Shauna Barbosa

MFA, author of the poetry collection Cape Verdean Blues (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). Ms. Barbosa’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, AGNI, Iowa Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Society of America, PBS Newshour, Lit Hub, and others. She was nominated for PEN America’s 2019 Open Book Award and was a 2018 Disquiet International Luso-American fellow.

Instructor Statement We all come to the world from different places, toting different maps of decency, humanity, beauty, chaos, and love. We are cartographers of human experience. Both writing and literature allow for one to have a double intellectual and creative life—this is what I share with my students. We will work on getting some of these journeys on the page. My goal is to focus on exposing students to a wide variety of literary structures and parameters within which students can pursue reading and writing as seems best to them as dictated by their immediate and evolving scholarly and aesthetic interests. I have learned to approach teaching with the philosophy that everyone arrives at literature differently, and that it is best to acknowledge and nurture that foundation while opening doors to new ways to embark on language.