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Celebrating 60 years of the umass mfa for poets & writers. all events are free and open to the public., friday, april 5, 2024 herter hall, 231.
3:30pm: Editor Chat with Anjali Singh
6pm: Visiting Faculty Reading with Hannah Brooks-Motl & Bianca Stone
7pm: Reception
8pm: LiveLit (current student reading)
3:30pm: Writer/Editor Chat with Sarah Ghazal Ali & Carey Salerno of Alice James Books
6pm: MFA Alumni Reading with Yvette Ndlovu, Sarah Ali, Eric Baus, and Susan Straight
8pm: Open Mic
The Juniper Literary Festival is produced by the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers and the Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action. The Festival is also supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the UMass English Department and the UMass Arts Council.
Sarah Ghazal Ali is the author of THEOPHANIES (Alice James Books, 2024), selected as the Editors' Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award. A 2022 Djanikian Scholar and winner of The Sewanee Review Poetry Prize, her poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, The Yale Review, Poem-a-Day, Guernica, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. A Stadler Fellow, Sarah is the poetry editor for West Branch. She has received fellowships and residencies from Tin House, the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts, the Hambidge Center, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Community of Writers, and others. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was a Juniper and MFA Fellow, and currently lives in the Bay Area, California.
Eric Baus is the author of five books of poetry: How I Became a Hum (Octopus Books, 2020) The Tranquilized Tongue, (City Lights 2014), Scared Text, winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011), Tuned Droves (Octopus Books, 2009), and The To Sound, winner of the Verse Prize (Wave Books, 2004). He is also the author of several chapbooks, most recently The Rain Of The Ice (Above/Ground Press 2014) and Euphorbia (Above/Ground Press 2019). His poems have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, and Finnish. He is a graduate of the PhD program in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Denver as well as the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He teaches literature and creative writing at Regis University’s Mile High MFA program in Denver, which he co-directs with poet Andrea Rexilius.
Hannah Brooks-Motl was born and raised in Wisconsin. She is the author of the poetry collections The New Years (2014), M (2015), and Earth (2019). Her poetry, essays, and criticism have appeared in the Best American Experimental Writing, the Cambridge Literary Review, the Chicago Review, Modernism/modernity, and in edited collections from Cambridge University Press and Wesleyan University Press. With Stephanie Burt she helped edit Randall Jarrell on W.H. Auden (2005). She earned an MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and PhD from the University of Chicago. She lives in western Massachusetts.
Yvette Lisa Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean sarungano (storyteller). Her debut short story collection Drinking from Graveyard Wells (University Press of Kentucky, Spring 2023) was selected for the 2021 UPK New Poetry & Prose Series. She received her MFA at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2023. She has taught at Clarion West Writers Workshop online and earned her BA at Cornell University. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Tin House Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers Workshop, and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. She received the 2017 Cornell University George Harmon Coxe Award for Poetry selected by Sally Wen Mao, and was the 2020 fiction winner of Columbia Journal’s Womxn History Month Special Issue and the 2021 Black Warrior Review Fiction Contest winner selected by K-Ming Chang. She is the co-founder of the Voodoonauts Summer Workshop for Black SFF writers. Her work has been anthologized in African Risen (Tordotcom Publishing, 2022) and has appeared or is forthcoming in F&SF, Tor.com, FANTASY Magazine, Columbia Journal, Fiyah Literary Magazine, Mermaids Monthly, and Kweli Journal.
Carey Salerno serves as the executive director & publisher of Alice James Books where she has been dedicated to broadening the spectrum of the American poetic voice since 2008. She is the author of Tributary (2021), Shelter (2009), and a co-editor of Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books (2013). She serves as co-chair for LitNet: The Literary Network and teaches publishing arts and poetry writing for the University of Maine at Farmington. Salerno is a frequent guest of writing programs, conferences, and festivals, where she conducts consultations and delivers talks on publishing arts, editing, poetry, manuscript compilation, and other topics. You may find her essays, poems–and articles and interviews regarding her literary and publishing work–in print and online, including in NPR, Poets & Writers, and American Poetry Review.
