Spring 2027 Course Schedule and Descriptions

Spring 2027 Course Schedule and Descriptions

C W 101.01     Introduction to Creative Writing        Wednesday 4:00-6:45 p.m./ In-person      Graduate Teaching Associate (TBA)

C W 101.02     Introduction to Creative Writing         Online Asynchronous             Graduate Teaching Associate (TBA)

C W 101.03     Introduction to Creative Writing        Online Asynchronous              Graduate Teaching Associate (TBA)

This course is an introduction to the creative writing process, in which you’ll do exercises in writing poetry, fiction, and dramatic scripts. There will also be selected readings of exemplary stories, poems, and plays. Open to all students. CROSS GENRE COURSE.

C W 301.01     Fundamentals of Creative Writing   Monday 4:00 – 6:45 p.m./In Person -   GTA
Prerequisite:  English 114, or equivalent. Priority enrollment given to Eng: Creative Writing, Eng: Ed w/ Creative Writing concentration and Cinema majors. Instruction and extensive practice in writing poetry, fiction, and plays, with selected readings of exemplary stories, poems, and plays. This course is the prerequisite to Short Story Writing, Poetry Writing, and Playwriting. Instructors’ names will be published in June. CROSS GENRE COURSE.

C W 302.01     Fundamentals of Creative Reading Thursday 12:30 – 3:15 p.m./In-Person            Graduate Teaching Associate (TBA)
Prerequisite: Prerequisite:  English 114, or equivalent. Enrollment limited to creative writing majors; non-majors admitted with consent of instructor. Every creative writer needs to be a creative reader. Knowing how to write means knowing how to read. As beginning writers, we learn our craft by reading the works of established writers, drawing inspiration from their examples. In this class, we will read stories, poems, and plays by a diversity of writers such as Samuel Beckett, Octavia Butler, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Sally Wen Mao and others. We will also explore a diversity of genres, including science fiction, fantasy, horror and contemporary realism. Students will discover that creative reading is often the first and most important step to creative writing. 

C W 510.01     The Creative Process-Investigating Voice: Camp Sensibility, Deadpan Humor, and the Uncanny           Wednesday 12:30-3:15p.m./In-Person         Joseph Cassara
Prerequisites: Restricted to Creative Writing majors and minors; C W 101 or C W 301 with a grade of C or better; or permission of the instructor. What makes a voice strange, funny, theatrical, odd, queer or unforgettable? This upper-division creative writing course explores how writers and artists use camp, deadpan humor, grotesquerie, theatricality, absurdity, affect and the uncanny to create distinctive voices and imaginative worlds. Graduate students are welcome to join this course designed for upper-division creative writing majors. Through close reading and discussion, students will investigate how voice shapes character, setting, narrative structure and emotional experience. Creative writing exercises will focus on constructing absurd scenes, writing deadpan dialogue, developing off-kilter characters, creating heightened social encounters and building highly saturated settings in which ordinary reality begins to tilt toward the bizarre. We will experiment with tonal shifts, comic understatement, theatrical excess, queer and camp sensibilities, unreliable perception, fragmented narration, social satire and the tension between sincerity and irony. Students will develop original fiction while exploring how voice can transform the familiar into something strange, comic, moving and unexpectedly unsettling. Authors and artists will include Susan Sontag, Cole Escola, Tennessee Williams, John Waters, Pedro Almodóvar, Patrick deWitt, Renata Adler, Kevin Wilson, Leonora Carrington, Tom Drury, Xita Rubert, K. Chiucarello, and Percival Everett.

C W 512GW.01             Craft of Fiction - GWAR           Tuesday 4:00-6:45   p.m./Online
Prerequisites: C W 301; ENG 114; ENG 214; B.A. majors in ENG, Creative Writing and ENG, Edu. (Creative Writing). Explore craft elements of fiction: plot, dialogue, character, point of view, place, etc. Focus is on published writing and exercises. Some student work is discussed. Satisfies the General Education GWAR/C WEP requirement. An exploration of how writers translate their vision onto the page. (Emphasis on HOW). Emphasis is on assigned reading material, but some student work will also be discussed in small groups.

C W 601.01     Work in Progress          Tuesday 4:00 – 6:45p.m./In- person                 Lecturer (TBA)
Prerequisite: Senior standing in Creative Writing.  Enrollment is limited to undergraduate majors in English: Creative Writing, Creative Writing, and English: Education (Creative Writing). Work In Progress is an advanced process course that offers senior creative writing majors the opportunity to work on their capstone project, a series of revisions and re-envisionings of creative pieces that they have initiated during their time in the Creative Writing program. The class will explore ways to sustain a creative practice, by re-envisioning their own creative works and by examining works by emerging and established writers. We will also discuss various pathways for publication and creative careers. CROSS GENRE COURSE. 

