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The Avenue 2024-2025 Call for Submissions

By In A Writing Life, Student & Alumni Contributions, Stuff You Oughta Know

 

The SJU Writing Studies literary magazine, The Avenue, is now open for submissions for the Spring 2025 issue! 

Submissions are due by Friday, December 20th, 2024. 

We want this issue to reflect the breadth, depth, and strength of current students and recent alumni of the SJU Writing Studies Program. We invite all genres (fiction, poetry, non-fiction, prose)

  • Prose should be no more than 2000/words or 8 pages of double-spaced work. Excerpts from longer pieces are welcome. 
  • We welcome multiple poetry submissions, but please limit your submissions to three poems.
  • We also welcome artwork/photography/visual art submissions to be featured in the issue!

Please follow these guidelines when submitting:

  • Size 12 font, double spaced
  • Please submit your final copy as a word document attachment
  • Do not include any identifying information in your piece as submissions will be reviewed anonymously.
Submit your pieces via email to theavenue@sju.edu.
 
If you have any questions, please email theavenue@sju.edu directly.
 
We look forward to reading your work! Happy writing!
 
All best,
Mickey Schuster, Jonathan Procopio, Edward Malandro, Brianna Vassallo, and Chase Davis

Avenue Editorial Board

Spring 2025 Course Offerings – Revised

By In A Writing Life, Stuff You Oughta Know

Spring 2025 Writing Studies Courses

Mondays, 6:30-9:15 pm, Online
ENG 642: Style
Instructor: Dr. Melissa A. Goldthwaite
CRN: 12245
(Area II) Also counts toward ENG 560, Rhetoric Then and Now, Core Course

In this course, we will consider the history of style from a rhetorical perspective and then move to the work of 20th and 21st century writers to explore the use of style in contemporary writing, including your own. A discussion-based seminar with a workshop component, this course depends on a high level of participation. In addition to reading, you will write a series of exercises and create a semester-long project exploring style.

 

Wednesdays, 6:30-9:15 pm, Online
ENG 614 – The Short Story
Instructor: Professor Tenaya Darlington
CRN: 12275
(Area I)

In this class, we’ll consider the history and evolution of the short story by exploring a variety of collections, from classic to contemporary. We’ll also read an international collection of short-shorts, a novel made of interconnected stories, and a collection of essays about the art of the story. Whether you enjoy reading or writing stories, this class will take you deeper into the form and offer you a chance to respond to the readings in a variety of ways.

 

Thursdays, 6:30-9:15 pm, Online
ENG 685 – Health, Advocacy, Storytelling
Instructor: Dr. Ann Green
CRN: 12373
(Area III) Also counts toward ENG 684, Health Writing

In this course, we will read memoir, novels, poems, creative nonfiction, and films in order to explore how race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability are depicted through the writing of caregivers, medical professionals, and patients. The course focuses on how cultural differences affect access to medical care and how illness and health are narrated depending on the writer’s intersectional position. Mental health diagnoses, addiction, chronic illness, and trauma may also be explored.

 

 

Call for Avenue Board Members

By In A Writing Life, Student & Alumni Contributions, Stuff You Oughta Know

Call for Avenue Board Members

Interested in serving as a co-editor or a board member for Avenue, our literary journal? This annual publication comes out each spring and is funded by Writing Studies. Each year, a new board creates its look, chooses submissions, handles the editing process, and oversees printing. If you would like to gain experience being part of a publication, please email me (changanubresch@sju.edu) by October 18, 2024.

Fall 2024 Course Offerings

By In A Writing Life, Stuff You Oughta Know

Mondays, 6:30-9:15 pm, Online
ENG 620: Special Topics in Literature & Culture: Nature and Environmental Writing
Instructor: Dr. Melissa A. Goldthwaite
CRN: 40585
(Area I)

Nature and Environmental Writing will give you an opportunity to explore the ways culture and genre inform contemporary writers’ approaches to nature and environmental writing. For example, we will study the ways Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of The Citizen Potawatomi Nation and a botanist, braids Western science, Indigenous knowledge, and her own experiences in her environmental essays. We will dip into You Are Here Now: Poetry in the Natural World, a new collection—described as “a lyrical reimagining of what ‘nature’ and ‘poetry’ are today”—edited by our current Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón. And that’s just the start. Assignments will include informal exercises, an analysis of and presentation on a text from a list of optional readings, and a longer piece or collection of environmental/nature writing in a genre chosen by the student. This discussion-based course will include both small-group and whole-class workshops.

Tuesdays, 6:30-9:15 pm, Online – Synchronously
ENG 678 – Magazine Writing
Instructor: Professor Tenaya Darlington
CRN: 42086
(Area III)

This class is designed to give you an overview of the magazine industry (both online and print) and to help you brainstorm, pitch, write, and edit journalistic stories for publication. We’ll spend most of the term writing, but we’ll also look closely at several publications as case studies in order to learn how magazines operate. If you’re interested in developing journalistic skills – from interviewing sources to writing succinctly – this class is designed to be an introduction. You’ll also learn about the business side of freelance writing, from building relationships with editors to negotiating contracts.

Wednesdays, 6:30-9:15 pm, Online
ENG 643 – Special Topics in the Essay
Instructor: Nikki Palladino
CRN: 42432
(Area II)

 What makes an essay effective? To answer that, we’ll need to define the essay as a literary form. What is it? What is it (not)? As part of our studies, we’ll read examples published in The Best American Essays, as well as other published writings. 

In 1986, Elizabeth Hardwick began her introduction to the first volume of The Best American Essays by writing, “The Essay?” Twenty-one years later, David Foster Wallace picked up where Hardwick left off, writing in the Foreword, “I do think there are things certain essays do, ways they behave (or misbehave) in prose that invites us to think that what we’re reading is truly an essay. Asked to attend a panel in the early 2000s and define the essay definitively, Wallace writes, “I should have simply stood up and uttered two words: The Essay?” The good news for writers is that the form and structure are inexact.

Yet, there are criteria. Virginia Woolf once wrote that “the essay must be pure – pure like water or pure like wine, but pure from dullness, deadness, and deposits of extraneous matter.” Most editors, when evaluating contributors’ essays, will select essays of general interest. In this course, we will create general interest essays that, George Saunders says, reflect our “chosen” voice and focus on what we value (in life, in prose). To do this, we will study the writing styles of such authors as John Paul (JP) Brammer, Lydia Davis, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith, Jia Tolentino, Ocean Vuong, David Foster Wallace, and E.B. White.

Thursdays, 6:30-9:15 pm, Online
ENG 550: The Practice of Writing
Instructor: Dr. Cristina Hanganu-Bresch
CRN: 40584
(Core Class)

 This course is designed as an Introduction to the Writing Studies Program, and it allows students to explore a variety of genres while they explore career options within the writing/publishing world. Students will consider the work of various writers and will play the role of columnist, essayist, poet, fiction writer, and editor. At the end of the course, students will reflect on these different roles and begin brainstorming a possible thesis project in one area.