Read Deeply & Improve Your Craft
This unique course is designed to provide an MFA semester of critical reading and set you up to publish your first book review.
What you’ll receive:
- Personalized Craft Mentorship— from Kristina Marie Darling, an editor and author with decades of experience turning the craft of reading into professional success
- Curated Reading Goals—with Kristina, you build an individual reading syllabus that will include three core texts PocketMFA sends to every reader
- Publishable Book Review(s)—at PocketMFA we prioritize your professional success, and every reader will leave the course with a publish-ready book essay and a plan to submit it
The cost of the three month course is $1597, and payment plans are available.
“While many workshops emphasize the importance of reading widely in one’s genre, it’s often left to the writer to transform this knowledge into insights about their own craft. This special course will focus on specific, actionable strategies for gleaning insights about craft, as well as the writing life, from books we love. Featuring an individualized, student-led curriculum, where participants collaboratively shape their reading lists, writing prompts arising from these chosen texts, and craft exercises reflecting participant writing goals, this seminar invites participants to consider creativity as a larger conversation, and to think of all of writing as an act of reading and response.”
Kristina Marie Darling, Reading Like a Writer Mentor
Your First Month
- Read Together Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose
- Create an individual syllabus with Kristina
- Individual readings toward your craft & professional goals
- First Reading Colloquium
Your Second Month
- Read togeher The Master Letters by Lucy Brock-Broido
- Individual readings toward your craft & professional goals
- Mentor Assignments
- Second Reading Colloquium
Your Third Month
- Read together My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe
- Individual readings toward your craft & professional goals
- Finish your publish-ready book review/essay
- Third Reading Colloquium
Kristina Marie Darling
Reading Like a Writer Mentor
Kristina Marie Darling is the author of thirty-nine books. An expert consultant with the United States Fulbright Commission, a twice-awarded Fulbright Scholar, and a member of the peer review panel for Fulbright grants, Dr. Darling’s work has also been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry, a Civita Institute Fellowship, and nine residencies at the American Academy in Rome, where she previously served as an ambassador for recruitment. Currently a faculty member at The Los Angeles Review of Books Publishing Workshop, she has taught (or is scheduled to teach) at Yale University, the American University in Rome, Stanford University, and the New School. Dr. Darling is Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly. Born and raised in the American Midwest, she now divides her time between the United States, Greece, and the Amalfi Coast.