NEW COURSE OFFERING in POETRY & SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP!

Special Problems in the Arts and Humanities:

Inventing and Designing a “Poetry Game”

ARHU 498 P / HONR 348K

Winter Break, January 2-22, 2014

1:00-4:00 each day, M-F, in Jiménez-PorterWriters House, Ground Floor Classroom #0128

Are you interested in any of the following:

• Poetry
• Art and design
• Start up business
• Arabic or Yiddish
• Learning through play
• Social Entrepreneurship
• Nonprofits and sustainability
• Preservation of threatened languages
• Marketing through video and social media
• Finance of Socially Responsible Business

Our class of graduate and undergraduate students with diverse skills and interests will work together in this winter break class to create a beautiful, marketable, sustainably sourced Poetry Game. The game will be marketed in a spring semester class (ENGL 398B) using Indiegogo, a cloud funding platform.

You do not have to be a poet to take this class. Poets are welcome of course, and so are business students, videographers, students of Yiddish and Arabic, and anyone interested in product design or start up business. All students will have a chance to focus on projects related to their interests, including a research paper, while learning about other fields of study.

Through guest speakers, readings, and discussions we will analyze the role of social entrepreneurship and business skills in the arts and artists careers. By the end of class we will have created a tangible product, a carefully crafted and artfully designed game.

The work of the poetry game will be shared with a nonprofit poetry and social justice organization, Split This Rock, and poets from Split This Rock will visit the class.

Instructor Zahara Heckscher is a serial entrepreneur, writer, social change advocate, and educator. You can reach her at 202-489-8908 or Zaharah@umd.edu.

Associate Instructor Zein El-Amine, MFA, is a literature and Arabic instructor at UMD.

FAQ: http://tinyurl.com/PoetryGameClassDetails


Information about scholarships available for the class: http://tinyurl.com/PoetryGameScholarship

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Johnna Schmidt, Director
Jiménez-Porter Writers’ House
Mailing: 1102 Francis Scott Key Hall
Office: 0111 Dorchester Hall
University of Maryland
College Park, MD  20742
Ph: 301.405.0671
Fax: 301-314-7708