C W 603.01     Short Story Writing     Tuesday 12:30 – 2:30p.m./Online    May-Lee Chai
Prerequisites: C W 301; C W 511GW or C W 512 GW or CW 513GW. Enrollment limited to creative writing majors; non-majors admitted with consent of instructor. In this class students will be encouraged to experiment with form and craft. We’ll read and discuss new and award-winning stories in a variety of styles and genres and hybrid forms. Students will have opportunities to generate new work and to give and receive feedback on their new creative work. Students will be encouraged to experiment with various forms in their own writing in order to generate written works that transport the reader, create empathy, and have lasting impact. Authors to be studied include Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Lesley Nneka Arimah, Carmen Maria Machado, Manuel Muñoz, and Charles Yu, among others.

C W 606.01     Art of Revision               Monday 12:30 – 3:15p.m. /In-person              Michael David Lukas
Prerequisites: C W 101 or C W 301; C W 302; C W 512GW or C W 603.Examine and experiment with the artistic processes of published writers (and a variety of other artists) who've taken a project from idea to completion. Study interviews, process notes, and "middle drafts" of these artists. Include analyses of the draft process, genre across artistic and literary forms, and creation and revision of student work.

C W 640.01     Transfer Literary Magazine    Wednesday 4 - 6:45 p.m./In Person  Lecturer 
Prerequisite:  C W 301; C W 302; C W 511GW or C W 512GW or C W 513GW; or consent of instructor. Join the staff of Transfer, the literary magazine of the Creative Writing Department, established in 1950, and one of the longest running student literary magazines in the US. The course is designed to give you a working taste of what it takes to put out a literary magazine (including critical analysis and discussion of short-listed submissions, proofreading, solicitation and distribution) and to make you think about the world of literary magazines and your own beliefs in literature. Come prepared to analyze and discuss text and investigate your own literary aesthetics. In order to bring Transfer into the 21st Century, in addition to assisting the editors publish the print magazine, class members will create, design, and edit their own literary magazine. If you’re interested in being an editor of Transfer, at the end of the semester you will be given the opportunity to apply for an editor position for the next issue. This is a process course (not a lab) and can be used to fulfill 3 units of the Creative Process requirement. CROSS GENRE COURSE.

C W 675.01     Community Projects in Literature      Tuesday 4 – 5:40 p.m./Online            Caro DeRobertis
Prerequisite: C W 101 or 301 with a grade of C or better. Enrollment is limited to undergraduate majors in English: Creative Writing and English: Education (Creative Writing). Non-majors admitted with consent of instructor. Paid and unpaid internship positions designed to give CW students practical knowledge and experience are available through local literary and arts organizations, civic and community organizations, Bay Area school districts and within the Creative Writing Community at SF State. Check out our Community Projects in Literature Internship Leads at https://creativewriting.sfsu.edu/content/communityprojects-0. Incredible academic internships are also available for C W 675/875 credit through SF State's Institute for Civic and Community Engagement (ICCE). Check out their list of paid and unpaid internships at http://icce.sfsu.edu. These working by remote and/or in person internships are robust opportunities to 'learn by doing'. If you have any questions, please contact Caro De Robertis at caro@sfsu.edu . C W 675/875 may be taken twice for 6 units of credit.                

C W 699            Independent Study     By Arrangement
Prerequisite:  Consent of instructor and a 3.0 GPA.  Upper division students may enroll in a course of Independent Study under the supervision of a member of the Creative Writing department, with whom the course is planned, developed, and completed. This course may be taken for one, two, or three units. No priority enrollment; enrollment is by petition, and a copy of your unofficial SF State transcript. Independent Study forms are available online http://registrar.sfsu.edu/forms under Independent Study (699, 899). This form must be signed by the instructor you will be working with, and the department chair, and must be turned in with a copy of your unofficial transcript. Please request a permit number from your instructor when they approve the 699 form.

 

GRADUATE CLASSES:

Note:  Preference in all Creative Writing graduate courses will be given to students admitted to either the M.A. or the M.F.A. programs in Creative Writing.  Preference in M.F.A. level courses will be given to students admitted to the M.F.A. program.  Priority in M.A. and M.F.A. writing workshops and creative process courses will be given to students admitted in the genre of the course.  Other Creative Writing M.A./M.F.A. students may enroll in these courses only with the permission of the instructor. 

