For fifty years, Literary Arts at Brown University has been a creative and intellectual center for a diverse and innovative literary community.
Literary Arts
For fifty years, Literary Arts at Brown University has been a creative and intellectual center for a diverse and innovative literary community.
Along with a handful of other writing programs nationwide, Brown provides a home for writers who are envisioning new paths in fiction, poetry, digital language arts, and mixed media.
During the registration period, students may register for courses depending on certain factors —some are open based on class year, others on declared concentration.
After the Registration period, instructor permission is needed to gain entry/access to the waitlist. No one will receive such permission until lotteries are run on the first day of the semester — for spring 2024, lotteries will take place on Wed., 4 September.
Literary Arts offers a mixture of workshops, seminars and hybrid workshop/seminar courses each semester, many of which are special topics (and are subject to change from one semester to the next).
Academics
Undergraduate
The Department in Literary Arts offers courses in fiction, poetry, screenwriting, digital & cross-disciplinary writing, and translation, as well as seminar courses in reading and writing about literature.
Graduate
Graduate students in Brown's Literary Arts MFA program may choose to focus in one of three tracks – Fiction, Poetry, or Digital/Cross Disciplinary Writing.
Robert Coover, formerly TB Stowell Adjunct Professor of Literary Arts, died on Saturday, 5 October 2024. Professor Coover had taught for Brown from 1978 to 2013; along with then-President Vartan Gregorian, he founded the Freedom to Write Program in 1989, bringing to campus three Chinese dissidents whose lives were in danger following the Tiananmen Square tragedy. The program was eventually transformed into the International Writers Project. Coover was also an instrumental figure in foregrounding what was first known as electronic writing, CAVE writing and now digital language arts. His innovative works of fiction expanded the range of technical and linguistic possibilities within narrative form.