In this course, students will explore the dynamic relationship between written texts and visual expression. Writers and visual artists have long taken inspiration from one another and sought to combine elements from each art form. The rich tradition of ekphrasis and the explosion of graphic novels in recent years are just two examples. Students will examine how writers translate visual detail and other visual techniques (perspective, framing, composition) to communicate metaphor, narrative, and argument. At the same time, students may consider the reverse relationship: how visual artists interpret literary texts. Ultimately, through the work of the course students will pursue a fuller understanding of what literature shows us about humanity’s relationship to the visual arts.

Offered Spring 2027

Questions about the relationship between humans and the natural world have been some of the most essential throughout all of literature, from Tang Dynasty poetry to contemporary climate fiction. In our current, pivotal moment, those questions have become increasingly urgent as ecological systems continue to be affected and remade by human-caused climate change. Global problems require global imaginations, and a wide array of writers are lending their voices and cultural traditions to explore how humans have and might develop different relationships to the environments in which they are enmeshed. In this class we’ll study stories, poems, and creative nonfiction. Possible texts may include Orion Magazine and works by Camille Dungy, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ursula K. Leguin, Ross Gay, and many others.

Offered Spring 2027

In this course, students will explore how Black women writers use magical realism to illuminate history, memory, family, and survival. Through close reading and discussion of Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward, Beloved by Toni Morrison, and Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, we will examine how the supernatural, the ancestral, and the unseen coexist with lived reality, revealing emotional and historical truths that realism alone cannot capture. Students will analyze how these novels grapple with legacy, trauma, love, and resilience, while also considering why magical realism has become such a powerful mode for telling Black women’s stories.

Offered Spring 2027

Music will be both the theme and the subject for our course of study, and for some of the texts we read, music will in fact be part of the very process of their creation. At times it will be a central metaphor, and at times this will radiate out to ideas about performance itself. One other question posed by many of these texts is the question of practice. What are the processes by which we can pay more careful attention to the world around us, and how might this enhance our ways of being in the world? Texts under consideration include A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, Olio by Tyehimba Jess, and Crazy Brave by Joy Harjo.

Offered Spring 2027

Over the last decade, poetry has resurged into daily life across the country. We turn to poetry in times of celebration and consolation, to give voice to community and identity, to post some bit of inspiration on social media and as a rallying cry. Poetry right now is more diverse than it has ever been—both in terms of who gets to write it and the styles in which it is written. This class is a deep dive into that diversity. We’ll study five books by poets representing diverging and coalescing trends and movements across the poetry landscape, plus a collection chosen by students. We’ll seek to answer one guiding question: What are the ways that poetry speaks to our particular moment? Coursework will include both creative and analytical projects.

Offered Spring 2027

This English elective offers students an in-depth exploration of murder mystery literature through the works of Agatha Christie, who is widely recognized as the best selling novelist of all time. Although 50 years have passed since Christie’s death, her stories remain popular globally. Students in the course will evaluate Christie’s methods for challenging readers to use evidence-based, critical thinking, and to pay close attention to detail. They will analyze plot structure, characterization, and theme; identify and evaluate literary devices such as foreshadowing, misdirection, and suspense; write analytical and creative responses to the literature; and engage in group discussions and problem-solving activities. They will investigate such essential questions as, “What makes a narrator reliable…or unreliable?” “How do clues, red herrings, and pacing shape the reader’s experience?” and “Why have Christie’s stories endured across cultures and generations?” This course blends literary analysis with problem-solving, which makes it ideal for students who enjoy puzzles. In addition, Christie’s works open conversations about historical context, gender roles, and the evolution of crime fiction. Texts include The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, And Then There Were None, Murder on the Orient Express, and A Murder is Announced.

Offered Spring 2027

What does it mean to be a writer? How does an author find her style? The Visiting Writer Seminar is a semester-long course in which students have the special opportunity to immerse themselves in a study of one writer’s works. Throughout the semester, students read a critical mass of texts by that writer before the course culminates with the author’s visit to Walker’s. During this visit, the writer will teach master classes, conduct writing workshops, and participate in class discussion.

The Spring 2027 visiting writer is Camille Dungy, the author of America, A Love Story (Wesleyan UP: 2026). She has also written the memoir Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers, and four other collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award. Dungy edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, the first anthology to bring African American environmental poetry to national attention. She also co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology and served as assistant editor for Gathering Ground: Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry; 100 Best African American Poems; Best American Essays; The 1619 Project; All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis; over 50 other anthologies; plus dozens of venues including the New Yorker; Poetry; Literary Hub; Paris Review; and Poets.org.

You may know her as the host of Immaterial, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise. A University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, Dungy’s honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both prose and poetry.

Offered Spring 2027

In Queer Literature, we will explore literature through the lens of queer theory and immerse ourselves in texts by queer authors. In this way, we will work together to question: What does it mean for literature to be called queer literature? In what ways does queerness — as a verb and a noun — transform our experiences as readers and writers? How can writing be used to bring awareness and justice to lived experiences of queerness? We will sample queer authors from across identities and locations in this course.

Offered Fall 2026

In print and in movies, science fiction has long been dominated by visions of the future that center whiteness and replicate contemporary racial hierarchies. Outside of the mainstream, meanwhile, science fiction writers of color crafted their own visions of the future, drawing upon diverse cultural heritages and traditions, and in recent decades they have regularly garnered much-deserved attention and the most prestigious awards in the genre. In this class we’ll study science fiction as imagined by writers of marginalized identities, and in the process we’ll widen the possible futures we might imagine. Authors may include N.K. Jemisin, Rebecca Roanhorse, Ted Chiang, Lisa M. Bradley, Stephen Graham Jones, Tobias S. Buckell, Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, and others.

Offered Fall 2026

How does movement–across and within nation-state borders–impact people in various ways? How do they write about their experiences before, during, and after this physical act of migration through literature? How can literature itself be impacted by movement? These are some of the questions we will explore together in Migrant Literature. In this course, you can expect to read literature by authors from around the globe. We will sample literature contextualized in migration by various authors with a focus on modern literature, though we may begin the course with historical literature by migrant authors.

Offered Fall 2026

This course will explore the reasons that we are drawn to the things we fear. The umbrella of horror as a genre covers many different subgenres, including monster stories, psychological thrillers, gothic literature, dystopian literature and more. We will discuss the way that horror readers read to explore their fears and anxieties, and the ways in which authors write in order to exorcize their own demons. We will also explore the ways in which horror literature trends reflect society and current events. We will read stories from authors both early and contemporary, including but not limited to Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Tananarive Due, Stephen Graham Jones, Nnedi Okorafor, Shirley Jackson, and more.

Offered Fall 2026

This course will sample winners of the big literature awards (like The National Book Award, Pulitzer Prize, Man Booker, etc.) from recent years. Award winners reflect the psyche of a reading public, though in sometimes unexpected ways. A year’s slate of award winners is like a time capsule, and we’ll crack them open in order to rediscover where the culture has been, to identify trends that have moved through the culture, and to locate where the culture currently is. Award winners are also, of course, a whole lot of readers’ favorite books. Genres might include fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and drama. The course might focus on one genre over a sequence of years, a sample across a decade, or a diversity of genre winners in one year.

Offered Fall 2026

In this course we will study folklore and fairy tales from around the world. We will talk about the ways in which folktales and fairy tales derive from oral tradition and as such reflect and affect the cultures from which they emerge. We will read stories from a wide variety of origins. We will also discuss various modern retellings of fairy tales, and we will consider the ways in which, with the advent of mediums such as podcasts, telling tales has once again taken on an oral element as well as a literary one.

Offered Fall 2026