Tracy O’Neill

BA, Connecticut College. MFA, City College of New York. MA, MPhil, Columbia University. Author of The Hopeful (2015) and Quotients (forthcoming 2020). Recipient: National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Award and Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellowship. Writing has appeared in Granta, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, BOMB, The Atlantic, McSweeney’s, VQR, The Guardian, Vice, and San Francisco Chronicle. Former editor-in-chief of Epiphany: A Literary Journal and co-founder of the Breakout 8 Writers Prize with the Author’s Guild. SLC, 2019–

Previous Courses

Speculative Fiction Workshop

Workshop—Fall

Speculative fiction is a generic term that has been imagined variously, originating to describe a particular type of science centered on fundamental human concerns and now understood to encompass several genres including horror, science fiction, fantasy, postapocalyptic fiction, revisionist historical fiction, and other “nonmimetic” narrative forms. This class will be a workshop in which discussion is sustained around craft and questions particular to speculative fiction: how to suggest the governing logics of other worlds, entry points into formulating a conceit, probability and the willing suspension of disbelief, and the social function of nonmaterially realistic literature. Throughout the semester, we will read selected works from the genre, including writing by Roque Larraquy, Ling Ma, Jamaica Kincaid, Ted Chiang, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Yukiko Motoya, Octavia Butler, Charles Yu, and others.

Faculty