This course will explore a range of texts written during or about the time period sometimes dubbed, “The Roaring Twenties.” We will move from glittering Long Island parties to the Nebraska prairie, from the fashionable streets of Chicago and Harlem to the floor of a Tampa cigar factory to learn how some of the celebrated novels and dramas in that era converse with one another about place, identity, and responsibility. Where do the characters in these stories find worth or meaning? How does the notion of progress fit with values based on tradition? What do we notice in the passions, limits, and possibilities of stories written and dreamed during this era? Texts may include My Antonia, The Great Gatsby, Anna in the Tropics, and Passing, among others.

This course is only open to students in the Class of 2026.

Offered Spring 2024

This course will explore some of the ways that writers with disabilities view, imagine, and narrate their experiences. As society pushes people with disabilities towards the margins, how does their written work help them to claim a fuller, more empowered self?  How do they disrupt traditional notions of “abled” and “disabled” bodies? What new and old forms and sub-genres of writing are particularly effective in doing so? As poet Jennifer Bartlett put it, how does one use writing as “a way of being in the world that wasn’t made for us”? Through our engagement with the texts and subjects in this emerging field of literature, we will also consider the intersection of disability with the other aspects of an individual’s identity in society.  In this work, perhaps we, too, might engage the world differently and reframe the way we think about our lives and differences. Texts may include Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, ed. Sheila Black, Jennifer Bartlett, and Michael Northern; Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg by Emily Rapp Black, Places I’ve Taken My Body by Molly McCully Brown; Call Me Ahab: A Short Story Collection by Anne Finger; Cost of Living by Martoj Martek; Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky; and Wound from the Mouth of a Wound by Torrin A. Greathouse.

Offered Spring 2024

The focus will be on North American indigenous mythology. Students will study various tropes, among them the trickster and the preponderance of anthropomorphic characters. Looking at the cosmology of the Iroquois, Algonquin, Zuñi, Inuit, and Navaho, students will examine how different environments influence their stories. The role of shamans and medicine men in transmitting these stories will also be studied. Students will read essays by Bobby Lake-Thom, known as Medicine Grizzly Bear, who was of Karuk and Seneca descent and a native healer. Students will also read sections of Braided Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Offered Spring 2024

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 will study science fiction as imagined by writers of marginalized identities, and in the process we will 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 Spring 2024

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 will study five books by poets representing diverging and coalescing trends and movements across the poetry landscape, plus a collection chosen by students. We will 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 2024

Hamlet is the character in Shakespeare whose experience most aligns with being a teenager in the 21st century. He is uncertain, full of angst, has a strained relationship with his parents, an on-again-off-again romantic partner, a loyal best friend, and a lot of yet to be realized potential. We will try to get a better understanding of this character and how he might be relevant 400 years later. Students will take a deep dive into Hamlet, reading and viewing several different productions. We will also look at texts that are inspired by or that draw on Hamlet including Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard and To Be or Not to Be by Ryan North as well as a viewing of The Lion King.

Offered Spring 2024

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 2024 Visiting Writer is Carmen Giménez. Carmen Giménez is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the NBCC Award in Poetry and Be Recorder (Graywolf Press, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry, the PEN Open Book Award, the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She was awarded the Academy of American Poets Fellowship Prize in 2020. A 2019 Guggenheim fellow, she served as the publisher of Noemi Press for 20 years. She is Publisher and Executive Director of Graywolf Press.

Offered Spring 2024

This course will explore a range of Asian American voices and stories in texts published since the eighties. We will learn from an array of experiences and identities, and we will do so through a variety of literary forms and genres, including fantasy, short fiction, personal essay, and poetry, as well as a longer work of fiction or memoir. Much of our work will involve careful attention to craft; as a result, we will produce both analytical and creative pieces in conversation with the pieces we read. Possible texts include Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, Night Sky With Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong, Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu, Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner, and work by Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston.

Offered Fall 2023

This elective is part anthropology, part philosophy, and part literature. Students will examine different tropes in myths as well as read scholarly work about myth, ritual, and symbol. The focus will be on Greek and Roman mythology. Texts will include The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and a series of well-known stories like Pandora’s Box, Prometheus, Oedipus, Orpheus and Eurydice, Demeter and Persephone, Narcissus and Echo.

