Distinguished Visiting Writer will teach Intersectional Creative Writing

Margaret Rhee has been named Cornell College’s 2021-2022 Distinguished Visiting Writer for the college’s Center for the Literary Arts. As the Distinguished Writer, she will teach Intersectional Creative Writing with New Media in Block 7, March 14–April 6.

Rhee is a poet, new media artist, and scholar in the Media Study Department at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the author of “Love, Robot,” named a 2017 Best Book of Poetry by Entropy Magazine and awarded a 2018 Elgin Award by the Science Fiction Poetry Association and the 2019 Best Book Award in Poetry by the Asian American Studies Association.

She also is the author of “Yellow”; “Radio Heart or, How Robots Fall Out of Love”; “Poetry Machines: A Letter to a Future Reader”; and “How We Became Human: Race, Robots, and the Asian American Body.” Her electronic literature project “The Kimchi Poetry Machine,” was selected to be exhibited in the Electronic Literature Collection Volume III. In addition, she is a Kundiman Fellow.

Her Cornell course Intersectional Creative Writing with New Media will engage difference—such as race, gender, citizenship, sexuality, and identity—through audio, video, electronic literature, and new media creative writing. Students will learn about and write poetry, fiction, and non-fiction through experimentation with digital platforms. Through constructionist learning (learning through creating) students will engage in creative writing and digital media-making grounded in dialogues of intersectionality in the digital age.

Each year the Center for the Literary Arts brings in distinguished writers to teach topic-based creative writing courses. The writers rotate among fiction, poetry, journalism, creative nonfiction, children’s literature, and a range of other topics. While on campus, the writers also give public readings or lectures.