Creative Community Support

The Center’s Creative Community Support programming will help bring together various literary arts and creative practice communities across WashU and throughout St. Louis, helping to foster closer relationships between faculty from different departments or schools, supporting creative programs on campus, and offering a welcoming and exciting environment for the literary arts at WashU.

Some of the activities we are planning include:

  • Collaborative creative-critical co-teaching and interdisciplinary workshops for interested faculty
  • St. Louis Literary Arts Calendar
    • One of the simplest but most important functions the Center can serve is to keep and circulate an up-to-date umbrella schedule of all the literary arts-related readings and events around campus and St. Louis.
  • Co-Sponsorship of Events
    • As a way of building partnerships within the university community, we have begun to co-sponsor literary arts events on campus. If you’re interested in co-sponsorship, visit the application page
  • Graduate Summer Research Grant in Creative Practice 
    • We plan to offer a competitive grant for summer research/travel to graduate students working on a creative literary project. Such a grant could provide invaluable support for student projects that will lead to published work.
  • A creative practice faculty happy hour
    • As a way to get to know each other and to become familiar with the work of fellow faculty members across disciplines, departments, programs, and even schools, instructors who will be teaching courses related to creative literary practice (or of interest to creative literary practitioners) will be invited to sign up to “pitch” their forthcoming courses to other faculty in one minute presentations at an informal happy hour held several weeks before registration. Beyond collegiality and fun, we hope these sessions will make it even easier for us to steer our students and advisees toward a greater range of exciting literary arts courses.

We welcome your suggestions and ideas for Creative Community Support. If you are a creative literary arts practitioner at WashU or in St. Louis, what programs and activities might best support you and your community, on campus or off? Let us know your thoughts!