Institute for Writing and Thinking Presents

IWT Writer as Reader Workshops

This year, IWT’s Writer as Reader workshops will be held on Friday, November 3, 2023. The lineup features novels, poetry, nonfiction, historical documents, plays, parables, and speculative fiction. Each workshop will highlight strategies that foster close reading and help readers develop an appreciation for the connections between different but related texts. Writer as Reader workshops emphasize the pedagogical value of teaching texts that are unfamiliar to students, prompting them to read closely and critically, with attentiveness and an open mind. 

These workshops will also offer opportunities for discussion about the impact on the classroom of ChatGPT and other AI writing programs, while modeling writing activities that motivate students to focus on the process and reflection required for critical thinking.

Workshop Offerings:

1. Feed My Frankenstein
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Victor Erice, The Spirit of the Beehive; selections of other texts will be provided.

2. Charles Chesnutt’s Conjure Tales: Bringing a Lesser-Known Masterpiece to Light 
Charles W. Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure Tales, edited by R. H. Brodhead (selected tales in standardized spelling will be provided).

3. Octavia Butler’s Visionary Future: Readings in Literary Disability Studies
Octavia Butler, “The Evening and The Morning and the Night”; Clare Barker and Stuart Murray, “On Reading Disability in Literature”; Sami Schalk, “Interpreting Disability Metaphor and Race in Octavia Butler’s ‘The Evening and the Morning and the Night’”

4. Immigrant Storytellers and the Challenge of Creating Home: Ibi Zoboi’s American Street and Edwidge Danticat’s “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work”
Ibi Zoboi, American Street; Edwidge Danticat, “Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work”

5. When Language Is the Protagonist: Sara Nović’s True Biz and Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning
Sara Nović, True Biz; selections from Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (provided)

6. Emily Dickinson and Harryette Mullen: Reading, Writing, and Expanding the Idea of the Poetic Self
The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Reading Edition, or The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson; Harryette Mullen, Recyclopedia

7. Troubling Innocence, Disquieting Dream: Images of Childhood in James Baldwin’s “My Dungeon Shook” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me
James Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook”; Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me; Susan Orlean, “The American Man at Age 10”; selected photographs by Devin Allen (provided)
 
8. The Possibility for Transformation
Leo Tolstoy, Master and Man”; George Saunders, “Tenth of December” (short story) and “And Yet They Drove On” (provided)
 
9. Toward an Embodied Understanding of History and Ourselves
Arthur Miller, “The Crucible”; W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Coming of John" and “Of Mr Booker T. Washington and Others”; James T. Patterson, “The Enemy Within” (short essays provided)

10. “Clamorous Harbingers”: Macbeth in Harlem and in the World
Shakespeare’s Macbeth (any edition); selections from literary criticism and from Clifford Mason, Macbeth in Harlem: Black Theater in America from the Beginning to Raisin in the Sun (provided)

---

For more information, call 845-752-4516, e-mail [email protected],
or visit https://iwt.bard.edu/writerasreader/.

Time: 9:30 am – 4:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Olin Humanities Building

Subscribe: Save this Event: Subscribe / .ics File