Fall 2026
ENGL 198: English Careers Seminar (8-Week, first Session Course)
TR 9:30-10:20
Instructor: Dr Francis X Connor
This one-credit seminar is designed to help students at the start of their English, Creative Writing, or Applied Linguistics major. The course will introduce students to all of the possibilities that these degrees have to offer. We’ll work closely with the Shocker Career Accelerator to understand the skillset that these degree instill in their majors and how to find meaningful experiences – from campus involvement to future job prospects – that best align with those skills. We’ll practice building a portfolio of professional materials that can grow with you through the major, and learn ways to find applied-learning and internship opportunities during your time at WSU. The goal of this seminar is to equip English, Creative Writing, and Applied Linguistics majors with a clear and productive pathway through the degree that best aligns with each student’s interests and aspirations.
ENGL 210: Composition: Business, Professional, and Technical Writing
Multiple sections and instructors
This course provides instruction and practice in writing the kinds of letters, memos,
emails, proposals,
and reports required in the professional world of business and industry. It emphasizes
both formats and
techniques necessary for effective and persuasive professional communication. We will
also discuss job
application materials such as resumes and cover letters. Prerequisite(s): ENGL 101,
102 or instructor's
consent. May be taken as part of the Professional Writing and Editing Minor. [WC]
ENGL 212: Writing With AI [New Course!!!!]
MW 12:30-1:45 [CRN 11984]
Instructor: Dr Carrie Dickison
This course explores the use of generative AI as a writing tool. Topics include prompt design, the critical examination of generative AI tools, and the ethical integration of generative AI into different parts of the writing process (idea generation, drafting, revising, editing, etc.) May be taken as part of the Professional Writing and Editing Minor. [TL]
ENGL 230: Exploring Literature
Online
Instructor: Clinton Jones
General education humanities course. This course is a general education class meant to guide students in critical reading of period- and genre-specific literature, including and specifically drama, fiction, and poetry. The class will focus in part on your reception and engagement of literature using critical reading strategies and discussions with classmates. Reading stories lets the audience step out into a different environment without responsibilities or anything on the line. You become a 3rd party entity that gains insight into a world and situations that aren’t your own. Hopefully, after reading and engaging with a piece, the audience walks away with new perspective that can transfer to life outside of the pages. [TA, CL]
ENGL 232R: Horror and the Supernatural
Online [CRN 22984]
Instructor: Kerry Jones
Welcome! To all things that go BUMP in the night! In this class, we'll be exploring American Literature with a somewhat darker and more ominous twist, and we will examine classical and contemporary works of horror and the supernatural--particularly themes and ideas common to the genre. Sometimes the elements are obvious and overt; sometimes they are sinister and subtle. We'll also try to explore just what makes this genre of literature so popular. What draws readers to the macabre, the fantastic, the grotesque, and (sometimes) the truly terrifying? Why do people keep coming back for more? Our authors this semester will include Poe, Hawthorne, Henry James, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, Octavia Butler and many more! Films will be included this semester, and may include Dracula, The Haunting, Rosemary’s Baby, and The Shining. [TA, CL]
ENGL 234: Young Adult Fiction
Online [CRN 12157]
Instructor: Dr Vanessa Aguilar
This course introduces students to a variety of fiction written specifically for young adults. In this course, we will examine the young adult “classics” from the 1960’s to the present day. Throughout the course, students will critically analyze the discourses that surround the YA fiction and the trends in the field. Students will read an array of genres such as fantasy, dystopia, and graphic novels.
