Young Women Writers Institute Online
The Program and Structure
Barnard’s Young Women Writers Institute encourages writers to find their voice and share it with the world. Students will spend their mornings learning from Barnard instructors in courses such as The Art of the Essay, Writing New York, and playwriting, on the same campus where writers like Greta Gerwig, Zora Neale Hurson, Jhumpa Lahiri got their start. Afternoons will be spent in intensives focused on developing a writing portfolio, getting published, and careers for writers.
Program Dates: Sunday, June 27- Friday, July 16, 2021
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Virtual Orientation: Sunday, June 27, 2021
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First Day of Classes- Monday, June 28, 2021
Tuition and Fees- $3,125
Program Structure
This institute is completely virtual. Classes are delivered synchronously at a mutually beneficial time for our students on both the east and west coast. We understand this will be a strain for some of our international students and will work with on ways to make the most of your class schedule. Classes take place on Mon, Tues, Thurs, and Friday midday from either 10:30 AM- 12:00 PM or 11:30-1:00 PM EST (please refer to your individual class) and Tues and Thurs afternoons from 2:30- 4:00 PM EST. Enrichment and student life activities will be held in both the early day and evening time frames (10am EST- 8pm EST)
The Curriculum
Instructor: Helen Kaplan
This class is designed for screenwriters who have written screenplays in proper script format and are interested in the art of revision. In this immersive screenwriting workshop, you’ll learn how to transcend tinkering, dive deeper into your story and characters, and re-see your work. Using improvisational acting techniques, we’ll bring scenes to life and re-stage them to sharpen the characters’ opposing goals. Focusing upon what each character needs, we’ll explore how to write even more memorable and moving scenes. Come ready to write and act! While sharing work and giving constructive notes will be the heart of the course, we’ll also do in-class writing exercises, have guest speakers, and analyze the blueprint and DNA of great films – their screenplays. By the end of the course, each writer will have revised at least one short script or excerpts from a feature length screenplay.
Appropriate for Grade Levels: 9, 10, 11
Time: Mon, Tues, Thurs, and Friday 11:30 AM- 1:00 PM EST
Tues and Thurs afternoons from 2:30- 4:00 PM EST.
Instructor: Mary Roma
Bring your love of truth, justice, mystery, and New York City history to this writing class. Studying the elements of the city’s well-known, and not so well-known crimes, can open a lens into the race, class, and gender structures at work in our metropolis, and reveal whom they benefit, and whom they harm. The current explosion in True Crime books, podcasts, blogs, and documentaries, and the fact that women are taking control of more of these narratives cannot be ignored. Students will choose an actual criminal case from New York’s recent or not so recent history (e.g. Typhoid Mary), and write a nonfiction story driven by their point of view, which will emerge from shorter pieces and research done during the class. The coursework will cover best writing practices, such as learning the skills of legally sound, ethical reporting, interviewing people on sensitive matters, and using public records—all in the interest of uncovering and shaping the raw material into a story that needs to be told, for victims who may not always have the tools to tell them. Readings will include Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in The Dark, Becky Cooper’s We Keep the Dead Close, James Polchin’s Indecent Advances, and excerpts from Christopher Payne’s photography book, North Brother Island, the Last Unknown Place in New York City. We will take virtual tours of public archives, the Museum of the City of New York, Central Park, and The East River, listen to Laci Mosley’s Scam Goddess, and view documentaries and films such as Strong Island, The Witness (about Kitty Genovese), and Summer of Sam. Experts on various topics will also participate as occasional guest speakers in the class.
Appropriate for Grade Levels: 9, 10, 11
Time: Mon, Tues, Thurs, and Friday 11:30 AM- 1:00 PM EST
Tues and Thurs afternoons from 2:30- 4:00 PM EST.
Instructor: Tom March
In this poetry writing workshop, students will explore the poem as a place for expressing what is essential about the self—and as a process for discovering the truth. The study of a variety of poetic forms will reveal how each offers a framework for clarifying one’s own understanding of the world on the way to inviting readers to share it. Class time will consist of workshops and close readings of exemplary poems. My workshop approach focuses on developing a safe and supportive climate for feedback in which we practice how to respond in ways that respect the goals and intentions of the poet as well as how to receive feedback with an open mind and confident heart. Afternoon special sessions will also feature craft talks and readings by other award-winning contemporary poets, followed by Q&A with students. During office hours, students will receive individual poetry consultations—focused on helping their poems be the poems they want them to be. At the end of the course, students will have a portfolio of poems ready to submit to journals, contests, and writing programs. For those who wish to begin publishing, there will be advice on how to create effective cover letters and target submissions strategically.
