Janet Pocorobba

Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Studies Program and M.F.A. in Creative Writing Program, Division of Interdisciplinary Inquiry

M.F.A., Lesley University; M.A., Northeastern Illinois University; A.B., Smith CollegeAssociate Professor and Coordinator of the Intercultural Relations Program, Division of Interdisciplinary Inquiry

(617) 349-8601
jpocorob@lesley.edu

Janet holds a M.F.A. in Creative Writing, and for her thesis, she wrote a memoir, The Fourth String, about her experiences learning the traditional music of Japan. Janet lived in Japan for many years and continues to travel there to perform. She also gives lectures and demonstrations of Japanese music in the States, as well as performs and teaches the three-stringed shamisen. Janet has taught ESL for ten years, and is currently an avid teacher of writing. She has taught composition, creative writing, and literature at Lesley College and Simmons College. She has led independent studies in Advanced Nonfiction Writing; Spiritual Autobiography; Music & Writing: Exploring the Creative Process; Reading & Reflection. She also teaches Craft Annotations, Writing Pedagogy and Writing Workshop in the MFA Low-Residency Program in Creative Writing, where she also serves as Assistant Coordinator of the program. Current interests: the English sentence, Peter Elbow’s “teacherless writing class”, Ludwig Bemelmans (and other writers of the 1930s), women spiritualists of the 1920s, psychoanalysis, narrator as channel, and the use of telling in nonfiction narrative. She is at currently designing several new seminars: Readability: Holy Grail or Dirty Word?; Unraveling the Mystery of Agatha Christie (Or Why She’s Still So Popular); and "It's Not About You!": Writing A New Kind of Memoir.

(617) 349-8601
jpocorob@lesley.edu