ENGL 276: Literature Of Sports
Online [CRN 22985]
Instructor: Clinton Jones
Unlock the drama of sports through literature and film by joining us this spring in the Literature of Sports! Dive into compelling stories with featured books such as The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier, a gripping tale of rebellion and peer pressure; Bleachers by John Grisham, a reflective story about small-town football and confronting past mistakes; and The Fight by Norman Mailer, an unforgettable chronicle of the legendary Ali vs. Foreman boxing match. Alongside these literary works, we’ll explore iconic sports films like the Rocky and Creed series, the classic underdog boxing stories; Remember the Titans, a powerful film about racial unity through football; Hoosiers, depicting Milan High School's journey to the Indiana state basketball championship; and Miracle, capturing the 1980 U.S. hockey team’s remarkable Olympic victory. This course is perfect for sports fans who love great storytelling, literature, and film, and for anyone eager to examine the intersection of sports and culture. It’s also ideal for those interested in how sports reflect personal and societal challenges. Students will engage in thought-provoking discussions, improve critical thinking and writing skills, and gain new perspectives on competition, teamwork, and triumph. All majors welcome!!! [TA]
Upper-Level Courses
ENGL 285: Introduction to Creative Writing
MW 11:00-12:15 [CRN 11986]
Instructor: Dr Adam Scheffler
“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on." This famous quote, attributed to novelist and short story writer Louis L’Amour, suggests that rather than waiting for inspiration, or worrying if our creative writing is any good or not, we should simply put pen to paper and begin—and that’s probably pretty good advice. But it’s also incomplete advice: what should we write about, we might wonder, and in what genre and style? What techniques or craft elements might help us hone our writing and make it as effective as possible? And how can we develop our own voice, or revise our work to build on our best and smartest impulses?
English 285 aims to help you begin to answer these questions by offering an introduction to creative writing in two genres: poetry and short fiction. In this class, you’ll read compelling poems and stories by a variety of professional authors to help inspire you, and you’ll be given prompts to help push your writing in new directions. You’ll also learn about key craft elements in each genre—such as images, lines, and stanzas as well as structure, characters, and dialogue. And you’ll read and provide feedback on your peers’ poems and stories, which will help you to become a better editor of your own work.
By the end of the term, you’ll be asked to produce drafts and revisions of three poems and one short story. This class will provide you with lots of feedback to help you improve your writing and ensure that you feel proud of the work that you produce. With any luck, you’ll leave this class feeling more confident about how to approach your writing, excited to keep that faucet turned on and to see what you’ll write next. [WC, TA]
TR 9:30-10:45 [CRN 11986]
Instructor: Dr Jason Allen
ENGL 285 introduces the practice and techniques of imaginative writing in its varied forms – primarily literary fiction and poetry. Within your own fiction you will explore and develop skills concerning key craft elements, including: setting, description, characterization, dialogue, voice, and point of view; and in your poetry you will develop an array of skills as you work within a variety of forms. We will also read published works and discuss them through the lens of a writer. Some of these works may serve as examples of techniques to explore or styles to emulate. A large portion of the semester will be devoted to workshopping your creative writing and providing feedback to your peers, and then delving into revision of your work. The books we’ll use are The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell, and The Poet’s Companion by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux.
TR 2:00-3:15 [CRN 14462]
Instructor: Kerry Jones
It’s time to unleash that inner poet and storyteller! This course is your creative playground. In this course, we’re going to dive into the art of writing poetry and fiction with curiosity, courage, and a sense of adventure. Through writing exercises, workshops, and reading work that inspires, you'll learn to take creative risks, give and receive feedback, and shape your voice on the page. No experience needed—just a willingness to write, revise, and surprise yourself. As Flannery O’Connor once said, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.” [WC, TA]
ENGL 301: Fiction Writing
MW 2:00-3:15 [CRN 11987]
Instructor: Dr Jason Allen
This workshop-based course emphasizes storytelling through well-crafted scenes. We will focus on all of the key elements and techniques employed by published fiction writers, and students will write numerous short pieces, some which are spawned from in-class writing prompts. During in-class workshop sessions, students offer constructive criticism in order for the author to substantially improve their work. Close reading and discussions of selected published works further enable students to improve their own creative writing craft skills. We’ll use Orange World by Karen Russell, Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby, and Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction by Benjamin Percy. Prerequisite: English 285 with a grade of B- or better [WC, TA]