Appropriate for Grade Levels: 9, 10, 11
Time: Mon, Tues, Thurs, and Friday 11:30 AM- 1:00 PM EST
Tues and Thurs afternoons from 2:30- 4:00 PM EST.
Instructor: Alice Reagan
What is a play? Where does a play come from? This course will embrace the live performance event in the widest possible terms through reading, writing, feedback, and discussion. Students will engage in daily writing exercises, as well as extended writing operations. We will become adept at giving and receiving feedback. We will read and dissect both classic texts and contemporary plays. We will engage with theatre artists living and working in New York City, and view and discuss theatre in the online environment. Successful students will possess a sense of adventure and willingness to experiment.
Appropriate for Grade Levels: 9, 10, 11
Time: Mon, Tues, Thurs, and Friday 10:30 AM- 12:00 PM EST
Tues and Thurs afternoons from 2:30- 4:00 PM EST.
Instructor: Jill DiDonato
From the Sans-Culottes to Pantsuit Nation, fashion has moved from being an expression of class status to a declaration of self. Fashion has also been weaponized and used as a call-to-arms for political, social, gender, and economic reform. This course examines the role of fashion (Victorian to Modern) as a barometer of cultural consciousness, especially in times of oppression and social unrest. Students will create digital mood boards and learn how fashion designers use them, analyze descriptions of fashion in literature, and read about the evolution of fashion from seminal critics including Roland Barthes, Margaret Atwood, and Valerie Steele. We will view virtual museum exhibitions devoted to fashion, create a framework to analyze the role of fashion in modern life, examine fashion magazines, blogs, and Instagram posts through a critical lens, and learn about the design studios of New York fashion designers. Fashion has been dismissed as frivolous by critics, however women including Virginia Woolf and Anna Wintour have refuted that statement. By the end of the course, students will come to their own conclusions, exploring the reasons people might dismiss the role of fashion in culture.
Appropriate for Grade Levels: 9, 10, 11
Time: Mon, Tues, Thurs, and Friday 10:30 AM- 12:00 PM EST
Tues and Thurs afternoons from 2:30- 4:00 PM EST.
Instructor: Quincy Jones
The Future is Female" except in science fiction, where it still looks pretty white and male. What happens when women of color take on such tropes as space exploration, cybernetics, superpowers, and the end of the world? How can women of color change the way we not only think of the future, but think of the present as well? In this class we’ll look at how speculative literature looks at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, technology, and environmental concerns. Readings will include work from such authors as Octavia Butler, Franny Choi, Sam Chanse, G Willow Wilson, and Tananarive Due with potential critical readings from Lisa Yaszek, Charlotte E Howell, and bell hooks.
Time: Mon, Tues, Thurs, and Friday 11:30 AM- 1:00 PM EST
Tues and Thurs afternoons from 2:30- 4:00 PM EST.
The Instructors
Erica Cardwell
Art and Justice: Imagining a New World
Erica Cardwell is writer and radical educator based in New York. She teaches English and Literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY and a social justice capstone at The New School. She received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College and is has been awarded fellowships and residencies by the Lambda Literary Foundation and Vermont Studio Center. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Believer, Hyperallergic, Rewire, Green Mountains Review and elsewhere. Erica is a board member of Radical Teacher Journal. She is writing a nonfiction novel about the life of her late mother and the Black imagination.
Jill DiDonato
Is Fashion Frivolous?
Jill Di Donato has taught a range of liberal arts courses in the Barnard Pre-College Program since 2010. She is a member of the faculty at the Fashion Institute of Technology and has taught at Columbia University and City Tech. A former fashion editor, she writes about fashion and beauty as a barometer of cultural consciousness and has been published in the Los Angeles Times, NYLON, Refinery 29, VICE, Byrdie, and Salon. She founded and curates a series on beauty,The Vanity Project, for Huffington Post. A Barnard alumna, she holds an MFA from Columbia University.
