Cullman Center Institute for Teachers: The Reporter and the Story: A Workshop in Journalism, July 18 - 22

This is a week-long seminar taking place from July 18th to July 22nd, 2016.

“Reporting” primarily connotes information-gathering – the seeking out of knowledge from sources in the outside world. Yet reporting also involves emotional and sensory apprehensions, including the writer’s relationship to what is unknown when the reporting begins. This workshop will explore ways writers might use these less-understood tools. How could confusion, for example, aid reporting? How does it shape one’s voice in the narrative? Change the story? Participants will consider these questions as well as conventional fact-finding methods as they write their own short nonfiction pieces during the week. Readings will include work by writers such as James Baldwin, Isabel Wilkerson, Zadie Smith, Joseph Mitchell, and Claudia Roth Pierpont.

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, is the author of Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx. She was a Cullman Center Fellow in 2007-2008.