By Carlyncia McDowell, African American Studies
Dear Student Intellectuals:
As your TA for Intro to African American Studies, I want to advocate for something that might feel unexpected alongside history texts and our classroom readings: creative writing. Far from being “extra” or merely expressive, creative writing is a valuable learning tool. It helps you translate concepts into felt experience, practice critical empathy, and imagine futures that scholarship describes but doesn’t always inhabit.
First, writing creatively trains you to read closely at a different level. When you write a persona poem, a narrative, or a micro-essay from another perspective, you are wrestling with voice, context, and constraint, which are the same tools scholars use to interpret primary sources. That imaginative labor forces you to consider power relations, historical pressures, and interior life all at once. It’s one thing to summarize redlining as a policy. It’s another thing to write a two-paragraph vignette or create a photo collage that shows how a family negotiates access to housing across generations. This deepens comprehension and makes abstract concepts memorable.
Second, creative forms cultivate empathy while keeping critique honest. African American Studies asks us to attend to lived experience, structural analysis, and the tension between them. Creative writing invites you to inhabit others’ perspectives without erasing complexity as you practice listening, induce nuance, and then step back to analyze what systemic forces shaped that voice. This back-and-forth between imaginative immersion and critical distance strengthens both interpretive skill and ethical responsibility.
Third, creative assignments broaden modes of knowledge production and classroom participation. Some of you might not learn best from exams or in standard essays. Poetry, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction open alternative pathways for you to demonstrate understanding. This can be especially true for those with strengths in storytelling, oral history, or artistic practice. Even if these aren’t your strengths, narratives are important in other fields such as AI, medicine (biology, chemistry, etc.), and finance. These methods democratize assessment and model the interdisciplinary nature of African American Studies, which blends history, literature, sociology, and the arts. It’s important to note that creative work in this space is not about romanticizing trauma. We teach and assess with care, using trigger warnings, content notes, and options to submit work privately or in annotated form that tie imaginative choices to scholarly reading.
Creative writing trains students to communicate scholarship accessibly, which is a critical skill for public-facing research, community engagement, and activism.
Looking forward, the implications are exciting. Graduates who can craft compelling narratives about structural injustice are better equipped to influence policy, media, and pedagogy. In the academy, creative practice is also reshaping how we publish and disseminate research, expanding what counts as evidence and argument.
So, if you’re nervous about creative assignments, know this: they’re not fluff and the work is valuable. You’re practicing thinking with feeling. As this semester ends and you turn in your final projects, I’m excited to see what you create and hope you can see how creative writing can be valuable to you in this course and others.
Your TA,
Carlyncia