Faculty
Joseph Earl Thomas
Joseph Earl Thomas
Contact
BA, Arcadia University. MA, Saint Joseph’s University. MFA, University of Notre Dame. PhD, University of Pennsylvania. Author of Sink, a memoir (Grand Central Publishing, 2022), longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; the novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer (Grand Central Publishing, 2024), which was awarded The Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and was a New York Times Editor’s Choice Pick; and the forthcoming story collection Leviathan Beach (Grand Central, 2025). His writing has been published in The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Dilettante Army, and The New York Times Book Review. His honors include the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize and fellowships from Kimbilio, VONA, Tin House, and Bread Loaf. Thomas also teaches courses in Black studies, poetics, queer theory, video games, and more at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. SLC, 2024–
Undergraduate Courses 2025-2026
Writing
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Open, Seminar—Year
WRIT 3202
Black study has been at the center of considerations surrounding kinship, gender, violence, literacy and language, revolution, property, technology, and alternative forms of thinking about the world for hundreds of years. What might we, as writers—regardless of our differing identities—learn from this tradition about how to articulate the relationships between “I” and “we,” form and freedom, aesthetics and social transformation? Many of our most influential contemporary writers draw from this tradition, from Toni Morrison to Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde to Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others. In this nonfiction writing course, we will learn to think beyond the given by studying the various innovations by Black writers with genres including, but not exclusive to, memoir, journalism, manifesto, hybrid forms, rap music, animation, and new media like digital games. Our focus will be especially strong on the 21st century, as we direct longstanding questions and writing techniques toward the many crises of our own moment. We will write across genres of nonfiction as we work to define them for ourselves, paying careful attention to rhetorical strategies and historical context in our attempts to represent reality.
Faculty
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First-Year Studies—Year
WRIT 1202
Black study has been at the center of considerations surrounding kinship, gender, violence, literacy and language, revolution, property, technology, and alternative forms of thinking about the world for hundreds of years. What might we, as writers—regardless of our differing identities—learn from this tradition about how to articulate the relationships between “I” and “we,” form and freedom, aesthetics and social transformation? Many of our most influential contemporary writers draw from this tradition, from Toni Morrison to Octavia Butler, Audre Lorde to Ta-Nehisi Coates, and others. In this nonfiction writing course, we will learn to think beyond the given by studying the various innovations by Black writers with genres including, but not exclusive to, memoir, journalism, manifesto, hybrid forms, rap music, animation, and new media like digital games. Our focus will be especially strong on the 21st century, as we direct longstanding questions and writing techniques toward the many crises of our own moment. We will write across genres of nonfiction as we work to define them for ourselves, paying careful attention to rhetorical strategies and historical context in our attempts to represent reality. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.
Faculty
Graduate Courses 2025-2026
Master of Fine Arts in Writing
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Seminar—Fall
WRIT 7710
This course focuses on the relationship between nonfiction and reality; that is, how writers—that’s us—construct reality on the page rather than assume its coherence. Each week in class, we will discuss nonfiction by writers such as Ursula Le Guin and Samuel Delany, alongside a wide array of prose that troubles the distinctions between fact and fiction through syntax, critical engagement, or experiments in narrative form. Our aim in reading as writers will be in metabolizing the formal strategies of language situated across “genres” in order to make something new through short exercises and longer nonfiction workshops. Likely writers that we will read include Jami Lin Nakamura, Saidiya Hartman, Tanya Tagaq, and Fernanda Melchor, among others. We will pay special attention to the relationship between difference and truth, across a range of perspectives, making difficulty the focus and vantage point in the writing that we produce for class.
Faculty
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Seminar—Spring
WRIT 7452
This course is a writing workshop interested in worldbuilding and the distinction(s) between what we might call realism and speculative fiction: fantasy, science fiction, horror, and especially everything in-between. Following an artistic trajectory that, at varying historical junctures, has either valorized or disparaged the fantastic—whether such criticisms took into account the importance of literary details, techniques and genres with regards to representing categories of difference—we will interrogate and create literature that thinks through the simultaneous gap and proximity between fantasy and reality. In order to do this we will read widely across primary and secondary texts that take up these concerns and, when appropriate, suggest ongoing dimensions of critique related to our contemporary moment. We will read work by writers such as George Schuyler and Yoko Towada, Gayl Jones and Renee Gladman, Fernanda Melchor and Samuel Delany, NK Jemisin and Mariana Enriquez.
Faculty
Previous Courses
Master of Fine Arts in Writing
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Seminar—Fall
WRIT 7710
In this course, we will generate our own lyric essays by paying close attention to published works of lyric poetry and prose, particularly work that may come from outside of our own comfort zones. Key areas we will consider are difficulty, intimacy, media, and experimentation. By learning to read as writers—which will include several essential critical essays—we will disentangle the historical, contextual, and stylistic components of “lyric” and “essay” in order to bring them back together in original prose which we will workshop in class together. A few examples of writers from which our readings will be drawn include: John Milton, Giada Scodellaro, Simone White, Sappho, Patricia Lockwood, Cristina Rivera Garza, Audre Lorde, Aimé Césaire, Ariana Reines, James Baldwin, Joy Priest, Sonia Sanchez, Elisa Gabbert, Renee Gladman, Annie Ernaux, Terrance Hayes, Saidiya Hartman, and Myung Mi Kim.
Faculty
Writing
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Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring
WRIT 3047
In addition to being the title of Michael Clune’s memoir or a theory in the hands of McKenzie Wark, video games have now invaded social space—and, therefore, our literary imaginations—in a way that would have been unthinkable 30 years ago. And yet, how do we write about games? About the experience both of playing these aesthetic objects and living in an arguably gamified world with the same intensity, curiosity, and rigor that we might otherwise bring to any centuries-old ekphrastic attempt? In this course, we will query the limits, techniques, and new forms of nonfiction writing made possible through video games, taking the anthology Critical Hits: Writers Playing Video Games as a springboard for our own experiments through short exercises and workshop. We will focus on the interplay between social position and form where, rather than an escape, video games pose new questions of difficulty in prose and in life. No experience playing video games will be required, though this will certainly not hurt; smaller indie games may be used as examples.
Faculty
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Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall
WRIT 3750
Shame is always a social problem. In this writing workshop, we will embark upon a study of shame and culture in order to consider how it emerges as both a boon and a stricture for writing from different perspectives and out of varying aesthetic and political needs. We will think about the consistency of what can or “cannot” be written along party lines, psychological barriers, or potential social punishment—and why. We will consider a few examples of pushing through taboo or potential humiliation, and why it is important that we continue trying to do so, against increasing fears of abandonment or being misunderstood.
Faculty
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Open, Seminar—Fall
WRIT 3023
This course is for students interested in the relationship between nonfiction and reality; that is, how nonfiction writers—that’s us—construct reality on the page rather than assume its coherence. Each week, in class, we will discuss nonfiction by writers like Ursula Le Guin and Samuel Delany, alongside a wide array of writers who trouble the distinction of what we consider possible. Our aim in reading as writers will be in metabolizing the formal strategies of language situated across “genres” in order to make something new through short exercises and longer workshops. Likely writers we will read include Jami Lin Nakamura, Saidiya Hartman, Tanya Tagaq, and Fernanda Melchor, among others. We will pay special attention to the relationship between difference and truth across a range of perspectives, making difficulty our focus and vantage point.
Faculty