Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey was SBC's 2019-20 common read, paired with Madeline Miller's Circe

Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey was SBC's 2019-20 common read, paired with Madeline Miller's Circe

Students receive a 12-week subscription to The New Yorker as the class text for CORE 120: The Mindful Writer

Students receive a 12-week subscription to The New Yorker as the class text for CORE 120: The Mindful Writer

Students draw inspiration from the beautiful and expansive campus

Students draw inspiration from the beautiful and expansive campus

Students in CORE 120 having dinner with New Yorker writer Leslie Jamison

Students in CORE 120 having dinner with New Yorker writer Leslie Jamison

Read. Think. Explore. Imagine. Write.

English and Creative Writing

The English and creative writing program at Sweet Briar College employs a studio curriculum with an emphasis on project-based learning.

Special topics classes across genres — and in new and evolving genres — ask students to engage in directed readings and sustained individual creative projects. We train students to engage with texts in the way that working writers do, dissolving the boundary between critical engagement and creative response and helping students discover that they grow as writers, as readers, and as human beings through explorations of both canonical and contemporary works of literature and through creative practice.

The reading and writing of literature are always in dynamic conversation, and we encourage students to produce work that references both the historical traditions of literature and the contemporary climate. As working writers, our faculty engage in projects that shift and develop over time and are informed by what we’re reading and what we discover as we write, as well as by the changing world around us. We prepare students to live and work as writers and to be more empathetic citizens and competent communicators, no matter what subjects they go on to study or what careers they pursue.


English and Creative Writing Events

This event has been canceled and will not be rescheduled. 

Writers Series: Lisa Russ Spaar

A reading by poet and novelist Lisa Russ Spaar.

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of a novel, Paradise Close (Persea, 2022); six acclaimed collections of poetry, including Madrigalia: New & Selected Poems (Persea, 2021), Orexia (Persea, 2017), Vanitas, Rough (Persea, 2013), Satin Cash (Persea, 2008), Blue Venus (Persea, 2004), and Glass Town (Red Hen Press, 1999); and two poetry chapbooks, Blind Boy on Skates (1986) and Cellar (1983). She is also the author of The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry (Drunken Boat Media, 2013), a collection of poetry history and criticism, and she was a 2014 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

She has edited four poetry anthologies, including More Truly and More Strange: 100 Contemporary American Self-Portrait Poems (Persea, 2020), Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Jefferson (University of Virginia Press, 2016), All That Might Heart: London Poems (University of Virginia Press, 2008), and Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems (Columbia University Press, 1999). Spaar has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors and awards. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, where for many years she directed the MFA program.

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