ENGL 303: Poetry Writing
MW 3:30-4:45 [CRN 11989]
Instructor: Dr Adam Scheffler
“For me, always the delight is the surprise,” writes poet Louise Glück, but we might not believe her. Poetry can seem unappealing to people who are not used to reading it—it can, for instance, seem overwrought, antiquated, or overly difficult to understand. Yet poetry can also be intensely meaningful. When people fall in love or get married, or when they have a funeral, or experience a national political trauma, they often read poems out loud as if only poetry can do justice to the full scope of our joy and grief. This course explores some of the surprising delights of both reading and writing poems. We read a variety of contemporary poets, and students write and submit their own poems for discussion in weekly workshops. In so doing, we consider poetry’s capacity to be funny, wise, wild, and heartbreaking—its ability to offer a kind of pleasure available nowhere else. Books will include The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. [WC, TA]
ENGL 307: Film: The Cinematic Mirror: Dreams, Visions, Delusions, and the Art of Spectacle
MW 4:30-5:45 [CRN 11990]
Instructor: Sam Taylor
This course explores the evolution of cinema as a medium uniquely suited to replicate both physical reality and the architecture of the human subconscious. From the earliest silent avant-garde experiments to modern arthouse films and Hollywood blockbusters, we will investigate how filmmakers use spectacle to construct narratives and visions that challenge our perception of what is "real." Throughout the semester, we will navigate the blurred boundaries between the individual’s internal dream-life and the collective delusions of society. We will examine how film acts as a "second skin" for reality—sometimes reflecting it with clarity, and other times distorting it into nightmare or propaganda, or providing a canvas for transformative visions.
ENGL 310: The Nature of Poetry
TR 11:00-12:15 [CRN 14181]
Instructor: Dr TJ Boynton
Poetry is the most caricatured and misunderstood of literary forms. Pop-cultural depictions of poetry portray it as a spontaneous gushing of flowery or sentimental language designed to woo a love interest, rhapsodizing over one’s passions, or brooding over one’s sufferings. Anyone who has these universal motivations and experiences can write poetry; they need only purchase a fountain pen and a moleskin notebook and find a secluded forest glade or a quiet corner of the local coffee shop. As this course will show, the popular perception of poetry is as wrong as it is clichéd. Poetry is not only a serious literary form marked by extreme technical discipline and imaginative creativity; it is, per square inch of text, perhaps the most difficult one to engage with in terms of both composition and reading comprehension. This course will train you in the concepts and skills required to appreciate and interpret this extremely challenging literary form. We will examine a wide variety of poetic genres by a historically and nationally diverse range of poets, and in the process we shall see that, in sharp contrast to its popular image, poetry is one of the most demanding and most rewarding of human creative pursuits. [TA, CL]
ENGL 315: Introduction to English Linguistics
Online [CRN 24082] [Cross-listed as LING 315]
or
TR 11:00-12:12
Instructor: Dr Mythili Menon
The main goal of this course is to introduce students to the basic methodology, linguistic
principles, including phonological and grammatical concepts used in modern linguistics.
A secondary goal of this course is to teach analytic reasoning through the examination
of linguistic phenomenon and data from
English.
ENGL 317: History of the English Language
TR 2:00-3:15 [CRN 14389]
Instructor: Dr Fran Connor
Hweat! Nu ic secgan wylle giedd spræc Angelcynne. þæt is cynelic þing! We reden olde stories of the worthiest and grettest of degree, yt we shal see þe ystorie of þt faire Englisse tonge. To this end, vve shall together alight vpon a course of study, wth eyes dazzling vpon the light of reason, and, though delights are oft with labour purchased, our purchase will surely delight our labour. Assignments will include in-class workshops, two research projects, and a presentation. ttyl #ENG317 @SportingKyd @thefxc.bsky.social Insta wsu_english ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
ENGL 323: World Literature
TR 11:00-12:15 [CRN 11994]
Instructor: Dr Katie Lanning
