English, Rhetoric, and Writing

Creative Writing at Berry

Berry College offers a truly unique environment for the undergraduate creative writer. While Berry's beautiful and extensive rural setting-at 26,000 acres, the world's largest campus-offers a rare opportunity for solitude and retreat, its small community of highly dedicated student and faculty writers offers unusual opportunities to share and discuss creative work.

Creative Writing Faculty:

Michael Cooley (Poetry)
Michael Mejia (Fiction/Non-fiction)
Sandra Meek (Poetry)

Writer-in-Residence

Advanced Creative Writing Poetry

Students in workshop

Students may take creative writing courses as part of an English major, a writing or English minor, or as electives for fulfilling any major. Courses are offered in introductory and advanced poetry and fiction, as well as in playwriting. Tutorials in any genre are available for the advanced undergraduate writer. Every other year, in association with Berry's Southern Women Writers Conference, the college sponsors a year-long residency of a southern writer of national reputation. In addition to any of the courses above, the writer-in-residence may offer additional courses in writing. Past writers-in-residence include Mary Hood (How Far She Went, And Venus is Blue, Familiar Heat), June Spence (Missing Women and Other Stories) and Karen Salyer McElmurray (Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, Mother of the Disappeared).

Professor Sandra Meek, Advanced Poetry Workshop

Guest poet Mark Jarman conducts workshop

Berry's Department of English, Rhetoric and Writing also sponsors a reading series which brings writers of national and international reputation to campus for readings and to meet with creative writing students. Recent visiting writers include Billy Collins, Charles Wright, Robin Becker, Mark Jarman, Reginald Shepherd, Dave Smith, Maggie Anderson, R. T. Smith, and Robert Pinsky. Held biennially, the Southern Women Writers Conference also brings numerous writers to campus. Recent participants include Lee Smith, Nikki Giovanni, Ellen Douglas, Brenda Marie Osbey, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and many others.

Berry students have many opportunities to read and publish their own work as well. Students edit the college literary journal, Ramifications; Ramifications also sponsors a highly popular open mike poetry night each semester. In recent years, students have also met on their own in a weekly writers' group for discussion and informal workshops, and have read in the larger Rome community at readings sponsored by the Rome Area Council for the Arts. Advanced students read extensively from their work during their final semester at a Senior Reading, at which they are also honored with a reception. Berry also honors exemplary student writers each year with a number of creative writing awards.

For further information on creative writing at Berry College, contact Sandra Meek