City to City: Writing in New York

New York, NY:  The Big Apple.  Or apple tree.  Or orchid.  Or more like a fruit salad. New York is a city of cultures, subcultures, and sub-subcultures from all across the world mixing and co-mingling across interlocking urban blocks.  New York writers have emerged from all walks of life, across various races, genders, languages, social-economic classes, and of course from across the sea.  In this class students will read various stories, poems, and essays from authors showing this city through their various points of view.  We will study them from both a historical and contemporary lens.  Students in turn will write about their own experience in the city in both familiar genres and more experimental ones.  By the end of the semester, students will submit a research project, utilizing both creative and critical writing, connecting their homelands to their new home. Readings include Walt Whitman, Michelle Zauner, Miguel Piñero, June Jordan, Bushra Rehman, and Langston Huhges.