Author of the novel Oval and the essay collection Death by Landscape, Wilk’s essays, criticism, and fiction have appeared in publications including The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Atlantic, n+1, The Paris Review online, Artforum, Bookforum, BOMB, Frieze, The Baffler, and The White Review. Wilk received a 2019 Andy Warhol Arts Writers Grant and a 2020 fellowship at the Berggruen Institute and is a contributing editor at e-flux journal. She has run courses and guest-taught at Eugene Lang College, City College of New York, The University of the Arts Berlin, The Royal College Copenhagen, Vassar, Columbia, and others. SLC, 2023–
Graduate Courses 2024-2025
MFA Writing
Speculative Fiction Craft: Portals
Craft—Fall
WRIT 7440
A portal to another world, time, or place may seem to be a relatively straightforward fictional device; but once you fall through one, anything is possible. In this class, we’ll enter mysterious doorways, passageways, and wormholes to figure out what this deceptively simple trope can offer. More broadly, we’ll focus on the ways that employing speculative elements can allow writers to tackle thorny real-world topics. For instance, what can a supernatural portal convey about the way power functions via borders and checkpoints? And in terms of literary forms rather than literal devices, can a book create a portal from, say...memoir to sci-fi? Although we’ll discuss genre conventions, most of our reading is not found on fantasy or sci-fi shelves and is in no way genre-cohesive. We want to get an idea of the most wide-ranging things that a portal (broadly defined) can do. Authors include Mohsin Hamid, Samanta Schweblin, China Mieville, the Strugatsky Brothers, Kathe Koja, Jonathan Lethem, Russel Hoban, Ted Chiang, Samuel Delany, Renee Gladman, William Gibson, Anna Kavan, and Hillary Leichter. Our primary method of investigation is close reading of novel-length works, but we will also take the material as prompts for short writing exercises.