This course approaches the vast array of world literature by focusing on the unifying theme of leaving home. How does literature from across the world represent concepts like homeland, borders, and foreign spaces? How do they understand place and the relationship between different regions of the world? Our course seeks to investigate these questions with a small but diverse snapshot of world literature. We’ll learn and practice several methodologies in pursuit of this study: comparative literature, translation theory, and colonial/postcolonial studies. Our class challenges you to think not only about the content of our readings but also about the approaches we take in analyzing them. These tools will equip you to assess world literature even beyond the texts assigned in this course. Where else but in world literature can you learn about Ancient Egyptian shipwrecks, Incan warriors, Korean folk heroes, Cuban magical realism, and Japanese ghost stories all in the same class?! Venture outside your comfort zone and come globetrotting in English 323. [TA, CL]
ENGL 325: Introduction to English Studies
MW 11:00-12:15 [CRN 11995]
Instructor: Dr Vanessa Aguilar
In this course, we will examine the fundamental skills in the field of English. We will explore various genres such as poetry, essays, short stories, plays, fiction, and graphic novels. Students will learn how to identify each genre along with the conventions that define them. Additionally, ENGL 325 connects literary theory with the histories, cultures, and practices of literary analysis that contribute to literary interpretation. The course work includes conducting a close reading analysis, a research paper, and a zine presentation. [TA, CL]
ENGL 330: The Nature of Fiction
Online [CRN 12161]
Instructor: Dr Rebeccah Bechtold
“A great obstacle to good education is the inordinate passion prevalent for novels, and the time lost in that reading which should be instructively employed,” or so stated Thomas Jefferson in a letter dated 1818. This course actively ignores Jefferson’s implicit advice and instead pursues the pleasure of reading fiction through the lens of American writers. Throughout the semester, we will be reading and analyzing a variety of fictional works by Americans, including Toni Morrison’s epic Song of Solomon, to better understand the genre and the scholarly traditions that support it. Early in the semester we will learn the basics of literary analysis while being introduced to the key concepts, skills, and terms associated with the genre; we will then move into broader questions about fiction, focusing on the different lenses literary scholars tend to use in their approach to the study of fiction; the class will culminate with a more in-depth research experience, providing you with the tools to write an informed literary analysis by the semester’s end.
TR 12:30-1:45 [CRN 11996]
Instructor: Dr Darren DeFrain
Dr DeFrain's teaching it; what more need be said? [TA]
ENGL 346: American Multicultural Literature
TR 9:30-10:45 [CRN 11997]
Instructor: Dr Jean Griffith
One recent preoccupation of American writers and readers has been history: not the past, but the story of the past. While backward glances have always been popular in fiction both as subject and theme, the treatment of history in recent, postmodern texts arguably differs from earlier ones because new theoretical frameworks have called into question both the epistemological underpinnings of history—how do we know what we know about the past?—and the form it takes, that of narrative. Rather than being fiction’s opposite, history can be viewed as subject to the same conventions that fiction is because it is told in the form of a story. Our class will explore why retelling history is so interesting to writers and readers in contemporary America and examine what forms that retelling takes. Our readings will cover a range of ways to narrate the past--from the historical novel to stories of time travel and “what if” tales--and our discussions will scrutinize the ways narrative time echoes and/or disrupts historical time. Texts may include Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Tommy Orange’s There There, and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic. [TA, CL]
ENGL 363: Major American Writers II
TR 12:30-1:45 [CRN 11999]
Instructor: Dr Jean Griffith
This course will survey the major trends in American literature from the end of the nineteenth century to the present, focusing on realist, modern, and postmodern short fiction, poetry, drama, and the novel. Since our course will begin with the period in which the United States emerged as a world power, we will pay attention to the cultural conditions that made the twentieth century “the American Century” and how the writers of the period have responded and, in the twenty-first century, continue to respond to that context.
ENGL 374: Literature In the Audio Age
MW 12:30-1:45 [CRN 22893]
Instructors: Dr Katie Lanning
Books are not simply inert accumulations of paper and ink, nor are they neutral vessels for conveying the work of an author. Rather, books are objects that themselves convey meaning; they are collaborative technologies, a nexus where writers, visual artists, craftsmen, and entrepreneurs join their particular skills to materially embody a text for public consumption. They tell stories about the cultures that produced them, the people who used them, and how people valued them over time. This course will approach books in this spirit: it will instruct students in thinking about books as physical objects, about the roles that books have played in shaping culture and society, and about the people involved in creating and sustaining manuscript and print cultures.
