High School Creative Writing Photography Workshop

brshaffner

Projections is an 8-week high school creative writing and urban landscape photography workshop centered around New York poems and landmarks. Each student contributes three poems and three corresponding photographs to a professionally bound and printed anthology—ideal for submission with a college writing and visual portfolio.

Students will analyze and emulate poems by Walt Whitman, Wislawa Szymborska, Hettie Jones, C.K. Williams, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Derek Walcott, and Audre Lorde, learning about New York literary history and extending that history into the present. They will pilgrimage to, photograph, and reinscribe the arc from Ground Zero to the Brooklyn Bridge to the Brooklyn Ferry. Projections invites students to evaluate the intersection of their identity, voice, and internal landscape with the identity, voice, and physical landscape of the city--and through this process of projection--to map their own cities.

The workshop will meet weekly on Saturdays from 1 pm to 4 pm, and begin in either December or January, depending on student interest and availability. We may offer a Saturday morning or Sunday workshop as well. Enrollment will be capped at 8 students. Workshops will be held in a historic brownstone in the heart of Park Slope.

Instructors:
Brooke Shaffner is a published, award-winning writer with a Master of Fine Arts in writing from Columbia University. She recently completed her first novel, Fight/Flight, and secured representation from Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. http://www.sll.com/. She is now working on Borderlands, a collection of stories. She has worked in education for nine years—teaching creative writing and English to private and public high school students and writing English Literature and composition courses for Pittsburgh, Chicago, Lynwood, and Clayton County Public High Schools.

Amy Williams’s photography has been in solo exhibitions at the Galerie de Multiples in Paris and 440 Gallery in Brooklyn; group exhibitions at Sideshow Gallery, the Educational Alliance, Sotheby’s, and Dinaburg Arts; and featured in Frog Magazine. She has taught photography courses at the Jewish Community Center, Educational Alliance, the International Center of Photography, and the Camera Club of New York.

Please email Brooke Shaffner at [email protected] for a full syllabus and workshop cost.