C W 808.01     Novel Writing Wednesday 4:00 – 6:45 p.m.               Joe Cassara
Prerequisites: Restricted to graduate students in Creative Writing; C W 807; or permission of the instructor. This advanced graduate studio course is designed for students who have completed CW 807 Developing the Novel and are ready to move from the early stages of conception and development into sustained drafting. Students will work on substantial portions of their novels while considering questions of narrative architecture characterization, voice, point of view, pacing, scene construction, structure and thematic coherence. We will read craft-related essays focused specifically on the writing of novels and use these works to develop a shared vocabulary for discussing long-form fiction. In their small groups, students will exchange pages, offer substantive feedback and discuss the evolving challenges and possibilities of their individual projects. This course will emphasize drafting forward—writing pages without continually looking back at or revising them. By the end of the semester, students should have a substantial portion of the messy, unwieldy first draft of their novels. The course will emphasize process, consistency, creative risk, and forward momentum, helping students develop sustainable practices for carrying a book-length project beyond the semester, and set them up with material that they can continue to revise and shape into future iterations of their novel. 

C W 809.01     Directed Writing for Grads    ARR tmfoster@sfsu.edu Tonya Foster
Prerequisite: Classified graduate standing in Creative Writing. Permission of the instructor is required to take this course; you will be dropped without prior consent of the instructor. The semester before you plan to enroll in Directed Writing, submit a sample of your writing in the instructor’s mailbox along with a note explaining that you want to take their Directed Writing class. Be sure you include your name, address, phone number and e-mail. If the instructor is on leave, please email your writing sample to her or him. Directed Writing is a course in which Creative Writing students meet one-on-one with a faculty member to engage in development and exploration of creative work. Interested students must submit a request to an instructor, by email, in the semester previous to the semester in which they seek to enroll. Students enroll in Directed Writing to fulfill one or more of the following objectives:  to complete a significant portion of a first draft of a book-length work of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry or a first draft of a play; to engage in deep revision of a fully imagined first draft; to engage in research and exploration of a project the writer is beginning to imagine; to engage in assigned reading chosen by the instructor to inspire invention; to bring a later draft to final draft completion. 

C W 810.01     Seminar in Creative Process – Creative Non-Fiction            Thursday 12:30 – 2:30 p.m./Online    May-Lee Chai
Prerequisite: Restricted to graduate Creative Writing students or permission of the instructor. Students will be exploring exciting contemporary works of creative nonfiction in a variety of styles and forms. We’ll be reading essays, memoir, narrative nonfiction, text-and-image works as well as hybrid works that cross traditional genre boundaries. Students will have opportunities to experiment and generate new creative work. There will be at least one Zoom visit with an established author.

C W 810.02     Seminar in Creative Process Contemporary World Fiction              Tuesday 4:00–6:00p.m./Online          May-Lee Chai
Prerequisite: Restricted to graduate Creative Writing students or permission of the instructor. In this course we will examine how writers have re-envisioned myths, folk tales, ghost stories, urban myths, and classic works of literature/art from around the world into vibrant new stories, novels, films, and hybrid works of literature. We'll study how these writers use their re-imaginings and inventions to expand aesthetic possibilities of "traditional" stories and tropes to create exciting new works that not only delight the senses and tell a good tale but also manage to speak truth to power, highlight erased histories, imagine new power dynamics, or explode false binaries. Students will have opportunities to generate new material and explore the themes as they choose to interpret them in short creative responses.

C W 810.03     Seminar in Creative Process Craft of Poetry              Monday 7:00 – 9:45 p.m./In-Person                Lecturer
Prerequisite: Restricted to graduate Creative Writing students or permission of the instructor. Examination of the creative process with an emphasis on techniques, style, and structure. May be repeated for credit when topics vary.

C W 825.01     Playwright's Theater Workshop         Wednesday 7 – 9:45 p.m./In-person               Lecturer
Prerequisite: Restricted to graduate Creative Writing students or consent of the instructor. MA and M.F.A. students from all genres are welcome (should the course be over-enrolled, priority will be given to Playwriting students). Calling all playwrights, directors, actors, stage managers, production managers and graphic artists!  Greenhouse 2025 is looking for full length and short plays to be presented in a guerilla style theatre format in various indoor and outdoor spaces on the SF State campus for our annual festival of new work. Playwrights must be highly self-motivated in the creative process. They must be willing to help cast their own plays and do whatever it takes to get their work up. The festival will be held in April. Master classes with local professionals will guide students with helpful tools in dramaturgy, publicity and marketing, fundraising and grant writing. May be repeated for a total of 9 units.

