English Certificates and Minors: Fall 2026

AI and Writing Certificate Courses

Course	Course Description
ENGL 2160: AI and Writing: Cultural and Historical Perspectives (Winn: In-person)	In this course, students explore the evolving world of artificial intelligence and its collaboration with human writers, starting with the advent of the printing press and moving to the sophisticated machine learning models of the 21st century. You will use varying LLM’s to explore multidisciplinary writing as an iterative process and examine the implications of these models in a fast-changing landscape. This is the first course toward earning USU's AI and Writing Certification.

Race, Society, Environment Minor

Course	Course Description
ENGL 2640: Race and Ethnicity in the United States (Ricketts: Virtual)	Race and ethnicity have been central to the story of the United States, shaping our culture, social structures, and sense of who “we” are as a nation. In this course, we’ll explore how ideas about race and ethnicity have developed over time, looking closely at the historical events, policies, and cultural narratives that have influenced American life. We’ll engage with a mix of sources—historical records, literature, media, and scholarship—to think critically about how these forces continue to shape society today. By exploring multiple perspectives, students will gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of race and ethnicity and their lasting impact on the country we live in.

For additional Race, Society, Environment courses available for Fall 26, please visit USU's Race, Society, Environment Minor website.

Digital Writing and Publication Certificate

Course	Course Description
ENGL 3420: Fiction Writing (Caron: In-person)	This writing workshop is designed for undergraduates who are new to fiction writing. Together, we’ll study a broad range of short stories and learn how to write them. As the writer William Trevor said, the short story is “the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth.” In this workshop, students will be guided through each step of the writing process—from inspiration to final draft. Among other things, students will learn how to find inspiration for their stories, how to create compelling characters, how to choose the right point of view, manage time, and write sharp dialogue. Students will apply this new knowledge to their own stories to create an “explosion of truth.” Writing prompts and exercises will push students to take literary risks, and workshops will help them revise their work. Students will also have an opportunity to participate in the USU creative writing community more broadly by attending faculty readings, as well as participate in the annual Brewer Festival of Writing events. All students welcome!
ENGL 3420: Fiction Writing (Waugh: In-person)	This introduction to short story writing will help you see all the many things a story is besides what happens. Plot may be “the soul of a tragedy,” according to Aristotle, but it certainly won’t keep your readers if that’s all there is. We will examine why character matters, as well as imagery, description, setting, time, point of view, and sparkling prose, among many other things. By taking this course, you will fill your writing toolbox with tools that will help you construct stories that keep your readers reading, all while participating fully in a supportive writing community.
ENGL 3430: Poetry Writing (Gunsberg: In-person)	This introductory poetry writing course is designed to help you become better writers and readers of poetry. We’ll focus our attention on both free and formal verse, discussing student work as well as poetry written by established authors. Our efforts will revolve around craft, which means we’ll practice time-honored techniques that have strengthened poets’ efforts for thousands of years as well as more recent poetic innovations. This approach begins with close attention to the language that moves us and, moreover, careful consideration of why it moves us. In short, we’ll read well to write well. This writing will be supplemented by your efforts to develop a literary vocabulary, one that broadens your understanding of published poetry and enlivens your responses to your classmates’ work.
ENGL 3430: Poetry Writing (Grimmer: Online)	In this workshop-based course, we will explore poetry’s role in developing durable skills through writing and art. To support creative risk-taking, assignments will focus on completing creative writing prompts and responding to classmates’ creative work, with an emphasis on showing the process of creating art itself over the product of a perfect work of art. Our guiding questions include: How does poetry interact with and create effects across different modes of art, including music and visual arts? What processes and prompts do artists and writers use to generate creative work? How do artists and writers provide feedback that supports innovation and creative risk-taking over perfection? This course will be a workshop-style exploration of these questions, through reading and experimenting with poetry and art in various formats and settings. Students can expect a combination of individual writing exercises, arts-based experiments in local museums and cafés, and online workshopping of creative projects in small groups. Students will learn durable skills for exploring the effects of text-based poems; they will also experiment with translating those effects into audio and visual media. Students are expected to attend visiting author readings on Zoom or in-person, write outside the classroom in libraries, cafés, and museums, and practice navigating the dynamic between individual writing, digital content, and community-based arts.
ENGL 3440: Creative Nonfiction Writing (Wells: In-person)	Michel de Montaigne says, “Every man has within himself the entire human condition.” By fairly and astutely investigating the larger meaning of a personal experience, a nonfiction writer can speak to the universal. The nonfiction writer is, therefore, tasked with honesty in their pursuit of discovery and greater knowledge. Often, we hear this described as a pact formed with the reader. However, we also know that memory can be fallible. David Lazar asserts that “Nonfiction blends fact and artifice in an attempt to arrive at truth, or truths.” And he is not alone in making the claim that literary nonfiction requires some invention. Calling on memory for meaning may, at times, involve some imagination. What obligation does the nonfiction writer have to the reader? How does structure and form provide fruitful ground to explore personal experience and memory in compelling ways? To join the conversations surrounding truth, insight, and meaning-making in nonfiction, we must first understand what others are saying. In order to do this, we will read and analyze texts that inform our understanding of creative nonfiction as a genre. While investigating these texts, we will examine the choices each writer makes and consider why they might have made them. In this class, students will learn and explore techniques for developing successful creative nonfiction essays, particularly memoir and personal narrative. We’ll examine voice, vivid detail, narrative arc, active scenes, and observation. Together, we’ll look closely at compelling personal essays, analyze craft elements, engage in writing exercises, and workshop student essays with a focus on learning practical and helpful revision strategies.
ENGL 3440: Creative Nonfiction Writing (Beck: In-person)	English 3440 will be a mix of lectures, workshops and out-of-class assignments that will focus on crafting new nonfiction projects. Few parameters will be placed on the subjects of the writing projects, but the class will emphasize narrative and personal writing. Course materials will mostly consist of contemporary essays in both audio and traditional formats. The class will be a safe place to hone existing skills and experiment with form and medium.