Craft Seminar: Better Writing Through Criticism with Ruth Franklin
Craft Seminar: Better Writing Through Criticism with Ruth Franklin
1 Session: Sunday, November 16
12:00-2:00pm ET
Ruth Franklin
Ruth Franklin's criticism appears regularly in The New Yorker, Harper's, and other publications. Her books include Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award) and The Many Lives of Anne Frank. She teaches nonfiction writing (criticism, biography, and memoir) in the MFA program at Columbia University.
How can thinking and writing critically about art and culture deepen our practice as creative writers? Join Ruth Franklin, a longtime book critic and teacher of nonfiction, to consider how works or art to which we are drawn—paintings, books, film, photographs—can give us new ideas for or perspectives on our own work.
In this single-session class, we'll do a close read of a short lyric essay that blends criticism and memoir. We'll then practice some techniques to accomplish similar effects and discuss strategies for responding to the art we consume on a daily basis, from books and museum exhibitions to podcasts, television, and more.
Workshop Highlights:
Learn how to clearly and effectively describe a work of art
Explore the use of criticism to tell stories about our own lives
Generate possibilities for continuing the work we begin together
This class has 3 scholarships available. To apply, please fill out this form by Friday, November 7
Ruth Franklin is a book critic and former editor at The New Republic. Her most recent book is The Many Lives of Anne Frank (Yale University Press, 2025), which Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called “an essential look at the diarist’s legacy.” Her first biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2016) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography about and was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2016, a Time magazine top nonfiction book of 2016, and a “best book of 2016” by The Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, and others. In The Washington Post, Elaine Showalter called it “a sympathetic and masterful biography that both uncovers Jackson’s secret and haunting life and repositions her as a major artist.”
Franklin’s work appears in many publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper’s. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in biography, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, a Leon Levy Fellowship in biography, and the Roger Shattuck Prize for Criticism. Her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2011), was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.
She was asked by the New York Institute of Humanities about how she conducts research and how long it took to write the Jackson biography: “I spent about six years on [the book]. A lot of it was spent doing archival research. Jackson’s archives are in the Library of Congress, about 50 boxes full of papers. And then her husband, Stanley Hyman, has his own archives at the Library of Congress, so that’s another 50 boxes or so. Along the way I was able to uncover more correspondence in people’s private collections. So it was mostly that and also a lot of interviewing. I travelled around, to California where two of Jackson’s children live, and to Vermont, where her other two children live, and to various other places. I interviewed students who studied with Stanley Hyman, and neighbors who had lived near Jackson and Hyman.”
Franklin attended Columbia as an undergraduate, and holds a Masters in Comparative Literature from Harvard. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
