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Creative Writing at HWS

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Creative Writing Concentration and Curriculum

The English & Creative Writing Department offers a Creative Writing Track within the English major. In addition to workshops and courses in the three primary genres—Fiction, Poetry, and Nonfiction—students can take complementary workshops in more specialized genres (e.g. Screenwriting, Hybrid Forms, the Lyric Essay) as well as workshops offered in other departments (e.g. in Theater, Education, Writing & Rhetoric). HWS has a rich, diverse, and innovative creative writing curriculum, and our graduates have an excellent track record of success.

 

Creative WritingCourses

Fiction Workshop | Poetry Workshop | Creative Nonfiction Workshop | Trias Workshop | Creative Writing (Intro Workshop) | Intermediate Craft of Fiction Workshop | Hybrid Forms Workshop | Lyric Essay Workshop | Intermediate Poetry Workshop | Advanced Poetry Workshop | The Craft of Fiction Workshop | Fiction Workshop II: Theory of Fiction | Playwriting Workshop | Children’s Literature | Creating Children’s Literature | Adolescent Literature Workshop | Literary Journalism Workshop | Small Press Book Publishing | The Video Essay | Travel Writing Workshop | Trias Tutorial

English and Creative Writing Courses and Curriculum

Experiential EducationTrias Workshop, Reading Series, and Residency

The Trias Program for Creative Writers 

The Trias Residency, a gift of Peter J. Trias '70, brings a renowned author to campus each year to work closely with students in the fall's Trias Workshop and spring's Trias Tutorial. The resident also curates a reading series. Past Trias writers include Mary Ruefle, Jeff VanderMeer, Chris Abani, Mary Gaitskill, Donald Revell, John D’Agata and Jenny Boully. This program complements the rich creative writing curriculum offered by permanent faculty.

The Trias Workshop

Each year, 12 students from across campus are selected to join the Trias Workshop and work directly with that year’s resident. Workshops take place in the Trias Classroom, where students develop their skills around creative topics selected by the resident, such as the lyric essay or environmental fiction. Your teacher, a nationally-renowned fiction writer, essayist, or poet, will help you develop in their genre toward publication or graduate school. Students apply to the workshop and are selected on the basis of their writing sample but need not be English majors. The Workshop is open to all. In the spring, 3-4 students will continue to work independently with the writer in a specialized tutorial. Students at HWS can take the workshop multiple years, and Trias graduates have gone on to publication and to enroll at some of the best graduate schools in the country.

The Reading Series

Each Trias Writer-in-Residence gives a public reading and curates a reading series of other renowned authors to spark a campus-wide literary conversation. Students, faculty and staff from across campus attend these events, have the opportunity to ask questions, and have the chance to have their books signed by the visitor following the reading. Past visitors have included winners of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Man Booker Prize, and MacArthur "Genuis" Fellowship. Writers in the series have been New York Times Bestsellers, have had their work turned into major studio films, and work at the cutting edge of their crafts. 

Learn More about the Trias Residency for Writers

Small Press Book Publishing &Seneca Review Books

SRB

In Small Press Book Publishing, students help publish a book. We focus on small press acquisitions editing through the facilitation of Seneca Review Books’ biennial Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize. The editors of Seneca Review Books will have narrowed down manuscript submissions to approximately 15 semifinalists. Over the course of the semester, students have the opportunity both to learn about and to engage in the acquisitions editorial process by reading, discussing, and evaluating each of the semifinalist manuscripts and by ultimately helping select five finalists. A nationally renowned writer (sometimes the TRIAS resident) will meet with the class several times and serve as the contest judge. Students will work in small groups to pitch one of the finalist manuscripts to the judge. By engaging in the book publishing and acquisitions process, students will grapple with such questions as: How do lyric essays and hybrid texts work in conjunction with one another in a book-length manuscript? What makes a creative manuscript good and how do we weigh it against competing manuscripts with different strengths? And how can we distinguish between manuscripts that cross the threshold into the realm of literary excellence and those that do not?

Students will have the opportunity to meet the winning author the following fall semester when they will come to HWS to give a reading from the winning book as part of the Trias Reading Series. Students are named in the beginning of the book as members of SRB’s Acquisitions Editorial Board. Many students who go on to careers in publishing start familiarizing themselves with the field by taking this course.

