Distinguished Visiting Writers named for 2016-17
The Cornell College Center for the Literary Arts announces two Distinguished Visiting Writers for 2016-2017: live lit performer Kate Harding and screenwriter Brian Sloan.
Essayist, fiction writer, and live lit Performer Kate Harding will teach Live Lit: The Personal is Political. The emerging nonfiction genre of live lit–short memoirs written for performance–will be used as a medium for exploring the personal and the political in creative work. Students in this course will gain experience both writing and performing their work.
Harding is author of the 2015 book “Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture–and What We Can Do About It” and co-editor of the anthologies “The Book of Jezebel: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Lady Things” and “Lessons from the Fat-o-sphere.” A prominent figure in Chicago’s live lit scene, she has also taught a variety of courses in nonfiction, fiction, and the writer’s online presence at Northwestern University, StoryStudio Chicago, and The Loft Literary Center.
Sloan will teach Creating Character, during which students will write original screenplays and have the opportunity to hear actors perform their work.
Sloan has been a writer, producer, and director working in film and television for more than 20 years. His shorts and features have been released worldwide and played at festivals such as Sundance, and he has also worked on programs for Discovery, NBC, and MTV. He teaches screenwriting, film and video production, and film history and theory at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, and at Queens College-City University of New York.
2015-16 writers
Each year two distinguished writers visit campus to teach block-long advanced creative writing courses in topics not typically included in the standing curriculum. In the current academic year cartoonist and illustrator Jackie Roche taught Art and Journalism during Block 3, and in Block 7, Distinguished Visiting Journalist Deborah Jian Lee will teach Reporting from the Margins.
Jackie Roche is a cartoonist, illustrator, and writer specializing in nonfiction comics. She graduated from the University of Hartford honors program with majors in illustration and American history, and she earned her M.F.A. at Savannah College of Art and Design. Her work has been published in such venues as: the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, Fusion, and Symbolia Magazine. She also has work forthcoming in several anthologies.
Lee is an award-winning journalist and radio producer. She is the author of “Rescuing Jesus: How People of Color, Women, and Queer Christians Are Reclaiming Evangelicalism,” which was published by Beacon Press in 2015. Her stories have been published by Slate, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, New York, Reuters, GOOD, SELF, Hemispheres, WBEZ, and WNYC, and she was formerly a staff reporter at The Associated Press. Lee majored in economics and creative writing at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and she received her M.S. from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
