Teaching

I've worked with students of almost every background and age, from adults preparing to take the GED to K-2 students learning conflict resolution strategies to college English majors taking literature surveys. Mostly I teach classes and workshops in book arts, literature, and creative writing.

College-level courses I've taught include: creative writing thesis workshops (NYU English), “Reading as a Writer” (NYU English), "Copyright, Commerce, and Culture" (NYU MCC), "British Literature II" (NYU English), and freshman composition and poetry workshops (both at the University of Alabama). This page collects elements of classes I've taught that have a public or online component—just a tiny fraction of the teaching I've done! For a better overview of my teaching experience, see my CV.

On Walking: Ambulatory Poetics, Performance, and Philosophy (with Emily Skillings)

On Tuesday nights between February 20 and April 17, 2018, Emily Skillings and I taught "On Walking" through The School of Making Thinking.

This course functioned as a laboratory space for experiments integrating walking, thinking, and making. We drew on a wide set of methods and discourses, including somatic poetics, urban/park planning, visual and performance art, disability studies, and literary criticism. Among the thinkers, artists, and and writers we engaged were Lisa Robertson, Harryette Mullen, Teju Cole, Rebecca Solnit, Richard Long, Judith Butler, Cole Swensen, and others.

Central questions we considered: What do thinkers gain by integrating a walking practice into their creative and intellectual work? How might walking allow us to think through our social, political, and economic surrounds with embodied specificity? What happens when we draw parallels between our inner landscapes and the landscapes we inhabit, the geography of our bodies and the grids, ways, and architectures of the spaces we cross? How might we create personal walking practices that augment and deepen our creative or critical thought processes? How do people with different bodies, backgrounds, and abilities “take a walk” and how might we question and dismantle the long-held “universality” of certain experiences of the walker/writer?

Shakespeare Lab (Class blog)

While TAing for a Shakespeare lecture course in NYU's English Department, I set up a class blog, Shakespeare Lab, to give students new ways to enter the texts we read. The blog came with a list of possible assignments—some based in performance and design, some in close reading, and some in creative writing. Students could choose which assignment to apply to any given play. In end-of-semester evaluations, one student wrote that the blog posts were the most helpful part of the course, adding: "You were right, it’s incredibly helpful to write about a play before speaking about it.”