NEIU English Institute
The NEIU English Institute has stimulating courses available to enroll in for non-credit. Take a course for continuing education hours or just for personal growth and enrichment. To enroll, follow the link below for the course(s) you would like to take and pay online by credit card. No application process is needed for a non-credit enrollment other than creating an account in our registration system. Current and future NEIU students seeking college-level credit can take these courses by registering through the normal process. (Visit our Admissions page and register as a degree-seeking student or student-at-large if you are not already registered as an NEIU student.)
SPRING 2021
ENGL 235: INTRO TO CREATIVE WRITING
This course introduces you to some terms, notions, and practices of creative writing. We’ll deal in multiple genres (non-fiction, short fiction, poetry, drama) and in the slippery spaces in which they overlap. Our goal is, of course, to produce “finished” work, but we also seek to experiment, attempt, fail, succeed, write at metatextual levels, reflect on our experimentation, critique and respond to one another’s work (by becoming an online writing community), collaborate with one another implicitly and explicitly, read, read, read, think about language, think about literature, think about power and authority and literature, think about voices, think about writing as a relevant and transformative act/performance/responsibility . . .
Online - Asynchronous
Jan. 11 through May 8
Prof. Olivia Cronk, o-cronk@neiu.edu
Olivia Cronk is the author of "Louise and Louise and Louise" (The Lettered Streets Press, 2016), and "Skin Horse" (Action Books, 2012). With Philip Sorenson, she edits The Journal Petra.
ENG 387: CREATIVE WRITING: FICTION II
In this course students read published fiction and explore topics in craft while writing, and discussing one another's work. Dive deep into the craft of fiction writing and your own imagination. Your stories are waiting for you! Note: it is not necessary to take the Creative Writing: Fiction I class prior to Fiction II, if taken through the English Institute.
Online - Asynchronous
Jan. 11 through May 8
Christine Simokaitis, c-simokaitis@neiu.edu
Christine Simokaitis is a prose writer whose work has appeared in anthologies including “Are We Feeling Better Yet? Women Speak About HealthCare in America,” and the journals Upstreet, Calyx, Paper Darts, and MAKE among others. She currently teaches Composition, Creative Nonfiction, Fiction and Flash Forms at NEIU.
ENG 398B: CREATIVE NON-FICTION
Creative nonfiction isn’t about telling the truth on the page, it’s about presenting your reality as a feeling, thinking person to others. It’s about claiming space. It’s about reconstructing the world(s) around you in order to uncover new territories and new connections. In this introductory creative nonfiction course, we’ll explore new ways to engage with reality as a text for creative work. We’ll read and investigate narrative and non-narrative forms, including personal essay/memoir, literary journalism, the lyric essay, and more. (What can we learn from unexpected forms of nonfiction, like the manifesto? The memorial? The crônica?) We’ll use observation, association, and structure to consider how, as writers, we reflect what it means to be a human. You’ll write a series of short pieces, and engage in peer feedback. You’ll tell the truth, for art's sake.
Online - Asynchronous
Jan. 11 through May 8
Prof. Amanda Goldblatt, a-goldblatt@neiu.edu
Amanda Goldblatt is the author of the novel "Hard Mouth," published by Counterpoint Press. Her work can lately be found in NOON, Fence, and Diagram. She was a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, and teaches creative writing at Northeastern Illinois University. More information is available at amandagoldblatt.com.
ENGL 391: ONE WOMAN WRITER
In this new course, students will study the full range of one woman writer’s output, from her earliest to her latest work, along with the most important critical work written about it all. What’s new? In this course, students will not repeat the work of others but launch themselves very quickly into uncharted territory—primary research which will contribute significantly to the recovery of this woman into literary history. The focus of this year’s study is Elizabeth Oakes Smith (1806-1893), poet, prose writer and novelist, public speaker and one of the pioneers of the first wave of the feminist movement. A “household name” in her time, circulated in newsprint from Maine to California (and lampooned by political cartoonists attacking her radicalism. She is a major figure of the 19th century still to be recovered for our own revision of literary and social history. YOU can and will be a part of that work when you take this course.
Online - Asynchronous
Jan. 11 through May 8
Timothy Scherman, t-scherman@neiu.edu
Timothy Scherman is currently Chair of English and Linguistics at NEIU. His publications have appeared in Arizona Quarterly, Paideuma, and Studies in Twentieth Century Literature, with more widely circulated work published in PopMatters.com (on Edgar Allan Poe and Tom Waits). He teaches courses in American Literature, Criticism and Theory, but specializes in the recovery of American Women Writers. Since 1991, he has concentrated on Elizabeth Oakes Smith (1806-1893), and serves as the webmaster of the Elizabeth Oakes Smith website, where many of his papers on Oakes Smith are available to readers, and as president of the Elizabeth Oakes Smith Society. He is currently working on a film of Oakes Smith's climb (one of the first by a white woman) of Maine's Mt. Katahdin in 1849.
