The Creative Writing Minor

Students who wish to minor in Creative Writing should meet with the Director of the Creative Writing Program, Gregory Djanikian, at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, 3808 Walnut (215.573.CPCW; djanikia@writing.upenn.edu).

The minor in Creative Writing consists of six courses. Of these:

• three will be Creative Writing workshops (any English courses numbered 10 or 111 through 199, excluding 125), and
• two or three others will be courses in the study of literary writing in the English language (English courses numbered 1 through 9 or 20 through 299); students may count one course in the literature of a language other than English.

Among the three Creative Writing workshops minors take, English 10, the introductory Creative Writing workshop, is strongly recommended (although not required). Among the three courses taken by Creative Writing minors in the study of literature in English, English 269, on poetics, is recommended, as is any of a number of English courses regularly offered in which students study the history and development of a genre (for instance, English 60, on the history of the English novel).

For a sampling of Creative Writing workshops currently offered, click here.

Creative Writing has had a long tradition at Penn. The Creative Writing faculty (standing, adjunct, visiting) has included some of the most important writers of our time and some of Penn's most brilliant and effective teachers, among them Philip Roth, Carlos Fuentes, John Wideman, Nora Magid, Romulus Linney, Daniel Hoffman, Paul Fussell, Jerre Mangione, and Loren Eisley.

The current faculty includes Dick Polman (journalism), Diane McKinney-Whetstone (a Penn alumna and leader among African American women novelists), Kitsi Watterson (novel writing), Robert Strauss (nonfiction writing, feature writing), Marc Lapadula (screenwriting), Daisy Fried (poetry), Charles Bernstein (poetry and poetics), Lise Funderburg (nonfiction), Marion Kant (writing reviews), Deborah Burnham (poetry), Anthony DeCurtis (popular culture reviewing and feature writing), Paul Hendrickson (documentary writing), Max Apple (fiction writing), Bob Perelman (poetry), Albert DiBartolomeo (fiction and essay writing), Gregory Djanikian (poetry), Tom Devaney (poetry), Jennifer Snead (fiction and poetry), Lorene Cary (fiction and memoir), Karen Rile (fiction), and Herman Beavers (poetry).

The emergence of a lively culture of writers at Penn in recent years, with the advent of the Kelly Writers House in 1995-96, has put contemporary writing in the foreground among Penn students. The Kelly Writers House Fellows seminar, an advanced undergraduate seminar in English, features three super-eminent writers each spring. This is just one of many collaborations between and among the Writers House, the English department's undergraduate literature major, and the Creative Writing Program. The founding of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing this year, a site for further collaboration among all of Penn's writing programs, makes a new minor in Creative Writing even more attractive.