This course will take place in our brand-new Robert L. Cattoi Book Technologies Lab, and it will be very hands-on: we'll create our own manuscripts, handprinted texts, bindings, zines etc as we master some basic bookmaking skills. We'll intersperse these with visits to WSU's Special Collections library, where we will look as specimens of historically-interesting books. Taught by Dr Lanning (a specialist in 18th- and 19th-century books) and Dr Connor (Medieval and Early Modern books), this innovative course teaches the history of the book in a new key. May be taken as part of the Text Technologies Minor. [TA, TL]
ENGL 401: Fiction Workshop
MW 2:00-3:15 [CRN 12000]
Instructor: Margaret Dawe
We’ll read short stories, practice fiction writing skills through exercises, and read and discuss the fiction manuscripts of fellow students in this advanced course in literary writing aiming to develop skills in writing, rewriting, and polishing literary fiction. The coursework is designed to help students make their writing concrete, precise, and compelling. In addition to regular exercises and two or three complete short stories, students will revise one story for a final portfolio which includes exercises done toward that revision. The books we’ll use are What If? Writing Exercises for Fiction Writers, third edition, by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction edited by Lex Williford and Michael Martone. Repeatable for credit. Repeatable for credit. Prerequisite: ENGL 301. [WC, TA]
ENGL 403: Poetry Workshop
MW 3:30-4:45 [CRN 22895]
Instructor: Sam Taylor
This Poetry Workshop for intermediate and advanced students will guide you as you continue your artistic quest and refine your poetry beyond the skills you learned in ENGL 303. In the company of serious peers and an experienced poet-mentor, we will discuss your work, the work of your classmates, and poems by diverse, established poets that can serve as models and inspiration for your own work. The poem will be presented as a field in which a vision of the world is enacted and a space in which anything can happen. Over the course of the semester, you will work toward developing and assembling a chapbook of your work, a short booklet that features your strongest work in an aesthetic presentation that you can share with friends or family. [TA]
ENGL 505: Advanced Creative Non-Fiction
MW 11:00-12:15 [CRN 12002]
Instructor: Margaret Dawe
Our subject is narrative nonfiction. You’ve read it already if you’ve read In Cold Blood, which is the story Truman Capote wrote with the help of his childhood friend Harper Lee. Capote’s story began when his editor at the New Yorker sent him to Holcomb, Kansas, to find out how a quadruple murder (that lingo hadn’t been invented yet) affected a small town, and Capote came back instead with a story that had a bad guy as the protagonist. Narrative nonfiction means telling a story which is all fact but uses fiction writing techniques: action, language, character, setting, and theme. This semester you’ll be asked to read intensely in this genre so that you can learn what’s been done before and what’s being done now; you’ll write a reader response to your five favorite works. The heart of your creative writing will be four short pieces of narrative nonfiction and a longer work (15-20 pages) of narrative nonfiction that you’ve done the reporting on. You’ll be asked to gather facts for the story by researching, interviewing, and also doing immersion reporting, observing your subject in action in different circumstances and recording details to show rather than tell the story. We’ll use the help Jack Hart offers in his book Storycraft to weave all this reporting into a story and we’ll learn what we can from the wonderful narrative nonfiction by the pros. Prerequisite: ENGL 285
ENGL 513B: American Poetry After Modernism
R 4:30-7:00 [CRN 14444]
Instructor: Dr Adam Scheffler
Modernist poets sometimes receive more attention, but the poets who came after them were just as exciting. Whether it was Frank O’Hara writing about his love affair with a sexy ballet dancer, Thom Gunn writing about biker gangs, surfers, and drug trips, Sylvia Plath boasting about how she will rise “with my red hair” and “eat men like air,” or Robert Hayden writing about slave revolts, Bessie Smith, and Malcolm X, American poets after World War Two wrote edgy poems, energized by a period of rapid cultural change and increasing aesthetic freedom. Whereas Modernist poets sometimes tended to wax melancholic about modernity, with T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” eulogizing the collapse of European culture and speaking mournfully of “these fragments…shored against my ruins,” the American poets who followed reveled in fragments and pluralism, and in the exciting, wild, democratic possibilities they afforded. In this class, we will read and study the work of several exceptional poets, writing between 1950 and the end of the 20th century, and consider how they broadened the possibilities of American poetry, relishing in and celebrating new freedoms, while still staying attuned to darker realities and to how far America had fallen short of its ideals.
