meet with their instructor, Peer Academic Leader, or a professional staff member.

Technology and Academic Support

Canvas and email access.

Barnard PCP utilizes Canvas, an online platform, where students will find their syllabus, assignments, discussion boards, and access to message their instructor or peers outside of class.

Students will also receive a PCP email to use for the duration of the program.

Our team will go over technology usage in the student manual and during Orientation.