Visiting Associate Professor of Practice, Literature and Creative WritingAffiliation:Visiting Education: BA Queens University; MA Johns Hopkins University
Tishani Doshi is an award-winning poet, dancer, and novelist. She has published six books of fiction and poetry. Her most recent books are, Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods, a collection of poems, shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and published in the USA (Copper Canyon Press), UK (Bloodaxe) and India (HarperCollins) — and a novel, "Small Days and Nights," published in the USA (Norton) and UK, India, and Australia (Bloomsbury), and forthcoming in several languages.
The body is central to Doshi's work. For fifteen years she worked as the lead dancer of legendary Indian choreographer Chandralekha's troupe and performed on stages all over the world. She is currently writing a memoir on dance and the body.
She is the recipient of the All India Poetry Competition and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Her fiction has been shortlisted for the Hindu Award and longlisted for the Orange Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She has also received grants from the UK Arts Council and has been a fellow at the Santa Maddalena Foundation and at Art OMI. She has given keynote speeches at the Sorbonne University, St Martin's Book Fair and the Shangri-La Salon in London; has given a TED Talk "The Luxury of Slowness" and has opened several literary festivals with a combination of spoken word and dance including The Blue Mountains Festival in Australia, the Lillehammer Festival in Norway, and presented her work at the Dubai Art Fair, and fifty other literary and art festivals worldwide. She has served on the jury for the Forward Poetry Prize, the Prada-Feltrinelli Literary Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award.
Courses Taught
3 credits
Ecopoetics: In the Land of the Tiger: What is the relationship between self and nature? How do we make ourselves at home in the world when the idea of home is continually under threat? In this age of the Anthropocene, how can literature and art-making respond to the global challenges we face? This multidisciplinary course will explore the intersections between ecology, conservation, film, and literature. In an immersive experience in the Western Ghats of India, one of the most biogeographically unique places on the planet, and home to over 800 wild tigers, we will observe wildlife and understand the challenges of conservation in a country teeming with 1.4 billion people. Alongside trips to the Nagarahole National Park in Karnataka and walks in ancient Shola forests, we will explore traditions of literature that offer a unique frame of humans in nature that go beyond mere pastoralism. The final part of the course will call for an eco-poetic reflection - an exploration of a topic (oral and written) that has elements of both the ecological and the lyric, emanating from an encounter of our time in the landscape of the Western Ghats.
This course includes a regional academic seminar to India. This course will be offered in January-Term 2025.
Previously taught: January 2024, January 2025
This course appears in...
Core Curriculum > Arts, Design, and Technology
Core Curriculum > Field Colloquia
What is Nature? Does it even exist? And if so, how and why is it that we humans have increasingly come to think of ourselves as beings excluded from it? Beings ever in search of various forms of reunion with Nature? Are consciousness and the singular ability to name the inhabitants of the "natural" world the very things that distance and separate us from that world? Can we come to appreciate how simultaneously significant and small our place in that world is? The fact that we are at once a mighty force and a mere mote on the very biology that begat us and all life? What do we, "the namers", do about our seemingly singular place in Nature? Such questions are as old as consciousness itself but now more urgent than ever, and in this course, we will be looking at the multivarious ways in which human beings across time and different cultures have addressed them. Have tried - be it through mythology, religion, philosophy, poetry, music, the visual arts, fiction, or non-fiction - to "encompass nature", and thus reunite with something we know ourselves, deep down, to be a part.
Prerequisite: Must be an NYU Abu Dhabi student and have not completed the Core: Colloquium requirement.
This workshop introduces the basic elements of poetry, fiction, and personal narrative with in-class writing, take-home reading and writing assignments, and substantive discussions of craft. The course is structured as a workshop, which means that students receive feedback from their instructor and their fellow writers in a roundtable setting, and that they should be prepared to offer their classmates responses to their work.
Previously taught: Fall 2016, Spring 2017, Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Summer 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Fall 2024
Spring 2025;
14 Weeks Nathalie Handal
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MW 11:20 - 12:35
Taught in Abu Dhabi
Fall 2025;
14 Weeks Deepak Unnikrishnan
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MW 09:55 - 11:10
Taught in Abu Dhabi
This course appears in...
Majors > Literature and Creative Writing
Minors > Creative Writing
An advanced fiction workshop that offers students the opportunity to hone their writing through peer critique and in-depth craft discussions. Extensive outside reading deepens students' understanding of fiction and broadens their knowledge of the evolution of literary forms and techniques. The thematic focus of these courses will vary depending on the instructor. There may be multiple sections of this course running in the same semester, each of which may have a different topic.
Prerequisite: LITCW-UH 1003 or approval by the instructor.
Previously taught: Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Spring 2021, Fall 2021, Fall 2022, Spring 2023, Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Fall 2024
Fall 2025;
14 Weeks Tishani Vinod Doshi
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MW 11:20 - 12:35
Taught in Abu Dhabi
This course appears in...
Majors > Literature and Creative Writing > Creative Writing
Majors > Literature and Creative Writing > Literature Topics
Minors > Creative Writing
This course focuses on writing poetry by experimenting with a variety of poetic forms and writing prompts, including 20th-century and contemporary poetry and statements and essays written by poets. Students will write poetry as well as learn terms for critical analysis. Some of the threads of inquiry and inspiration that will run through the workshop include: What is poetry? What does it do? What is the state of poetry now? What does it mean to write and read poems in English if it is not your home or only language? In addition to workshopping peers' poetry, participants will learn about the chapbook tradition, make their own small books of between 15 and 25 pages, and organize readings to experiment with various performance-based approaches to poetry.
Prerequisite: LITCW-UH 1003 or approval by the instructor.
Previously taught: Fall 2016, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Fall 2022
This course appears in...
Majors > Literature and Creative Writing > Creative Writing
Majors > Literature and Creative Writing > Literature Topics
Minors > Creative Writing
In advanced fiction workshop students will write fiction "flash fiction," short stories, and works that may be extended into the territory of the novella considering things like point of view, dialogue, structure and plot, narrative voice, scene and character building. The class will explore prose fiction that is rooted firmly in reality writing stories seemingly "ripped from the headlines" as well as works that draw on a writer's imagination, as well as traditions of surrealism. Students will practice writing new works from a variety of prompts, will critique others productively, and revise their works toward a final portfolio of works brought to high polish. Exemplary and representative works of contemporary fiction will be read as starting points for writing exercises, discussions of writing strategies, and toward the development of new works.
Prerequisite: LITCW-UH 1003 or instructor consent
Previously taught: Spring 2019
This course appears in...
Majors > Literature and Creative Writing > Creative Writing