Syllabi, Prompts, & Teaching Materials
Below are free prompts & syllabi; feel free to draw from these materials as you feel inspired to, or to just peruse my own pedagogical framework and scaffolding!
(CV Here)
ENGWRT 0530: Intro to Poetry
Teaching History
University of Pittsburgh (Fall 2023—Spring 2025)
Department of English
ENGWRT 0530: Introduction to Poetry Writing (Summer 2024 & Spring 2025)
ENGWRT 0400: Intro to Creative Writing (Fall 2024)
ENGCMP 0200: Seminar in Composition (Fall 2023 & Spring 2025)
+ Various workshops with Metamorphosis and the Pitt Sexual Assault Prevention Center
A poem begins with an inquiry—and like all good questions, not all of its mysteries and contours are meant to be understood. Of course, this is beautiful in theory, but how do any of us go about crafting a poem if our only instruction is “be curious?” In this course, we’ll center on a forever poem we revise with each breath: each moment of brushing against a stranger and sharing in their space; every time we reach toward language and instead, find something raw and evocative, something hard to articulate that is often slipping into the margins. Here, we’ll let these mysteries populate the poem and move toward the pulse of these unanswerable questions, the primary one being what makes the “i” at the center of the poem so vivid and raw in all its aliveness (or, its refusal to come alive). If this all sounds very woo woo, that’s OK too! As with the poem, we have to give ourselves over to not being (or trying to be) understood easily—it is in the worlds we weave of language, imagery, sound, and every contour and texture of the art we call poetry that we might move beyond only a space of “logic” and legibility and instead, start translating our interiors in the unique way only our voice can do.
Intro to Poetry: Sample Prompts
Poem Prompt Fragments #1: Try to begin in the body, and imagine a genesis for you & your interior: what would be the big bang of the idea of "you"? Where does the self you identify as start, where do "you" begin, and where are you becoming and/or ending? Watch and/or read Ross Gay's "Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude". If you were to compose a poem of your gratitude and loves, what form would that take? How sprawling or brief would a list of your gratitude become? Try to incorporate as many leaps as you can, similar to Ross Gay, so that you might leap from love and into the pocket of something more unknowing and unsayable. Words too, are a double edged sword, and can cut with one side and be tender with the other. What have you been called, and what have you been afraid to admit was not a bad name for you? Maybe it was a curse word, or some kind of derogatory speech that not only functioned to hurt, but in a strange way, functioned to affirm or complicate your understanding of your identity. E.g: I have personally been catcalled and labelled incredibly rude names often used for women, but as I am trans, these words served to both affirm me as other than my initial gender, while also serving as an act of violence. The time you had a heated discussion with your friend and were rudely called something in the heat of the moment is also an option: allowing nuance and complications to enter into hurt often lead to unexpected, new and exciting ways of thinking. When and why are you silent? Can you try being silent in a poem (in whatever way this means for your writing)? What parts that make up "you" are still a mystery to you, or that you're still getting to know? Here, you can consider persona to play with meeting yourself: what would happen if a character you identify with were to be a stand-in for yourself? Or, if your self were a person separate from you, what might they say or do in close proximity to you?
Poem Prompt Fragments #3: Write a poem that begins in or around a specific word/term, before slipping into a completely different word/phrase as you continue to pressure its shape, body, and form. In doing so, remember to hold its history, etymology/ different meanings over time, and the meaning you desire of it--even if it's insufficient in capturing the emotional weight you want it to (think of something like a poem about "grief" as a word, that asks if 5 letters is enough to capture the emotion it elicits; same with "love," "hate," and so on). Ask the word to be more than what it is: if it's a verb, what does it become as a noun? If it's now made into a noun, what are the implications on the new etymologies and histories you've gifted this word? Try to let it guide you into an almost completely different world of language and vocabulary, so that you take more adventurous leaps in your journey. Write a poem where you don't know where it'll end, or even where it's going. When you start the poem, intentionally choose a topic you don't quite know how to talk about, and anytime you have an idea for how to end the poem--don't. Do the opposite of that idea, and write the poem in a different direction. Don't think of a conclusion in advance for the poem at all: just keep writing until you reach a point where the poem avalanches into something unexpected and exciting--then, let it reach an end, without writing something you think of as an "end." This is a good practice for teaching yourself how to write mystery, voltas, and not over-explain in the poem when trying to get across an idea or reach for a specific sentiment. Write the smallest poem you can think of--but do so in at least 10 lines or longer. The key is not to make a short poem, but to