Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice… Pablo Neruda called it “the greatest revelation in the Spanish language since Don Quixote of Cervantes.” William Kennedy deemed it “the first piece of literature since the Book of […]
The renowned creative writing program in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of English has a reputation for nurturing some of the top writers from diverse backgrounds, voices and interests. Faculty include widely recognized, award-winning writers, and many M.F.A. alumni have gone onto successful writing careers. Works by both faculty and alumni of the […]
I met Emily several years ago at Columbia University, where I was teaching and she was studying in the MFA writing program. She was one of my students in a seminar on process, where students dramatically experimented with the methods, times, and circumstances of their writing, . Many students can have difficulty working outside of […]
Affiliate Disclosure If you buy through our links, we may get a commission. Read our ethics policy . Have you ever wondered if you could turn your journaling hobby into a career? Do you have something important to say or an incredible story to tell the world? Today, technology makes it easy for us to […]
Academics Content By Nicole O’Connell This story originally appeared on the Writing Program’s website. The Writing Program has announced that the ENGLWRIT 111 Best Text Contest will now be known as the Marcia Curtis Best Text Contest, named for Marcia Curtis, who served as a teacher and administrator in the Writing Program for around 25 […]
Last week, generative fiction tool Sudowrite launched a system for writing whole novels. Called Story Engine, it’s another shot in the ongoing culture war between artists and AI developers — one side infuriated by what feels like a devaluation of their craft, the other insisting that it’s a tool for unlocking creativity and breaking writer’s […]
It’s the kind of thing you do when you’re young. You write about your heroes, and then you actually write to them. In my case the hero was Martin Amis, a writer I read in my early 20s in a trance of admiration. This was the mid-to-late ’90s, before we had smartphones, but a paperback […]
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Haolun Xu. Fifteen years ago, in the halcyon days of social media, book publicists began urging fiction writers to set up social media accounts, particularly on Twitter, to help promote their books. Many of the authors I knew groused that nothing worth saying could be said in 140 characters […]
John August Araya Doheny/Getty Images Writers Guild of America negotiating committee member John August has publicly disclosed his company’s investment in an artificial intelligence-powered writing tool and is facing some member blowback as the WGA is seeking to regulate the use of the technology in its current negotiations. The Big Fish and Aladdin screenwriter (and […]
Snow on snow in Geneva, Switzerland, courtesy of jenny downing, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Over the last few years, I’ve been reading unappreciated and erased novels by Black artists from the twentieth century. They’ve helped me think about the idea of illegibility—about what the literary world has historically deemed too wild, complex, radical, […]
