Tiny Texts: Short Poems, Flash Fiction, Micro-Diaries with Nicole Cooley (via Zoom)

This craft class will focus on miniatures, tiny texts that play with language in wonderful, fun ways and at the same time ask us to rethink our ideas about reading and writing.  We will look at short forms in early twentieth-first American writing, from haiku to prose poems to micro-fiction to tiny diaries written on index cards.  We will discuss silence, omission, erasure, page space, and look closely at the linguistic strategies employed by texts that define themselves as “shorts.” Our emphasis will be on discovering the issues that resonate across genres and unsettling the idea of genre itself.  We will write and read and think about how tiny texts reveal so much about the world around us.

NB: This class will be taught on Zoom and capped at 12 people. Please read all course policies before registering for a workshop. Scholarships are due via Submittable on May 15, 2024.

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans, received an MFA from The Iowa Writers Workshop, and is the author of eight books — seven collections of poems and a novel.  Her most recent books are the forthcoming poetry collection Mother Water Ash (Louisiana University Press, 2024),  the poetry collections Of Marriage, published by Alice James Books in 2018 and Girl after Girl after Girl, winner of the Devils’ Kitchen Award from Southern Illinois University and published by Louisiana State University Press in 2017. Her other books of poems include Breach (LSU 2010), Milk Dress (co-winner of  a Kinereth Gensler Award, Alice James Books, 2010), The Afflicted Girls (LSU 2004) and Resurrection (Winner of the Walt Whitman Award from The Academy of American Poets, LSU, 1996).  Her chapbook, Frozen Charlottes, A Sequence, came out with Essay Press in 2016 and her co-authored chapbook Vanishing Point came out with Floodgate in 2020.  Regan Books/Harper Collins published her novel Judy Garland, Ginger Love, in 1998. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Narrative, Tupelo Quarterly, Boston Review, and The North American Review, among other magazines. Nicole has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, a New Jersey Arts Council Grant and a Fellowship from The American Antiquarian Society. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Queens College, City University of New York, and lives outside of NYC with her family.