C W 840.01     14 Hills Literary Magazine     Monday 4 - 6:45 p.m./In-person        Michael David Lukas
Prerequisite: Classified graduate standing in Creative Writing. Prerequisite: Classified graduate standing in Creative Writing. Fourteen Hills is a working small press as well as a graduate course in editing, publishing, and other skills essential to thriving and leading in the contemporary literary world. Each year, we publish one issue of Fourteen Hills: the SFSU Review, a nationally recognized literary print magazine, as well as the Michael Rubin Book Award (MRBA) winner, a book-length work by an SF State student or recent graduate. Fourteen Hills is run entirely by students with support from our Faculty Advisor and the Department of Creative Writing. The course, taught primarily by the Editor-in-Chief, is designed to give students an opportunity to observe and engage in many aspects of running a literary magazine, from editorial decisions to distribution logistics, from public relations and author interviews to curating a literary prize, from aesthetic considerations to the dynamics of equity and narrative justice in the broader publishing field. Students in the class serve as staff for the journal, working closely with the editors to consider and evaluate work for publication as well as learning about the copy-editing process, visual art selection, cover design, distribution, sales, and promotion. This is a class designed to merge real-world, hands-on publishing experience with the honing of skills that can ignite, inspire, and empower us in all our literary endeavors. CROSS GENRE COURSE.

C W 852.01     Creative Nonfiction Workshop           Wednesday 12:30 – 3:15 p.m./In-person     Chanan Tigay
Prerequisite: Classified graduate standing in MFA in Creative Writing, the MA in English; Creative Writing, or the new MA in Creative Writing. In this graduate Creative Nonfiction Workshop, you will submit 2-3 pieces of creative nonfiction—either separate shorter pieces or sections of something longer you are working on. You will hone your skills as critics, responding weekly to your classmates’ submissions, both in class and in feedback letters. The great majority of our time will be dedicated to discussing students’ work, with an eye toward drawing connections between craft principles and their own writing practice. We will workshop two writers’ submissions each week, examining such craft elements as structure, tension, dialogue, clarity, arc and character, paying particular attention to the ways in which conventions of craft are applied and understood—and oftentimes reinterpreted or subverted. May be repeated for a maximum of 18 units.

C W 853.01     M.F.A. Workshop in Fiction   Monday 7 – 9:45p.m./In-person        Caro DeRobertis
Prerequisite: Classified graduate status in the M.F.A. in Creative Writing or consent of instructor. Students are expected to concentrate on the revision of fiction, on bringing work to a finished, publishable state. Emphasizes the short story. May be repeated for a total of 18 units.

C W 854.01     Workshop in Poetry    Monday 12:30 – 3:15 p.m./In-person             Andrew Joron
Prerequisite: Classified graduate status in the M.F.A. in Creative Writing or consent of instructor. A poem instigates a revolution in language, a miracle in words. How do poets bring about such transformations? Students will explore, through assigned readings and their own work, various ways of creating and destroying the very substance of language to make poetry happen. In addition, students will explore different approaches to constructing a book of poetry as preparation for their MFA thesis. May be repeated for a total of 18 units.

C W 855.01     Workshop in Playwriting         Monday 12:30 – 3:15 p.m./In- Person            Lecturer
Prerequisite: Restricted to graduate Creative Writing students or permission of the instructor. Students are expected to concentrate on the revision of a play, on bringing work to a finished state, ready for production. May be repeated for a total of 18 units.

C W 859.01     Practicum in Teaching              Thursday 4 – 6:45p.m./In-Person       Nona Caspers
Prerequisite: Open to both MA and MFA Creative Writing students.  Repeatable once for credit.  Students working for the first time as Pedagogical Apprentices to instructors of undergraduate Creative Writing courses are required to take this Practicum course concurrent with their work with a teacher of record. Students meet as a group once every three weeks in tandem with asynchronous work on Canvas, posting teaching journals and case studies on a weekly basis.   This course provides pedagogical grounding for pragmatic classroom teaching work and offers students a structured forum in which to discuss their teaching under the supervision of an experienced teacher and in collaboration with other Pedagogical Apprentices.   NB: Each student must make arrangements with an instructor to serve as a Pedagogical Apprentice.

C W 860.01     Teaching Creative Writing      Monday 4 – 6:45 p.m. /In Person       Caro De Robertis
Prerequisite: Restricted to graduate Creative Writing students or permission of the instructor. Theoretical and practical aspects of teaching creative writing. (Plus-minus letter grade only.)