Anjali Singh started her career in publishing in 1996 as a literary scout. Formerly Editorial Director at Other Press, she has also worked as an editor at Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Vintage Books. She is best known for having championed Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis after stumbling across it on a visit to Paris. She has always been drawn to the thrill of discovering new writers and among the literary novelists whose careers she helped launch are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Samantha Hunt, Preeta Samarasan and Saleem Haddad. As an agent she represents Bridgett Davis, author of the acclaimed memoir The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers ; Susan Abulhawa, bestselling author of Mornings in Jenin and Against the Loveless World ; Nawaaz Ahmed, author of the PEN-Faulkner finalist Radiant Fugitives; Mai Al-Nakib, author of An Unlasting Home and Rachel Harper, author of The Other Mother . Her graphic novel list includes Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martinez’ Wake: The Hidden History of Women-led Slave Revolts , Rhea Ewing’s Fine: A Comic About Gender , Gillian Goerz’s two Shirley and Jamila books and Deena Mohamed’s Shubeik Lubeik as well as new and forthcoming works by Gillian Goerz, Steenz, Salman Toor, Fouad Mezher and Tessa Hulls. She grew up between New Delhi and Alexandria, VA, graduated from Brown University and holds a diploma in French language and literature from the Sorbonne. She is a devoted New Yorker but still manages to spend a great deal of time in Rhode Island.
Susan Straight is the author of several novels, including the national bestseller Highwire Moon , a finalist for the National Book Award, and A Million Nightingales , a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, as well as the memoir In the Country of Women , named a best book of 2019 by NPR and Real Simple . Her most recent novel Mecca , was published March 2022 by FSG. Mecca was a national bestseller, a finalist for The Kirkus Prize, and named a best novel of the year by The Washington Post and NPR, as well as a Top Ten California Book by the New York Times, and winner of the Southwest Book of the Year for Fiction. She is the recipient of the Edgar Award for Best Short Story, the O. Henry Prize, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, Harper’s , and elsewhere. She was born and continues to live in Riverside, California, with her family, where she serves as Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.
Bianca Stone is the author of the poetry collections What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022) which won the 2023 Vermont Book Award in Poetry; The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018), Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Octopus Books and Tin House, 2014) and collaborated with Anne Carson on the illuminated version of Antigonick (New Directions, 2012). Her work has appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The Nation. She teaches classes on poetry and poetic study at the Ruth Stone House (501c3) where she is editor-at-large for ITERANT magazine and host of Ode & Psyche Podcast.
MFA Program Coordinator
E445 South College 150 Hicks Way Amherst, MA 01003 (413) 545-5456
Writer J. Robert Lennon, the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences, has previously played around with genre elements – from mazy, existential mysteries to dystopian satire – but his new novel, “Hard Girls,” is his first straight-up thriller.
By david nutt, cornell chronicle.
For writer J. Robert Lennon , the plot was hatched on a walk with his wife.
He’d been enjoying the work of literary writers who had recently turned to crime fiction – Colson Whitehead, Dan Chaon, his friend Adam O’Fallon Price, MFA ’14 – and he realized he was a little jealous of them. After all, Lennon has been an avid reader of the genre his whole life. And, as readers of his eclectic oeuvre know, he loves a literary exercise.
“I joked that I should do a thriller series, and spitballed, off the top of my head, the silliest thing I could think of: badass twin sisters, estranged by a traumatic event in their past, whose mom may or may not have been in the CIA,” said Lennon, the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences. “And before I even finished laughing, I was working the angles, trying to figure out how to make something like that plausible, entertaining and emotionally rich.”
For all its dark subterfuge and espionage hijinks, the heart of Lennon’s book is the relationship between twin sisters Jane and Lila Pool.