Seneca Review Books

Seneca Review &Campus Publications

Seneca Review—published by Hobart and William Colleges Press—is a top-tier literary journal of international renown, with a history of more than 50 years of publishing innovators who create truly groundbreaking work and writers of the very highest caliber. The writers we’ve published have won every major honor under the sun—including the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Bollingen Prize, Nation Book Critics Circle Award, Lenore Marshall Award, National Poetry Series, Yale Younger Poets Prize, Lannan Literary Fellowship, and so on. We are known as the birthplace of the Lyric Essay and as early champions of multimodal and hybrid-forms writing. We have published special issues on translation, on writing about disability, and on writing that is “beyond category.” Our anthology We Might As Well Call it the Lyric Essay is a seminal text in creative nonfiction, a must-have on virtually every graduate exam reading list in the field.

Students eager to work in literary editing may become involved with Seneca Review. Past students have worked with the journal on social media editing, website curation, and manuscript selection.

In addition to Seneca Review, which is faculty-run, there are also student run publications—Thel, The Herald, The Martini, and Echo & Pine.

Campus Publications

MFA/Graduate Program Placement

Our students have gone on to attend some of the top MFA and graduate programs in the country, including the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Colorado State University, SUNY Buffalo, UNLV, UMASS Amherst, UMASS Boston, Sarah Lawrence, U of Utah, and more.

 

Student PublishingRecord

While still undergraduates at HWS, our students have an exceptional record of placing their creative work in national literary magazines. Students have had their stories, poems, nonfiction essays, and hybrid work published in such journals as New Delta Review, DIAGRAM, Southeast Review, Pangyrus, The Journal, Entropy Magazine, Nasiona, Cleaver, and elsewhere. Students have also had their published work nominated for Pushcart Prizes.

 

Creative WritingFaculty

Melanie Conroy-Goldman (Fiction, Screenwriting)

Professor of English and Creative Writing

Melanie Conroy-Goldman is the author of The Likely World, a novel from Red Hen Press, and her fiction has been published in Southern Review, StoryQuarterly, in anthologies from Morrow and St. Martin’s and online at venues such as McSweeneys.net. She has volunteered as a teacher at a maximum-security men’s prison with the Cornell Prison Education Program.

Kathryn Cowles (Poetry, Hybrid Forms)

Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing

Kathryn Cowles’s The Strange Wondrous Works of Eleanor Eleanor won Fence’s Modern Poets Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s di Castagnola Work-in-Progress Prize; collages from this work were collected in a solo art exhibition called Feminine Monstrous. Her other books are Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World (Milkweed) and Eleanor, Eleanor, not your real name (Bearstar), winner of the Brunsman poetry book prize. She earned a PhD in poetry from the U of Utah and teaches English and Creative Writing at Hobart and William Smith, where she directs the Trias Writer’s Residency on rotation and coedits the multimodal Beyond Category section of Seneca Review. kathryncowles.com

Geoffrey Babbitt (Nonfiction, Poetry)

Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing

Geoffrey Babbitt is author of A Grain of Sand in Lambeth, which won Interim’s Betsy Joiner Flanagan Prize in Poetry and is forthcoming from U of Nevada Press in 2025. His first book is Appendices Pulled from a Study on Light (Spuyten Duyvil). Babbitt’s poems and essays have appeared in North American Review, Pleiades, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Notre Dame Review, Washington Square, Guesthouse, Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA and PhD from the U of Utah and serves as Editor of Seneca Review and Seneca Review Books, for which he cofounded the Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize. geoffreybabbitt.com

Ben Ristow (Fiction, Nonfiction)

Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric

Ben Ristow is author of Craft Consciousness and Artistic Practice in Creative Writing, published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2021. His fiction has been published in BOMB, AMBIT, Indiana Review, Southwest Review, Gray's Sporting Journal and has been noted in Best American Nonrequired Reading and podcasted for Fiction for Driving Across America (BOMB).

Daniel Schonning (Poetry, Nonfiction)

Director of HWS Debate

Daniel Schonning’s As When Waking was published by University of Chicago Press, selected by Srikanth Reddy as part of the relaunched Phoenix Poets Series. His poetry has been published in Best New Poets, Orion Magazine, Poetry Daily, POETRY Magazine, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He lives in the Finger Lakes region of New York, where he teaches creative writing at Hobart and William Smith and serves as a poetry editor for Seneca Review.

English and Creative Writing Faculty Directory