ask what "small" means to you in a poem, however you might interpret it. Some processes that might trick you into doing this is writing a longer poem, then doing an erasure, and keeping only the erasure so it becomes the whole poem itself; or writing a poem with descriptions centered around smallness, or that considers smallness in imagery vs. the actual vocabulary itself; or even just doing a revision of a poem you've already written by cutting it down to 10 or so lines, keeping only what feels most powerful in the poem (even if it doesn't seem to be related, on the surface). This is also a great way of tricking yourself into effective revision--or "killing your darlings." Make a poem entirely off the page--that is, make a poem based only on your speech, and composed after only the words you say aloud, which you will then transcribe to the page. Focus on how the poem sounds aloud regardless of its written form, then try to communicate the rhythms and cadence of your solely spoken poem on the page. Write a poem on a current political issue--BUT, in doing so, you must weave another practice / field of study into a poem, and use it to guide the form, language, and content of your poem. Example: if you're a bio major and want to talk about tariffs, write a poem on tariffs in the form of a biology equation or lab experiment ("President Trump Tariffs as a Hardy-Weinberg Equation," "At Home in Delaware, Joe Biden Does a Differential Analysis") ; or maybe, as a poli-sci major, you make a poem on foreign policy in the form of a satirical court document written in legalese (like "STATE OF GEORGIA VS. THE LANDMASS OF GREENLAND," or something like Layli Long Soldier's "Whereas"); or even, as one of my peers once wrote, an interrogation of race politics in sports through an imagined interview between a basketball player you love and a sports newscaster who asks inappropriate, irrelevant questions. It doesn't have to be a field you major in or are familiar with: if you like cooking, consider a political conflict as a recipe; if you like anime, imagine your favorite character dealing with a landlord in Oakland. Whatever your intervention of imagined "form" is, just allow it the freedom to guide your political poem into a strange, unexpected, and insightful place. And with political poems, think carefully about the relationship between factual information, poetic liberties, and the greater point of inquiry you reach toward (for a poem like this, really think about whether you're saying something urgent or necessary)
Form Poem Prompt Fragments: Write a poem as a "self portrait." This can be a self portrait as another object / person / idea ("Self Portrait as my Father's Broken Cross," "Self Portrait with Scarlet Bruise", etc...) and should use this subject to prompt an interrogation of some feature, quality, or aspect of yourself emphasized uniquely through this form. You can also think of this as a sister to the ekphrastic--try to treat the object or central conceit as if a painting in need of vivid, detailed exploration where, when looking deep enough, you eventually find yourself. For examples, see Abdulkareem Abdulkareem's "Self Portrait with Phonemic Analysis", Diane Seuss' "Self Portrait with Sylvia Plath's Braid", or Roger Reeves' "Self Portrait as Vincent Van Gogh in the Asylum at Arles". Write a letter to your own hometown or a geographic space with resonance to you, where you consider it as a whole--including its flaws, its beauty, its history, the people populating the space, and how the two are informed by each of these qualities even while juxtaposed together. To reign in the scope, consider making this letter not just to a large expanse of space, but something even more specific: think a bedroom, a convenience store, the hotel you stayed in during a core memory, the friend's house where you first explored some range of new emotions, etc. Write an ekphrastic for your favorite piece of art--whether a traditional work of art like a painting, or a more loose application like a scene from a video game, film, TV show, piece of music, etc. Think about how to not only reflect on the vivid contours and specific details of the art (we won't necessarily have access to the art, so pretend you're explaining the art piece to us as if we've never heard it), but also to use the details of its actual qualities as a leaping off point for greater inquiries that ideally, should bring you outside the canvas of the painting entirely. Approach the art with a sense of curiosity and newness: what haven't you noticed before, but now that you've observed it, suddenly opens up an entirely new world of how you perceive the art? What are some other interpretations of this art piece / scene, especially if you're seeing it as if for the first time? For examples, see Terrance Hayes' "Envoi", and Krista Franklin's "Everyday a Woman Around the World is Pulled into Blue."
ENGWRT 0400: Intro to Creative Writing
(Excerpt) Note that my primary practice is primarily as a poet—as a result, much of our work will be foregrounded in poetics as a practice first, before we allow this central framing to explode our understanding of genre and conventions / constraints. In this specific course, we’ll blur between genre and style, and you’ll have the freedom to compose in as wide a range as you wish, be it fiction in verse or as a screenplay, flash fiction, nonfiction through witness poetics, graphic memoir, or even in an audiovisual format; we’ll make space for every imagination sparked by the world of writing as art.
