Finally, Finally, Finally
2020 is finally over. It’s been a tough year, between quarantining, masking, and having all of our classes on Zoom. (Zoom fatigue is real!) But it’s finally over and 2021 has begun. Classes start this week, second years are ensconced in their rooms working on their theses, and, to make it all even better, we got our first real dump of snow. Winter is here (finally) along with the new semester. We may have had a brown Christmas, and a dry New Year, but now we are in the midst of Vermont’s
winter wonderland. I couldn’t be happier, as I stare out my dorm room window.
Visiting Faculty and Module choices
Our first module offers classes that are of a theme, in a way. Not novel writing, or poetry, or even CNF, but Screenwriting and Playwriting, taught by returning faculty Tim Kirkman and Amahl Khouri.
Tim Kirkman
Writer/Director Tim Kirkman is an Emmy, Gotham, GLAAD and Independent Spirit Award nominee. He has produced a documentary and directed three feature films. His course will teach VCFA students the basics of writing screenplays. By the end of the module each student will have written a 3 to 6 pages for a 3-5 minute short film.
Amahl Khouri
Berlin Based Amahl Khouri is a queer transgender Jordanian documentary playwright and play
producer. He’s the author of several plays including She He Me and No Matter Where I Go and part of the Climate Change Theater Action. His course on playwriting is entitled Inside Looking Out: Monodrama/Autobiography that Finds the Self Elsewhere. Students will generate material towards their own personal monodrama. (a one person play about oneself, along the lines of Fleabag and Latin History for Morons.) It sounds like an exciting class, and I can say from experience that Amahl is an engaging teacher as well as a sweetheart.
Spring 2021 Reading Series
Tim and Amahl will be with us for the first in our reading series on February 5th, along with Felicia Rose Chavez and poet Evie Shockley. Chavez is an award-winning educator and author of The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom. Shockley is the author of the new black and semiautomatic, winners of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. semiautomatic was a finalist for the Pulitzer and LA Times Book Prizes.
Please join us!