The result: “ Hard Girls ,” his 10th novel, published Feb. 20 by Mulholland Books. While in the past Lennon has played around with genre elements – from mazy, existential mysteries to dystopian satire – “Hard Girls” is his first straight-up thriller.
He drew inspiration from classic and contemporary crime writers, among them Lee Child, Tana French, Richard Stark and Patricia Highsmith, plus a few unlikely outliers.
“My joke elevator pitch is that the sisters are Anna and Elsa from ‘Frozen’ crossed with ‘Jack Reacher,’” he said. “The royal family of Arendelle, with fists like frozen turkeys.”
Lennon honored many conventions of the genre – family intrigue, shadowy government operatives, international travel and wild gunplay – putting his own spin on some tropes while bucking against others.
“As much as I love a good police procedural, I didn’t want any cops in this series. They are always just over the horizon, not quite noticing what’s going on,” he said. “And I’m never going to name the music the characters are listening to, or the booze they’re drinking. They like talk radio or silence, and half of them are recovering alcoholics.”
In early drafts, Lennon had to actively strip away some of the overt literariness, but overall, genre distinctions don’t mean all that much to him. It’s all one big sandbox. And his indelible voice – witty and avuncular, playful and accessible – remains intact.
“I wanted this to be a departure, and I tried to make it one, but ultimately it really is recognizable as my work. It’s plottier, but I’ve always liked plot. It’s over the top, but I’ve never been a straight realist,” he said, citing his novels “Broken River” and “Familiar” as kindred works.
For all the dark subterfuge and espionage hijinks, the heart of the book is the relationship between twin sisters Jane and Lila Pool, whose lives splintered in high school and who now follow very different paths. Jane is a suburban mom who does administrative work at a local college. Lila, the wilder sibling, has been AWOL for a decade until she starts sending Jane encrypted messages. The backstory of their early trauma and fracture is braided through their present-day mission to track down their mother while they themselves are pursued by clandestine figures, and their academic father reckons with a mystery of his own.
Part of the fun, Lennon said, was figuring out how far he could delve into the technical aspects of a thriller – the trickery, the tradecraft – without losing sight of what makes the sisters’ relationship special.
“I think when a family is troubled, siblings have to rely on each other more, and can also come to resent each other more,” he said. “The sisters’ terrible mother shaped them as much by her absence as by her presence, and the two women’s personalities formed around different aspects of hers.”
A weird hike
Lennon’s path through publishing has been its own kind of tense thrill ride.
His first two novels, “The Light of Falling Stars” (1997) and “The Funnies” (1999), were published by Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin. Sales were healthy. Reviews were good. His career was off to a promising start.
“I started out when people still thought they might be able to make a living at this,” he said. “I got overhyped a couple of times, then dumped.”
His third novel, “On the Night Plain,” landed at Henry Holt after Riverhead rejected it, but the book had the misfortune of being published in September 2001. (Lennon learned of the terrorist attacks at the beginning of his book tour; he was standing in an airport, wondering why all the flights were cancelled.)
“You have all kinds of failures for reasons you can’t predict,” he once said in an interview. “Your career is not on rails. It’s a weird hike through the wilderness. And you have to kind of enjoy having it even when no one is paying attention to you.”
His hike got even weirder: His fourth novel, “Mailman” (2004), was rejected by Holt and published by W.W. Norton, which accepted his next novel, “Happyland,” only to cancel the book’s publication “over paranoia about lawsuits,” Lennon said.
The darkly comic satire was inspired by the story of American Girl magnate Pleasant Rowland, who controversially gave $40 million to Wells College in Aurora, New York, to revitalize its downtown; many people criticized the gift as a ploy to remake the town in her image. Lennon created a wholly fictionalized world with a very different character at its center, but Norton balked and his agent dropped him.
