Lawrence Grauman Jr. Fellowship Fund

The Grauman Fellowship is made in honor of Lawrence Grauman Jr. (1935-2017) in recognition of his dedicated efforts to improve and sustain good writing at the University and beyond, and of his own notable achievements as an editor and scholar. Mr. Grauman was a writer, editor, and educator who served as editor of the Antioch Review and wrote for publications such as The Nation, The New Republic, The New Leader, Dissent, Harper’s, and Film Quarterly. 

The Fellowship Fund provides two scholarships of approximately one-half tuition to be awarded each year for Master of Arts Program in the Humanities students.

MAPH applicants who plan to work on creative nonfiction or literary journalism can indicate an interest in the Grauman Fellowship on their application in the financial data section. 

Fellows will be notified of their award at the time of their acceptance. 

CRWR 44012 - Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Writing the Narrative Nonfiction Feature (Ben Austen)

In this writing workshop, students will go through all the stages of composing a narrative nonfiction feature story. After generating a few ideas that seem original, surprising in their approach, and appropriate in scope, we will write and re-write pitches, learning how to highlight the potential story in these ideas. After the class agrees to “assign” one of these features, each student will report, research and write a draft. The features will be workshopped in class, and students will go through an editorial process, polishing their stories through drafts and experimenting with style and form for a final assignment. Along the way, we will consider the mechanics, ethics and craft of this work as we read published nonfiction and talk to writers/reporters about their process. In the end, we should be able to put together a publication that contains all of these feature stories.

CRWR 44022 - Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Writing Beyond the Event (Kathleen Blackburn)

Much of the tradition of Western storytelling relies on scene-driven narratives propelled by rising action toward an inevitable apex. Often natural disasters are illustrated the same way: hurricanes, invasion of new species, infectious disease, and oil spills are cast as singular events with a beginning, middle and end. This advanced workshop will explore how to push beyond the event. We will examine how forms of nonfiction, from investigative journalism to lyric essays, push against the hegemony of the “event” to tell a longer, slower story of disruption across the nexus of time and space. Following Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence, readings will focus on places and communities whose narratives do not fit tidily into beginning-middle-end story structures. Workshop will ask students to consider how their work might recognize the contexts of extraction, commodity flow, climate change, and borders surrounding the “events” driving our stories.

ENGL 32706 - Autobiography (Deborah Nelson)

Autobiography is a genre course that takes up first the “retrospective prose narrative,” the most familiar form of autobiographical writing, and then moves on to various kinds of life writing from diaries/journals to internet forms and the personal essay.  The writers we will focus on are Augustine and Benjamin Franklin for the classic models of retrospective prose narrative; Allison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Andy Warhol’s The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B and Back Again for an investigation of relational autobiography; the Diary of Alice James and Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals; Theresa Cha’s Dictee and Lynn Hejinian’s My Life;  Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia.  We will conclude with student selections of internet autobiography and the personal essay. 

CRWR 44009 - Advanced Nonfiction Workshop: Writing Lives (Rachel Cohen)

Certain lives catch and keep our attention – they seem magnetic, illustrative, confusing, broken off, revelatory. Sometimes we suspect that through studying a life we will be able to understand a scientific discovery, an artistic creation, a political issue or an historical period; sometimes we are drawn by the drama of the life the subject lived, or by the person’s introspection or testimony. This is a course for students interested in writing lives – and might be of particular interest to a variety of students: creative writers from nonfiction, fiction, and playwriting with an interest in profiles, group portraits, documentary work, or historical meditation; graduate and undergraduate students of history, art, politics, medicine, or law who imagine one day writing a biography, or who are interested in oral history, portraits, medical narrative writing, testimony, case histories, or writing for general / magazine audiences. We’ll work to learn methods and techniques of interviewing, quotation, portrayal and documentation from historians and journalists, and also from playwrights, psychoanalysts, documentary photographers and archivists. Students will write weekly exercises in a variety of forms, and will complete one longer essay to be workshopped in class and revised. 

ENGL 36250 - Richer and Poorer: Income Inequality (Elaine Hadley) 

Current political and recent academic debate have centered on income or wealth inequality. Data suggests a rapidly growing divergence between those earners at the bottom and those at the top. This course seeks to place that current concern in conversation with a range of moments in nineteenth and twentieth century history when literature and economics converged on questions of economic inequality. In keeping with recent political economic scholarship by Thomas Piketty, we will be adopting a long historic view and a somewhat wide geographic scale as we explore how economic inequality is represented, measured, assessed and addressed.

As the Sparks Fly Upward (Creative)
What They Wanted to Hear”: Dwayne Betts, Carceral Citizenship, & the Pedagogy of Repression (Critical)
Michael Fischer, MAPH ‘19
Advisor: Daniel Raeburn

The Record Reflects: Joan Didion on Crime, Crisis, and the 20th Century
Jenna Routenberg, MAPH ‘20
Advisor: Deborah Nelson

"nothing feels like a song:" racial melancholia, the palimpsest, and other bluesy texts
Logan Ward, MAPH ‘21
Advisor: Tina Post