Orvieto & Ekphrasis
Each semester in Orvieto, a hilltop town between Rome and Florence, our students write poetry about artwork & architecture and study such poems written by the greats in a month-long seminar taught by a lauded writer/prof.
(Here’s the Gordon-In-Orvieto website.)
Gordon in Orvieto invites students into a dialogue about the interplay of faith, art, community, and society—and to learn from the lives of artists, poets and saints of the past. As a part of the program, students encounter places that were formative to Christian civilizations in the West.
The curriculum in Orvieto hinges upon the dialogue between the verbal and the visual. For millennia, words and images have been the primary means of narrative and representation. Italy remains an origin point for this history as a crossroads of the arts and humanities. For this reason, our location in Orvieto is vital, providing the opportunity to study design, poetry, literature, painting, sculpture, and history from original sources in their original context. By being in this place, we hope to inspire interdisciplinary collaboration and cultivate a model of learning that is place-specific.
Poets and writers who teach in our program:
Hannah Armbrust Badia, Stonecoast Choice and Warren Wilson MFA
Scott Cairns, director of the MFA program at University of Missouri
Robert Clark, Edgar Award-winning novelist, Guggenheim fellow
Karen Halvorsen Schreck, MFA SUNY Binghamton
Julia Kasdorf, director of the MFA program at Penn State
Lynn Marcotte, director of the writing center at Gordon College
Paul Mariani, former chair of the English department at Boston College
D.S. Martin, Poet-in-Residence at McMaster Divinity College
Lynn Marcotte, creative writing professor at Gordon College
Marilyn McIntyre, author & writing teacher at Westmont, UC Davis
Christine Perrin, director of creative writing at Messiah College
Jeanne Murray Walker, winner of PEW and NEA fellowships
Paul Willis, professor of English & creative writing at Westmont College
Grace Shaw, MFA, Seattle Pacific University
Mark Wacome Stevick, who designed this course.
Poets-in-residence/instructors: Melissa Mack (MFA UCAL, Irvine, author of The Next Crystal Text), Susanna Young (MFA, Queens University), Lily Greenberg (MFA, University of New Hampshire), Hannah Armbrust Badia, and Grace Shaw.
Ars Creative Writing 