Happily for “Happyland,” Harper’s Magazine took the rare step of serializing an abridged version of the book across five issues in 2006 – the first time it had done so in 50 years. In 2013, the complete novel was published as an e-book.
After that experience, Lennon began to feel commercial publishing was a waste of time, he said, and since the late 2000s his literary work has been issued by Graywolf, a renowned nonprofit press that he calls “the very greatest of independent publishers.”
“I’ve made less money and been much, much happier,” he said.
It’s a lesson that is hopefully not lost on his students, who have included such literary success stories as Téa Obrect, MFA ’09 and Ling Ma, MFA ’15 .
“I think young writers today are in an excellent position to start unusual careers amidst a flourishing of new small presses,” he said. “There will still be a select few who get a big paycheck and some minor fame, but I think that indies have moved in and brought new life to territory abandoned by the big presses. I hope my students will embrace the artisanal peculiarity of the industry and make writing a labor of love.”
As his publishing trajectory shifted, Lennon’s fiction grew more “ creepy, ‘thrillery’ and fantastical .” But he has not completely abandoned the big publishing houses, nor they him. His new sideline in crime is being published through Mulholland, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group that is known for edgy and quasi-literary mysteries. He’s already putting the finishing touches on the next entry in the series, “Buzz Kill.”
A sense of place
“Hard Girls” marks the return of Nestor, Lennon’s fictional stand-in for Ithaca. Much like the late Alison Lurie ’s Corinth, Nestor serves as a proxy for everything Lennon loves, and sometimes lovingly satirizes, about the town where he has lived for decades.
“My oldest daughter read an early draft and immediately asked, ‘Is this part of the extended J. Robert Lennon literary universe?’” Lennon said. “Place is really important to my fiction, but not in the sense that I want to accurately portray real places … I just want to evoke the sense of a place, fictional or not. To make it feel lived in. ‘Hard Girls’ goes to some places I’ve never actually been, including Panama, rural Missouri and prison, so I watched a lot of YouTube road trip videos and read a lot of testimonials.”
Lennon, who grew up in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, and received his bachelor’s degree and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and University of Montana, respectively, moved to Ithaca in 1997. He and his first wife lived in a house where a notorious local murder had taken place, and they made a living through freelance writing and teaching at regional colleges (Wells, Syracuse University, Ithaca College) and “freeloaded at the local libraries.”
Lennon came to Cornell as a guest lecturer in the Knight Writing Program in 1998. In 2004, he was offered a visiting professorship and taught several undergraduate writing classes. In 2006, he joined the Department of Literatures in English’s Creative Writing Program.
For Lennon, writing and teaching are not separate spheres. They are deeply connected.
“I try to share with students whatever I’m trying to puzzle out in my work, and I learn about my own work trying to help guide theirs,” he said. “You think you’ve seen it all, but you never have – it’s a real delight to encounter new literary problems I’ve never seen before, and to perpetually have to justify to other people why I think something is or isn’t good. Students are always upending what I thought was settled law.”
On top of all of that, he also finds time to edit EPOCH, Cornell’s long-running literary magazine, and he is a longtime musician . As with his writing, his music romps across borders, from indie rock to electronica to the rootsy Americana of the Starry Mountain Sweetheart Band.
Despite the dramatic twists in his career and his evolving aesthetics and interests, Lennon sees a consistent thread running through it all.
“I feel as though I’ve gotten a little less sentimental and cloying, a little more enigmatic and oblique. But I’d like to think there’s an overarching clarity and accessibility to my work,” he said. “I do experiments now and then, but ultimately I’m always singing Nina Simone … ‘I’m just a soul whose intentions are good…oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood…’”
Lennon will hold a book launch event Feb. 21, 7 p.m., at Ithaca’s Odyssey Bookstore, 115 W. Green Street.
Abby kozlowski.
