Class Meetings: Thursdays, May 9 - June 13, from 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM, in the Poetry Center Conference Room 207

Registration opens April 15, 2019 at 11 AM. 

“Writings about food are necessarily as diverse as writings about any art of life and as illuminative of the things that matter because food is connected to everything,” writes Betty Fussell in “Eating My Words,” an essay that fiercely defends the culinary as a serious literary subject. In his introduction to The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink, Kevin Young writes, “Nothing is as taken for granted these days as food--except maybe poetry. Both are bread and honey, water and wine, mother’s milk and manna; and if ignored, or never used, both wither.” In this cross-genre, six-week workshop, we’ll explore our lives and the world around us through a culinary lens. We will move from poetry to memoir to essays and cultural criticism; from memories of Arabic coffee to queer and African roots of United States cuisine to reportage on culinary culture within prisons and at an aid station just south of the US-Mexico border. We will read work by Naomi Shihab Nye, Audre Lorde, Virgie Tovar, Michael Twitty, Mari Herreras, Denise Chávez and many more. Because of the experimental and generative nature of this course, students will turn in three to five writing assignments over the course of six weeks in lieu of a workshop. The class will culminate in a potluck where we will share words we’ve been working on and dishes that are central to our lives.