Rachel Manley
Professional Title: M.F.A. Creative Writing Faculty
Areas of Academic Focus and Expertise:
Nonfiction, Poetry
Representative List of Recent Courses Taught:
Distance-Learning Courses:
• Creative Writing I-IV
• Craft and Reflection I-III
• Graduating Seminar Preparation
• Creative Thesis
Residency Seminars:
• Serving the Magnet of Memory: Fictive Techniques for Memoir
• The Subconscious Editor
Education: B.A. (Special honors) The University of West Indies
Representative List of Recent Publications / Exhibitions:
Memoirs:
The Applestrudel Tree (2012)
Horses in Her Hair (2008)
Slipstream: A Daughter Remembers (2009)
Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood (2009)
Books of Poetry:
A Light Left On (1992)
Poems 2 (1978)
Prisms (1970)
Teaching Philosophy: I do not have a teaching philosophy. Maybe empathy. But that's not philosophy. As a mentor I try to intuit what's in the minds and hearts of the writers I work with, hoping to help sharpen their philosophy, their thoughts, their words, and their meaning, so that they can achieve whatever special literary goal they have set for themselves. In the end, if I do have to define a philosophy of teaching, or the technique I use to buttress that philosophy, then simply, it is to use my experience as a writer in guiding and assisting my students along their journey to fulfill their imagination.
Awards: 1997 Governor General's Award for Literature (Canada); The Jamaica Centennial Medal for Poetry, The Mary Ingraham Bunting Fellowship (Literature) Radcliffe College; Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship; Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Fellowship, Bellagio, Italy; Pierre Berton Fellowship, Yukon, Canada; Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship; New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship; Hawthornden Castle, Edinburgh, Scotland Writer's Fellowship.