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2/20/2024 By | Tracy Hamler Carrick
The Center for Teaching Innovation and the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines invite writing instructors across disciplines to come together as a community to discuss strategies for teaching writing in the age of A.I. These workshops are an opportunity to learn more about generative A.I. as it applies to writing courses; hear what other instructors have tried; ask questions and share ideas; and participate in the co-creation of a generative A.I. toolkit for writing courses. We encourage you to sign up for and attend both sessions, as they build upon each other, but you can also attend just one. Please bring your laptop to both sessions.
Please forward to colleagues and collaborators!
Cti workshops | generative a.i. in a writing classroom.
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The Creative Writing Program offers the MFA degree with a concentration in either poetry or fiction. Students pursue intensive study with distinguished faculty, participate in a graduate writing workshop and a teaching assistantship, and complete a book-length manuscript. The program is small, flexible, and generous with funding and support.
Learn about the M.F.A. degree in Creative Writing offered by the department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, with concentrations in poetry or fiction. Find out the requirements, financial support, teaching experience, and Special Committee for this program.
Ishion Hutchinson W.E.B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities Academic Interests: Creative Writing Postcolonial and Anglophone J. Robert Lennon Ann S. Bowers Professor of English Editor, EPOCH Literary Magazine Academic Interests: Creative Writing Valzhyna Mort Associate Professor Academic Interests: Creative Writing Ernesto Quiñonez
The Creative Writing Program offers the MFA degree, with a concentration in either poetry or fiction. MFA students pursue intensive study with distinguished faculty committed to creative and intellectual achievement. Each year the department enrolls only eight MFA students, four in each concentration.
The Creative Writing Program offers the MFA degree, with a concentration in either poetry or fiction. MFA students pursue intensive study with distinguished faculty committed to creative and intellectual achievement. Learn more about the MFA in Creative Writing PhD in English Language & Literature
Please see the MFA in Creative Writing Procedural Guide for more details. Philip H. Freund '29 Teaching Fellowship Lectureship Year 1 Fall Teach 2 courses (1 section each): First -Year Writing Seminar
Now a graduate student in Cornell's Creative Writing Program, he's still writing stories, but in a new place - Ithaca - and with a new purpose: finding the language to write about war in a meaningful way. "In journalism in a war, the focus is eventually on numbers," Rafiq, MFA '21, says. "One body, two bodies.
Cornell University Fully Funded MFA in Creative Writing Cornell University Cornell University, based in Ithaca, New York, offers a two-years of fully funded MFA in creative writing program. This Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree concentration in either poetry or fiction.
In that the Iowa Writers' Workshop - which in 1936 offered the world's first creative writing master's in fine arts degree - is full-residency, Cornell expects to attract a different audience ...
Graduate Program Director Helena Viramontes Director of Creative Writing 250 Goldwin Smith Hall Department of English Ithaca New York, United States 14850. Each year the department enrolls eight students, four in fiction and four in poetry. Our small size allows us to offer a generous financial support package which fully funds every student.
The two-year Master of Fine Arts in Creative Visual Arts program is an intensive, intimate, and diverse community that supports both interdisciplinary and medium-specific practices, augmented by access to the breadth of fields of study across the university. Students work closely with a special advisory committee consisting of Department of Art ...
Daniel R. Schwarz. Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature & Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow. Academic Interests: 20th and 21st Century British. Cultural Studies. Literary Theory.
Cornell University offers a fully funded MFA program in Creative Writing. As part of our series How to Fully Fund Your Master's Degree, here is a list of universities that have fully funded MFA programs in creative writing.A Master's of Fine Arts in creative writing can lead to a career as a professional writer, in academia, and more.
University of Oregon (Eugene, OR) Visitor7, Knight Library, CC BY-SA 3.0. Starting off the list is one of the oldest and most venerated Creative Writing programs in the country, the MFA at the University of Oregon. Longtime mentor, teacher, and award-winning poet Garrett Hongo directs the program, modeling its studio-based approach to one-on ...
