Creative Writing


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Creative Writing

The goal of Hamilton's Creative Writing Program is to encourage students to develop practical skills and insights in the broader context of literary practice and culture.
 

Overview

Do you have the first four chapters of the Great American Novel hidden on your computer desktop? Are you scribbling free verse in the margins of your literary anthology? Do you sense a connection between that rap or rock you’re doing on weekends and the experience of reading Maya Angelou or Billy Collins or even Walt Whitman? Consider the possibility that you’re a creative writer as well as a literary scholar. Hamilton is one of a small number of undergraduate liberal arts colleges that offer not only courses but a full major or minor in creative writing. More ...

Academic Program

Research Opportunities

Many English majors spend a semester or a year studying abroad, typically in England, Ireland or Australia. Hamilton-affiliated programs offer a chance to explore first-hand the historical roots and cultural settings of many of our most important authors and works. While study abroad is an integral part of the liberal arts curriculum, it has special resonance for students of English and creative writing as they learn to analyze not only traditional texts but the larger cultural and creative interactions that produce them.



The Senior Program

The progression of workshops in the creative writing program culminates in the senior seminar, where students compose and revise a major collection of poetry or short fiction or a novella. Senior creative writing students seeking honors present their work in a public reading. For all students, the aim of the senior program is to achieve the maturity of vision and technical control developed in earlier workshops. More ...


Resources

While nearly every campus has a writing center, Hamilton’s Nesbitt-Johnston Writing Center is regarded as one of the nation’s best — a model for other colleges and universities. Here students learn the fine points of researching, developing and organizing essays. All students have access to — and most make use of — the center’s student tutors, who are drawn from the best writers in every discipline across campus.

Hamilton's Burke Library has among its substantial literary holdings an important collection related to the American modernist poet and Hamilton alumnus Ezra Pound. It also offers a wide selection of Caribbean literature and a remarkable handwritten, hand-decorated manuscript from 1465 that students in medieval courses may examine and handle.