Intro to Creative Writing: Sample Prompts
Poetic Praxis 1 (from Toi Derricotte's Workshop): Take a piece of paper and turn it horizontal. Now on its side, you'll draw two long lines so you have 3 columns. In the first column, list up to 5 emotional states: these can be any state of being. i.e. pensive, reluctant, avoidant, sad, obsessive, etc. Then, in the next column, write up to 5 adjective or specific, vivid descriptors, like oak hued, mahogany, cracked, moonlit, and so on. Finally, write specific objects and nouns, like Rick Owens button up, stolen handbag, protein bar, etc. Once you've written these in the columns, then randomly place your hand on the page in the first column and circle wherever your hand lands. Do so again for all 3 columns, until you have an emotional state, a specific descriptor, and a distinct noun. Now, combine all three into the first line of a poem ("I am a pensive, oak-hued busted high heel") in whatever way you can imagine, and follow its line of thought to whatever connections and adjacent images / ideas are sparked for you. Let this sprawl into a poem of however long. Remember not to mold the poem, so much as let the poem be molded by the clash of unexpected phrasing, syntax, and the "eros and musculature" of the line, as Carl Phillips puts it.
Essay fragment prompts from nonfiction section: Write an essay that begins with an "ending" (however you interpret this to mean). Attempt to answer an unanswerable question, whether about yourself, your family / loved ones, or the world, and use this to reflect on why this question holds a weight in your life. Choose a random object within your sight in your living room. Either by reflecting on the history you shared with it, or imagining what history it might hold, describe / explore the object in all 5 senses, and dive into its value / imagined value and how it came to be in your possession. If you don't have access to the object's history, after imagining its past, consider the theoretical value of something similar, or what unexpected parallels it sparks for you (maybe it reminds you of something your mother owned, which may lead to you reflecting on that respective object; maybe its similar to something you wish you valued from someone else, though you don't have the chance to anymore). Think back to a space that is not a home, a bedroom, a place of comfort, or an otherwise sentimental space. Interrogate your relationship to this seemingly un-sentimental space, and explore its value or importance to you along with what histories you've shared with it, including a description both of the space and its own history outside of you (light research may be involved). While writing this, tend to this space as if it were precious, despite its unsentimental nature. Without writing in another language or inventing your own unused code / language, write something you refuse to translate, then proceed with the rest of the essay in a series of untranslated poems or paragraphs. Make it so that you don't offer access to those who the writing is not intended for, and place the onus on the reader to meet you where you are, rather than the other way around.
Fiction fragment prompts: Here, we're going to magnify a moment and practice breathing life into a scene. In addition, we'll be playing with how we might make more nuanced and intricate the worlds we're currently writing into during this last section on fiction. First, take either characters you've already created for a story, or characters you can conjure and create in this moment (even if borrowed from popular media—similar to fan fiction). Now, write a scene featuring these characters or imagining new ones that does all the following: Places the characters in an argument with one another, exploring how they might respond to conflict and therefore explaining the characters with actions, rather than descriptions of them; Uses environment as a catalyst for the argument, while vividly rendering the environment on the page; And ends without resolving their argument or the central point of contention. How you write this is completely up to you: it may be a scene with no dialogue that features only interior narration and explores the emotional space between these characters; or maybe you'll use this opportunity to try writing into these characters from a new angle, such as a poem, some kind of received form, or maybe using a note left by one of the characters to do the work for you. ... Consider the elements of worldbuilding, character traits, voice / tone or style of the main narrator, dialogue, descriptions, and everything else that feels resonant to a story. Then, imagine the ending to a greater story, or the beginning to a story, and write until you reach what you feel is a strong opening or satisfying closing to a longer piece. If you choose to write an ending, briefly recount at the top the tldr of the story / scene / scenario so far as you imagine it; if you write a beginning, write a tldr after the opening, explaining what the imagined characters and scene will eventually end up doing in the story.
ENGCMP 0200: Seminar in Composition 1
To essay is to try, attempt, experiment. In this course, you will compose essays—experimental writings—documenting a semester-long inquiry related to the poetics of bearing witness. Each essay will move you more deeply into this inquiry, so that you not only want to know more about the subject but may be also affected by it and inspired to teach others about it. Each of your essays is a landing point on a study: the first essay draws on observation and experience and practices description; the second interprets archival artifacts; the third synthesizes your previous findings and analyzes discovery; and the last invites to you re-see and re-envision a prior essay. As a describing/inscribing inquirer, you will be encouraged to admit uncertainty about complexities and to uncover your personal relationship to the topic of inquiry. In our class community, you will work closely with peers, sharing sources, reading and responding to one another’s drafts, developing a class project, and supporting each other throughout the journey.
