Students are required to complete and revise the first 30 pages of a feature-length screenplay. In place of introductory lectures on story and cinema, an interactive presentation provides multimedia lectures that include sample text, images, and audio and video clips. In addition to two rounds of individual student feedback sessions, students have one-on-one meetings with the instructor conducted through video, audio, or text chat. The final grade is a cumulative assessment of student performance over the course of the term, factoring in all assignments, participation in discussion threads and progress made in the revision of 30 screenplay pages.
Optional Live Session Times TBA
You have the option to enroll in the individual course without committing to the entire Certificate in Creative Writing, enjoying the flexibility and expertise offered by Penn LPS Online to suit your schedule and interests.
*Academic credit is defined by the University of Pennsylvania as a course unit (c.u.). A course unit (c.u.) is a general measure of academic work over a period of time, typically a term (semester or summer). A c.u. (or a fraction of a c.u.) represents different types of academic work across different types of academic programs and is the basic unit of progress toward a degree. One c.u. is usually converted to a four-semester-hour course.
Instructors
- Lecturer in creative writing
Zachary Tyler Vickers is the author of the short story collection Congratulations on Your Martyrdom! His fiction has won numerous awards, like the Kurt Vonnegut Prize, and has appeared in many prominent journals, including Boston Review and The Saturday Evening Post. His screenwriting won grand prize at the Flickers' Rhode Island International Film Festival and has… Read more
- Lecturer in cinema and media studies
Scott Burkhardt is a graduate of Columbia University’s School of the Arts where he received a Master of Fine Arts in Film. His films and scripts have won awards and notice around the world. He has written for network television (NBC’s Smash) and developed projects for NBC Universal, CBS Studios and MXN Entertainment. He is currently raising funds for his first feature film, Slipstream, and is starting the festival circuit… Read more
- Faculty Director, Penn LPS Online Certificate in Creative Writing
- Director, Creative Writing Program
Julia Bloch received a BA in political philosophy at Carleton College, an MFA in creative writing/poetry at Mills College, and an MA and PhD in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Her interests in twentieth-century poetry and poetics include the North American long poem; formal hybridity; subjectivity; gender and sexuality; and genre theory. Her current book project, "Lyric after Epic: Gender and the Postwar Long Poem," investigates generic concordance and contention in the… Read more
- 2017-2018 Digital Studies Fellow at Rutgers University-Camden
J †Johnson is the author of Trouble Songs: A Musicological Poetics (punctum books, 2018), and a poetry collection, The Book / Or / The Woods (punctum books, 2021). Their writing has appeared in PEN America, Jacket2, the tiny, Tarpaulin Sky, and elsewhere. A chapbook, trunc & frag, is at Our Teeth. They wrote the music and culture series Book Album Book at Fanzine, and are at work on a performative critical investigation of analog-digital interface, language-… Read more