M.F.A. in Creative Writing Faculty | Cornell College Faculty and Staff Cornell faculty, rotating guest faculty, and a diverse slate of visiting writers, publishers, and agents who will attend residencies, guarantee you the opportunity to learn from a wide range of styles and creative approaches.
He switched to writing in English in 2012, and has published short stories and essays in The New York Times, The Guardian, London Review of Books, Massachusetts Review, Asymptote, openDemocracy. He earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Queensland in Australia, and an MFA in creative writing from NYU.
About EPOCH EPOCH publishes fiction, poetry, essays, comics, and graphic art. In continuous publication since 1947, the magazine is edited by students and faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing, in Cornell University's Department of Literatures in English.
The Department of Literatures in English Program in Creative Writing proudly presents the 2023 MFA in Creative Writing Graduation Reading!
At Cornell, teaching is considered an integral part of training for a career in writing. The Department of English, in conjunction with the First-Year Writing Program, offers excellent training for beginning teachers and varied and interesting teaching in the university-wide First-Year Writing Program. These are not conventional freshman ...
A Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree program can offer all of these things. ... Cornell University's MFA program is a two-year program that offers students the opportunity to editorial train and teach writing seminars as part of their degree. The program also offers a joint MFA PhD through the Creative Writing and English departments.
The College Departments and Programs Directory Student Life Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Leadership Awards Facilities Creative Writing With a minor in creative writing, you'll take five courses in creative writing, literature and cultural studies. You can concentrate in a single genre (fiction or poetry), or freely study both.
215 N Cayuga Street Dewitt Mall Featuring prose and poetry by students and lecturers of the MFA in Creative Writing Program. Friday, October 14 @ 5pm Mackenzie Berry, Poet Rogelio Juárez, Fiction Writer Imogen Osborne, Poet Courtney Michelle Raisin, Fiction Writer Friday, October 28 @ 5pm India Sada Hackle, Poet Vivian Hu, Fiction Writer
Fridays, 10/27, 11/10, 11/17 at 5pm Buffalo Street Books 215 N Cayuga Street Dewitt Mall Featuring prose and poetry by students and lecturers of the MFA in Creative Writing Program. Em Setzer, Poet Em Setzer is a poet and translator from Maryland. They are a graduate from Bard College, where they studied Poetry and Classics, and were awarded the William Frauenfelder Translation Prize.
Oh nice 👍 ya, if you have the time and resources then you may as well apply if you're interested. Almost any humanities program (including the English PhD at Cornell) will accept students directly from undergraduate. The usual career path is to become a writer, in one form or another, but yes, many folks teach with an MFA.
A/An. Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, MFA '14. Gutmann-Gonzalez, who teaches creative writing at Clark University, drew inspiration for this poetry chapbook from archival research on the Salem witch trials. "As state-legislated violence, witch hunts were constitutive to the colonial order, reinforcing what was normal and what aberrant," observes the publisher, End of the Line Press.
He teaches literature and creative writing at Regis University's Mile High MFA program in Denver, which he co-directs with poet Andrea Rexilius. Hannah Brooks-Motl was born and raised in Wisconsin. She is the author of the poetry collections The New Years (2014), M (2015), and Earth (2019).
Buffalo Street Books 215 N Cayuga Street Dewitt Mall Featuring prose and poetry by students and lecturers of the MFA in Creative Writing Program. Ngoc Pham, Poet Mathew Bettencourt, Fiction Writer
Lennon came to Cornell as a guest lecturer in the Knight Writing Program in 1998. In 2004, he was offered a visiting professorship and taught several undergraduate writing classes. In 2006, he joined the Department of Literatures in English's Creative Writing Program. For Lennon, writing and teaching are not separate spheres.
Senior Lecturer and Director of the Writing Workshop & Graduate Writing Service M101 McGraw Hall and 174 Rockefeller Hall Ithaca, NY 14853 United States Email John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines 607-255-2280