Who influenced you to first become a writer or an artist or a designer or an architect? Do you know who inspired them? In this class, students will research, read and discuss the inspirations of prominent writers, artists, and makers in order to understand their processes, choices, challenges and accomplishments. As a class, we will build a reading list tailored to our influences. Students will choose and pursue their own influence, write an abstract, create a bibliography, generate drafts, and refine an essay through the workshop process with the class. This course is especially useful to students who are working on artists' statements or thesis projects, or seeking to pursue research on their own inspirations and influences. Students will read longer critical works on a range of topics to prepare to write and workshop a substantive critical essay of their own. This is an introduction to research techniques and study of various approaches and applications of critical methodology as it relates to interpretation and evaluation of texts. Selected inspirations include Kevin Killian, Zadie Smith, Roxane Gay, Yiyun Li, Sandra Cisneros, James Baldwin.

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