Dear MA Students,

I hope your first month of the academic year has gone well.

I’m writing with an October message about some events, opportunities, and announcements, and to give you a preview of the Spring 2025 and Summer 2025 course offerings.

MA STUDENT CONFERENCE

In October, we’ll start planning of our MA student conference, which will take place in March 2025. We’re excited that our conference day will end with a reading and talk with the award-winning novelist Edwidge Danticat, who has recently published a book of essays titles We’re Alone.  If you are interested in being in this year’s conference committee—which involves coming up with the theme, reviewing submissions, and helping organizing the day’s program—please fill out this form to indicate your interest.  We’ll try to set up a first meeting sometime this month. 

TEACHING OPPORTUNITIES

Occasionally, our writing program has opportunities for master’s students to teach first-year writing at Queens. These opportunities usually require an availability to teach in the morning hours.  If you are interested in such an opportunity, please complete this form.  We’ll add your name to a list of students that we will consider if any opportunities arise. 

GRADUATION

If you are planning to graduate in the fall semester, please apply for graduation on CUNYfirst before October 31. Failure to do so will delay your graduation until the next semester and cost a few hundred dollars in penalties.

SPRING AND SUMMER COURSES AND REGISTRATION

Pre-registration will happen sometime in October.  We’ll receive word on the precise dates in the coming week or two, but, for now, I want to give you a preview of the classes that we will be offering in Spring 2025 semester:

DAY	4:40 to 6:30	6:40 to 8:30
Monday	719/ The Canterbury Tales with Glenn Burger	701/ Grad Methodologies with Omari Weekes
Tuesday	643/ Young Adult Literature with Carrie Hintz (ONLINE)	729/ Studies in Modern Literature with Cliff Mak
Wednesday	636/ History of Literary Criticism with William Orchard	781/ HIV/ AIDS Narratives with Megan Paslawski
Thursday	733/ Asian American Graphic Narratives with Caroline Hong (ONLINE)	781/ Gothic, Horror, and the Weird: Short Form Fiction with Sian Silyn Roberts (ONLINE)

In the summer, we will offer two classes in the four-week June session: 719/ Medieval Epic with Edward Currie (online asynchronous) and 781/ American Women Playwrights with Rhoda Sirlin (online synchronous).  In the second summer session that runs from the first week of July to mid-August, we will offer: 732/ Latinx Childhood with William Orchard (online synchronous) and 781/ 20^th Century American Poetry: Modernism to Postmodernism with James Richie (online synchronous). 

EVENTS

The college has a new reading series called Writers at Queens that brings creative writers to campus to read from their work and talk with students. The first event, a reading by visiting professor Ayala Johnson, happened on Monday.  The next event brings comic artist Ivan Velez, Jr. to campus to talk about his work and to provide some instruction on how to make comics.  This event will take place on October 23.  Velez will visit through the day, and his evening talk at 6:30 pm in Klapper 672 is specially designed for master’s students in art, creative writing, and literature.

ZOOM CAFÉ

Thanks to those of you who came out to the opening Zoom Café. We hope to have another two before the semester is over. These will likely be hosted by a student and faculty member who will choose the topics for general discussion (although the discussion could wander from that). If you’re interested in being a “host” for one of these events or if there are topics that you want to hear covered in them, please let me know. The opening event ended up being about vampires and thesis topics.  Any topic is fair game! 

We’ll follow up about registration once the registrar shares the pre-registration dates for next term.  As always, if you have any questions or concerns, feel free to reach out to Cliff or me. 

Best,
Bill