C W 875.01     Community Projects in Literature     Tuesday 4 – 5:40 p.m./In-Person       Caro De Robertis
Prerequisite: C W 101 or 301 with a grade of C or better. Enrollment is limited to undergraduate majors in English: Creative Writing and English: Education (Creative Writing). Non-majors admitted with consent of instructor. Paid and unpaid internship positions designed to give CW students practical knowledge and experience are available through local literary and arts organizations, civic and community organizations, Bay Area school districts and within the Creative Writing Community at SF State. Check out our Community Projects in Literature Internship Leads at https://creativewriting.sfsu.edu/content/communityprojects-0.  Incredible academic internships are also available for C W 675/875 credit through SF State's Institute for Civic and Community Engagement (ICCE). Check out their list of paid and unpaid internships at http://icce.sfsu.edu. These working by remote and/or in person internships are robust opportunities to 'learn by doing'. If you have any questions, please contact Caro De Robertis at caro@sfsu.edu . C W 675/875 may be taken twice for 6 units of credit.   

C W 880.01     M.F.A. Craft Tutorial: Fiction – Poetics of Narrative                Tuesday 12:30– 3:15 p.m./In Person     Andrew Joron
Prerequisite: Restricted to graduate M.F.A. in Creative Writing students or permission of the instructor. This course will examine the myriad ways that narrative language opens the temporal dimension, freeing consciousness to travel backward, forward, and sideways in time. This is a cross-genre course in which we will watch how time flows in stories, poems, memoir, and plays. The course will draw a diverse range of poets and writers who play with time. Along with such works, reading Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in a Narrative will encourage students to think beyond the traditional “narrative arc.” Students will use these creative approaches to the construction of narrative as points of departure for their own writing.

C W 881.01     M.F.A. Craft Tutorial: Poetics of Indeterminacy and Individuating Visions             Monday 4– 5:40p.m./Online             Tonya Foster Prerequisite: Restricted to MFA in Creative Writing students or permission of the instructor. In a universe of cells—who is not in jail? Jailers. / In a world of hospitals—who is not sick? Doctors. / A golden sardine is swimming in my head. / Oh, we know some things, man, about some things” from “Jail Poems” by Bob Kaufman. Decolonial feminist philosopher, Denise Ferreira Da Silva proposes recomposition as a means of making new ways of being. She explains that recomposition “requires that we release thinking from the grip of certainty and embrace the imagination’s power to create with unclear and confused, or uncertain impressions.” Poet/scholar Joan Retallack argues for the “importance … of complexity and indeterminacy” in poetry. This seminar-workshop focuses on how artists create the “disorder and mayhem” that redraft our “geometries of attention” by mining the imagination. According to Amiri Baraka, “What is called the imagination (from image, magi, magic, magician, etc.) is a practical vector from the soul. It stores all data and can be called on to solve all our “problems.” He suggests that “Imagination (image) is all possibility… Possibility is what moves us.” In this class, we will focus on art (writing, visual art, music) as “recomposition,” and will read and explore poetry, essays, other genre and media to explore the “image” and artists’ individual visions.

C W 893 Written M.A. Creative Project (3 units)  
Prerequisite: advancement to M.A. candidacy in English: Creative Writing.  Advancement To Candidacy (ATC) and Culminating Experience Proposal forms must be on file in the Division of Graduate Studies the semester before registration. These 3 units M.A. students sign up for while working on the culminating experience/thesis/written creative project, which may be a collection of short stories, a group of poems, a novel or a play.  Enrollment is by permission number during priority registration/enrollment: you will be emailed the correct class and permission numbers to enroll in your section. You must enroll in this course or your will not receive credit for your thesis.

C W 893 Written M.F.A. Creative Work (6 units)
Prerequisite: advancement to M.F.A. candidacy in Creative Writing; Advancement To Candidacy (ATC) and Culminating Experience Proposal forms must be on file in the Division of Graduate Studies the semester before registration. These 6 units M.F.A. students sign up for while working on the culminating experience/thesis/written creative project, which is expected to be a book length collection of short stories, or poems, or a novel or a play of publishable quality.  Enrollment is by permission number during priority registration/enrollment: you will be emailed the correct class and permission numbers to enroll in your section. You must enroll in this course or your will not receive credit for your thesis.

C W 899 Independent Study                             ARR

Prerequisite:  consent of instructor and a minimum GPA of 3.25. A special study is planned, developed, and completed under the direction of a faculty member. This course may be taken for one, two, or three units. No priority enrollment; enrollment is by petition, and a copy of your unofficial SF State transcript. Independent Study forms are available online http://registrar.sfsu.edu/forms under Independent Study (699, 899). This form must be signed by the instructor you will be working with, and the department chair, and must be turned in with a copy of your unofficial transcript. Your instructor will give you a permit number once they have approved the 899 petition. 

Archived Class Schedules