Quincy Jones
To Boldly Go: Women of Color in Speculative Fiction
Quincy Scott Jones is an educator and author of two books of poetry: The T-Bone Series (Whirlwind Press, 2009) and How to Kill Yourself Instead of Your Children (C&R Press, 2021). His work has appeared in the African American Review, The North American Review, the Bellingham Review, Love Jawns: A Mixtape, and The Feminist Wire as well as anthologies Resisting Arrest: Poems to Stretch the Sky, COVID Chronicles: A Comics Anthology, and Black Lives Have Always Mattered: A Collection of Essays, Poems, and Personal Narratives. With Nina Sharma he co-curates Blackshop, a column that thinks about allyship between BIPOC artist. His graphic narrative, Black Nerd, is in the works.
Helen Kaplan
Advanced Screenwriting
Helen Kaplan holds an MFA in Film from Columbia University and a BA from Brown University. She has made numerous short films including the award-winning Return to Sender, was an Associate Producer on the PBS documentary, New York, and authored the chapter on Subplots in Writing Movies (Bloomsbury USA). Helen teaches screenwriting, directing, and film production at Hunter College.
Thomas March
Poetry Writing Workshop: The Poem, The Self, and The Truth!
Thomas March is a poet, teacher and critic based in New York City. His work has appeared in The Believer, Bellevue Literary Review, The Good Men Project, The Huffington Post, New Letters, Pleiades, and Public Pool, among others. His poetry column, "Appreciations," which offers appreciative close readings of poems from recent collections, appears regularly in Lambda Literary Review. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in poetry, and he is a past recipient of the Norma Millay Ellis Fellowship in Poetry, from the Millay Colony for the Arts. Aftermath, his first poetry collection, was selected by Joan Larkin for The Word Works Hilary Tham Capital Collection and will appear in Spring 2018.
Alice Reagan
Playwriting
Alice Reagan is Associate Professor of Professional Practice in the Barnard College Theatre department. She has directed plays at Shakespeare & Company, Dobama Theatre, Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble, Profile Theatre, Boom Arts, La Mama, Brave New World Rep, HERE Arts Center, The Chocolate Factory, and Target Margin Theater. She has directed new plays by Julia Jarcho, Gab Reisman, Mac Wellman, Dipika Guha, Chiori Miyagawa, and LM Feldman, and developed and leads the commissioning program New Plays at Barnard. Her primary interests are feminist plays and adaptations that challenge and subvert traditional narrative forms. MA Performance Studies: NYU/Tisch, MFA: Columbia.
Mary Roma
Citizen Sleuth: Writing Compelling True Crime Stories from New York City Cases
Mary Roma is an Instructor of English and Writing at New York University and Empire State College, and has taught for Teen Ink Magazine’s Summer in New York City Writing Program. She is a Curriculum Consultant for the mentoring organization, Girls Write Now, and leads writing workshops for teens at the New York Public Library. A native New Yorker, she has also traveled to Europe, Asia, and South America, especially Colombia. Her writing has been published in TRIPS magazine and she is a copy editor for the iPad based publication, PERISCOPE. In her spare time (and during spring migration), she takes bird walks in Central Park and hunts for foodie delights throughout New York City's multi-ethnic boroughs. She earned her Master of Arts in English and American Literature from New York University, and her Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from Bard College.
Technology and Academic Support
IMATS/ Canvas/Zoom
Barnard PCP utilizes Canvas, an online classroom, where students will find their syllabus, Zoom links to their class sessions, assignments, discussion boards, and access to message their instructor or peers.
All classes and workshops are hosted via Zoom. Our instructors have worked to create robust lessons that utilize various technology capabilities and platforms such as Zoom breakout rooms, Twine, Canva, and even apps developed by our professors!
Our team will go over technology usage and etiquette extensively in the student manual and during Orientation.
Course Assistant
Each course has the added support of a Course Assistant (CAs), a current Barnard student (or a recent graduate). CAs assist faculty with administrative tasks, classroom management, and facilitate office hours to help students.
Community Office Hours
Each Monday at 2:00 PM EST students are invited to meet with any member of our Pre-College Programs team. Office hours are meant to mimic the PCP’s open door office policy and give students a space to meet with instructors, course assistants, or a professional staff member.
