ENCW 2300

*For Fall 2024* - Prof. Santana (this is what she goes by) is wonderful in every way. She leads class discussions with ease and makes thought-provoking points about the texts we read. The class is designed to be a workshop. For the first few weeks, we read a selection of the professor's favorite poems, starting from the beginning of writing itself with an ancient Mesopotamian author. Afterward, we had a chance to write our own poems and have them reviewed by classmates during the workshop. There were two workshops, one toward the beginning of the semester and one toward the end. The homework was just the readings which are literally just 1-2 page poems so it's extremely manageable and/or simple assignments. The only *big* assignment is a book essay which isn't too stressful as the professor gives a lot of time for it and directions on the requirements. Amazing professor!! I can't recommend enough!

Highly recommend this course if you're looking for a low-stress, pretty easy and interesting class. A lot of students take this as their ENWR but I just took it to fulfill a discipline. Professor Santana is super nice and makes the class feel like we're all a bunch of friends just talking about poetry. There were minimal assignments, usually just two poems to read before class and then we would debrief them in class. It is discussion based so you're expected to come to class with comments or insights about the poems and all the ones we read were pretty diverse so my class discussions were always very rich and lengthy which I enjoyed. We had two workshop poems which were fun and easy, twelve in-class writing prompts which were also fun to respond to, and then a book essay over an anthology of our choosing which I was stressed about at first but it was actually a pretty chill assignment. The final is a portfolio compilation of all these things which was nice. Professor Santana does this weird thing where the highest grade you usually get is a 95 because she "reserves 95-100 for exceptional students who go above and beyond with creativity and engagement." Whatever that means. Anyways I still ended with an A in this class and always felt motivated to show up!