Offered Fall 2023

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 will 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 Fall 2023

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 Fall 2023

Octavia Butler is a pioneer of modern science fiction. She was creating and making space for herself in the genre at a time when it was deeply unwelcoming to Black writers. Despite this, her works and ideas have exerted massive influence on a host of writers as well as social justice organizers — that is, on our ability to imagine alternative futures. In this class we will study her novels and short stories, engage with the literary and social organizing theories that her works have spawned, and check out a few writers and thinkers she has influenced. Texts by Butler may include Blood Child and Other Stories, Parable of the Sower, Wild Seed, and Kindred.

Offered Fall 2023

Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice is a classic. It has been translated, adapted for film and television, and reimagined by many different authors. Adaptations of it have included modern retellings, graphic novels, zombie stories, different narrators, and much more. We will explore the question of why Pride and Prejudice has inspired so many retellings and what those retellings bring to the conversation. Texts may include Pride by our visiting writer Ibi Zoboi, Pride and Protest by Nikki Payne, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith, and Longbourn by Jo Baker.

Offered Fall 2023

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 Fall 2023 visiting writer is Ibi Zoboi. Zoboi is the author of numerous titles including American Street (2017), which was a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award in Young Adult’s Literature, a Time Magazine Best YA Book Of All Time, and a Kirkus Best Book of the Year; Pride (2018), a contemporary remix of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; and My Life As An Ice Cream Sandwich (2020), a moving middle-grade debut of a girl finding her place in a world that’s changing at warp speed. Zoboi is also the co-author of the Walter Award and L.A. Times Book Prize-winning Punching the Air (2021) with prison reform activist Dr. Yusef Salaam, an Exonerated Five member, which was also shortlisted for the U.K.’s Yoto Carnegie Medal. She is the editor of Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America (2020), an essential collection of captivating stories about what it is like to be young and Black in America. Her debut picture book, The People Remember (2021), received a Coretta Scott King Book Honor Award. Her other recent titles include Star Child: A biographical Constellation of Octavia Estelle Butler (2022), and Okoye to the People: A Black Panther Novel (2022) for Marvel.

Offered Fall 2023

In this course, students will learn how to analyze the visual medium of graphic novels and explore how graphic novels have emerged as a robust literary genre since the publication of Maus in 1980. We will pay particular attention to historically marginalized voices including transgender, queer, Jewish, and Asian authors and illustrators and how they have used this genre to amplify their voices. Students will have opportunities for creative projects, formal presentations, and analytical writing over the course of the semester. Texts may include Understanding Comics, Maus, Home, On a Sunbeam, Nimona, One Summer, and Monstress.

Offered Spring 2024

In this course, students will expand their knowledge of literature and genre as they explore novels, plays, poetry, and creative nonfiction from literary traditions across the globe. They will build their lexicon of literary devices and terms as well as learn to analyze these both verbally and in writing. Students will continue to build on their foundation of writing skills as they practice analytical writing in academic essays as well as creative pieces demonstrating their understanding of each genre. By the end of the year students will be comfortable encountering and engaging with a wide range of literature as they work toward becoming independent learners, thinkers, and writers. Works may include Much Ado About Nothing, Antigone, A Raisin in the Sun, Parable of the Sower, Homegoing, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, and texts from our visiting writers.

Writing is fundamental to success in the upper school and this course lays a strong foundation for writing in the humanities as well as an introduction to studying literature at the high school level. Students will practice writing personal essays, research papers, rhetorical arguments, and literary analysis over the course of the year. Students will read reviews, watch Moth story performances, participate in research that reflects their own interests, and analyze poetry, fiction, and non-fiction writing. Students will also engage deeply with their own writing process, identifying strengths and learning to revise and edit areas that need improvement. To help bolster their writing toolkit, students will learn grammar, vocabulary, and MLA style and citation. Students will also work to build reading habits through book circles and common course texts which may include works from our visiting writers, Shakespeare, and a selection of short fiction, poetry, and essays chosen by the instructor.

In this course, we will explore together the relationship between literary works and their film adaptations. What is lost, gained, or transformed as the story’s voice changes its form? How do characters and images change when we encounter them on screen instead of on the page? As film continues to demonstrate new possibility for narrative, how might we observe and articulate the different choices authors and directors make to engage us in their art? By studying the terms and techniques used in each medium, students will be able to analyze, appreciate, and imitate the techniques and talents of authors and directors alike. Past texts have included The Color Purple, Atonement, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption, The Joy Luck Club, Never Let Me Go, and The Orchid Thief, among others. Texts under consideration for 2023 include If Beale Street Could Talk, Stories of Your Life and Others, The Namesake, and Rabbit Hole, among others.

Offered Fall 2023