ENGL 515D: Shakespeare's Plays and Poetry
Online [CRN 14383]
Instructor: Dr Michael Behrens
An intensive focus on the literary, cultural and social impact of William Shakespeare's work from his time to the present. Subjects announced each semester. This online course will examine the poetry and plays of Shakespeare broadly in the context of early modern English culture. We will also discuss a selection of Shakespearian criticism and scholarship.
ENGL 516B: Emily Dickinson
Online [CRN 12163]
Instructor: Dr Rebeccah Bechtold
“Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” asked Emily Dickinson in 1862. This course hopes the answer is no as we’ll be spending our semester working with Dickinson’s poetry and prose. Throughout the semester we will work with her writing—treating it as an object with textual, oral/aural, and tactile elements—while also considering its placement within the everyday landscape of nineteenth-century America.
ENGL 533A: Horrow By Writers of Color
TR 2:00-3:15 [CRN 14388]
Instructor: Dr Jean Griffith
This course will focus on horror fiction and film by contemporary Americans of color, particularly African and Native Americans. We will explore what is unique about African and Native American horror, what similarities they share and what distinguishes them, and how they both relate to the larger horror fiction and film scenes. Along the way, this course will help you improve upon your reading, viewing, critically engaging, and writing skills.
ENGL 536B: Contemporary Writing By Women
Online [CRN 14461]
Instructor: Dr Chineyre Okafor
ENGL 579: Intro To Digital Humanities
Online [CRN 12164]
Instructor: Dr Mary Waters
Introduces students to some of the tools and projects that constitute the digital humanities, and considers issues raised by the field.
ENGL 590: Senior Seminar
T 4:30-7:00 [CRN 22990]
Instructor: Dr TJ Boynton
Senior Seminar will provide a space for each student to craft an individualized culmination to their work at WSU. Instead of a traditional course with assigned texts/readings, students will forge their own path throughout the semester, and in so doing will demonstrate their readiness for the world after graduation. Among the tasks students will be asked to design and execute along this path are: the “bucket list book” challenge, in which each student will read a book they have always wanted to read and perform a series of small response assignments documenting that experience; a “peer revision workshop,” in which each student will select a major piece of writing from their previous coursework to share with their peers and refine/improve (potentially with an eye toward submission for departmental awards or conference proposals); and the final project itself, which can take several different forms/genres based upon the student’s interests and post-graduation plans, but which will concretize and put on display their particular passions and attainments in the discipline of English. [OC]
ENGL 680: Theory and Practice in Composition
W 4:30-7:00 [CRN 12004]
Instructor: Dr. Carrie Dickison
This course is designed especially for prospective and practicing teachers. It will introduce you to theories of rhetoric and writing, major research questions in the field of composition studies, and best practices for teaching writing in schools and colleges. We will investigate writing processes, analyze varieties and examples of student writing, and hone our own writing skills by drafting, revising, and evaluating our own and others’ work. As we read significant publications in the field, we will continually consider the relationship between theory and classroom practice. Assignments will give you experience reading pedagogical and theoretical texts; posing complex and worthwhile questions about the teaching of writing; performing research and synthesizing your findings; drafting course materials for current or future writing classes; and responding effectively to student writing. Topics of discussion will include teaching the writing process; developing writing assignments; teaching sentence structure and grammar; and responding to and assessing student writing. May be taken as part of the Professional Writing and Editing Minor. [WC]
ENGL 686: Professional, Technical, Scientific Writing & Editing
Online [CRN 12165]
Instructor: Dr. Michael Behrens
Introduces students to editing and writing in professional, scientific, technical and medical fields. Through careful reading and analysis of exemplary technical and scientific documents, students gain exposure to numerous writing genres produced for different audiences and contexts. They practice writing in several forms, which may include research summaries, press releases, procedures, specifications, infographics, public service announcements, fact sheets and popular science writing. Assignments help strengthen students' rhetorical awareness, as well as the precision, clarity and readability of their writing. May be taken as part of the Professional Writing and Editing Minor.