McMullan Writers Workshop 2026

We are excited to have several course offerings for MYWW 2026! We will fill courses on a rolling basis, so please indicate your course preferences in this section.

Richard Boada -- “Living Tensions: The City and Urban Environments”: In this workshop-style course, students will read, write, talk, and think about a diverse cross-section of 20th and 21st century poetic texts to and focus on the topic of The City and Urban Environments. In our course, we will read and write poems about cities where we have lived, places where we could never be from, cityscapes and landscapes, the movement of traffic or city rivers, or the crumbling foundations and infrastructure in order to understand who we are as poets and citizens. We will consider ways contemporary poetry takes place in what Jennifer DeVere Brody calls “an expanded field of writing” where language is embodied material that takes shape both on- and off- of the physical page. Throughout the course, we will continually attempt to re-define (or de-refine) what it means to read and to write within the context of how we understand our cities and urban spaces.

Nadia Alexis -- "Inventing and Reinventing Myth, Folklore, and Fairytales: A Poetry Workshop": In this generative writing workshop, students will explore poetry that reinvents mythology, folklore, fairytales of the world, and poetry in which poets create their own mythologies. Engaging with a diverse array of poets and traditions, students will read, consider, and discuss how poets engage in mythmaking, retelling, and reimagining well-known and lesser-known global stories to create new narratives, pose new questions, draw connections to the present, and more. Students will also write their own folklore and mythology-inspired poetry using contemporary example texts, writing prompts, and class discussions as inspiration.

Jamie Dickson -- “How Metaphors Carry Us To Meaning": We all know what metaphors are, but this class will look under the hood and discuss the mechanics of how exactly individual and extended metaphors function. Students will look at samples of writing from Langston Hughes, William Shakespeare, Sylvia Plath, Tim Gautreaux, and a host of others. Then, we’ll talk about how a well-placed metaphor can add spice to your own writing. Similes will be there too, tagging along like an adorable little sibling.  

Catherine Gray -- "Brave Writing: A Creative Nonfiction Workshop": Bring your true stories of beginnings and endings, bodies and places, ancestry and dreamscapes. Bring yourself with your doubts, fears, obsessions, and love. In this course, we will write toward your most urgent questions to see what new vantage points emerge. How does writing creative nonfiction allow us to discover what is true about ourselves? Through reading mentor texts and playing with craft choices at the sentence and paragraph level, we will explore how life’s big or small events have altered the way you see the world and the people around you.

Shalanda Stanley -- “Love, Absence, & Desire: Writing with a Pulse”: This course invites writers to explore the emotional power of love, the ache of absence, and the force of desire — not as abstract ideas, but as engines that move every great story. Whether in fiction, film, poetry, or our own lives, longing is often what gives narrative its heat. In this class, reading becomes fuel for writing, and writing becomes a way of reaching toward what feels just out of grasp. Through contemporary and classic works of fiction, students will examine how connection, distance, and yearning are crafted on the page — and then turn inward to write from those same charged spaces. We’ll treat writing as a living exchange — intimate, risky, and rooted in feeling. This is a workshop for students who want to write with honesty and electricity, who are willing to ask: What do I want? What have I lost? What still pulls me forward? By the end of the week, students will have developed original, voice-driven work shaped by emotional truth — and a deeper understanding of how narrative desire drives both great literature and our own stories.