Seminar in Composition 1: Prompts / Assignments
Grounding Essay: Since we've gained the ability to make a canvas of the world, we've documented the world we inhabit through art, oral traditions, and writing. In the poem "A Little Closer to the Edge", Ocean Vuong nourishes his past where personal memory is absent (his conception), and enters the imagined space of the two lovers who gave form to Ocean as an idea and entity. In bearing witness, he simultaneously preserves the history of love and violence he was born into and allows memory to become something malleable, something moving him toward realization--and, at times, the ruin of generational trauma. Recently, the politics of remembrance and reckoning with our often conflicting, lived-in experiences has proved a flashpoint in current culture wars. Yet the curiosity to document persists; the pull to render what we witness and remember remains urgent, and we defiantly continue to record the world through grief, suffering, and unimaginable tragedies. In a few paragraphs, explore what you believe to be at the core of the human purpose of documenting our personal experiences. What value is there in recording and remembering the past as we experienced it? And not just in a historical or intellectual sense, but in an personal sense close to you too (why would you try to remember a late friend’s laugh, your grandmother’s voice, etc.). Why have so many writers felt compelled to document and relive their experiences? Next: if we are to learn from the past, what are some ways we might use the experiences of those who bore witness to it in a productive way? And last, should our understanding of history be rooted in the past, or rooted in the constant experience of new historical events (or perhaps even a balance of both)?
Archive Essay: In this assignment, we’ll be thinking about how the multimedia texts we’re currently reading are integrating a range of references with varying proximity. To translate more simply: we’ll be making annotated bibliographies, using 2 personal primary sources and 1 secondary source. You’ll need to first consider whether you want to focus on either your personal history, or on a piece of media you could talk endlessly about. This means you have two options— Option One: Consider how your own life intersects with a historical moment. You can think of this as building on Essay 1. One of your primary sources can be the same photograph / object you used in the first essay, or it can be something passed down in your family and originally made by an ancestor. This can also range to letters, emails, texts, voicemails, etc. Think about customs and cultures too—are there recordings/documentations of your family traditions? This can be thought of as a primary source as well and can be easy to investigate for historical research / secondary sources. Option Two: Think about a TV show, album, song, videogame, or really any piece of media you’re obsessed with. In this instance, you’ll investigate the artist’s personal discussion about their art as primary sources, and then consider how it’s being discussed by others in the world outside of the artist. To help narrow your research, think about material that has been extensively written about or discussed. If you’re examining a family recipe passed down from your grandparents, there are likely articles on how that recipe came to be customary in your culture, or how it varies from region to region. If you’re examining your own experiences at a Taylor Swift concert, there are likely essays and articles confronting a number of cultural topics/politics on the nature of her stardom. The list goes on—just consider something that is likely already engaged in some degree of academic discourse. Once you’ve decided which route for your research, then curate 2 primary sources and 1 secondary source (or vice versa—just make sure you have both secondary and primary). The primary sources can be by you (your documentation should be thought of as scholarly research—it’s the nature of this class!) or by someone else who was there to witness; the secondary sources can be historical, analytical, speculative, or even artistic (creative writing about a topic can be primary/secondary sources too) but most importantly, they should represent a critical analysis of whatever your primary sources are. Write the sources in MLA format (hanging indent, alphabetized, whatever) and use a free citation device online to make this process easier. Last, you’ll write between 150-200 words summarizing the source and explaining what draws you to the specific text. This research will partly lead into Essay 2. Get creative with your sources and try to have fun finding out something new!
Final Project Essay: This final essay will synthesize the act of creation with analysis. Think about all that we have discussed around first person documentation, openings, conclusions, annotations / citing, and revision. For this assignment, you will produce an original creative work that imitates the style/technique/devices of one excerpt you have encountered in this class. We will continue writing of our own lives, thoughts, witness, and experience as we have done all class—but now through the constraints and style of an artist who constitutes your “lineage” of sorts. When choosing which work you want to imitate, consider how the style / medium will impact your subject, whether you even liked the piece / what you liked, and what you might learn from writing inside of this artist’s space. Think of this as an act of revision: you’ll need to first analyze what craft moves the author makes in creating their art, then think of how to translate those moves to a personal narrative you want to write toward. Content-wise, you can write about a similar moment in time or idea as one of your previous essays, or work toward a different one—just make sure you’re doing your best to imitate the style of one of your previous readings. Obviously, our readings have ranged vastly in media, so this is an invitation to be as playful and creative as you need. Do you want to try writing a graphic novel excerpt in the style of Allison Bechdel? A grieving poem like Victoria Chang? Or perhaps you’ll translate the style conventions of a poem to a more traditional essay. However you tackle it is fair game. The creative portion will be 3 pages; there will be a critical analysis to go along with it that will be 2 pages. In the analysis, explain what moves you picked up on, explain why you’ve done what you’ve done as homage or imitation, and think critically about your own writing in relation to the previous work.