Contact Alejandro
Mail Code WP
Alejandro Cuellar 00S
Writing Resource Center
413.559.5748
Alejandro Cuellar 00S
Co-Director of the Writing Program and Senior Faculty Associate
Alejandro Cuellar, co-director of the writing program and senior faculty associate, received his B.A. from Hampshire College and his M.F.A. in fiction writing from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
His writing concentrates on American identity, biculturalism, and bilingualism, with a primary focus on Latinx and Latin American/Caribbean immigrant narratives. He has taught at the UMass Amherst, Smith College, and Holyoke Community College.
Recent and Upcoming Courses
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In this course we will examine how narrators and narration drive and impose structure onto short stories. By doing so, we will begin to consider the role of the narrator in our own creative work. We will study the role narrators play into the function of the stories they tell, whether they feature in those stories or not. Thinking about the veracity of our narrators, we will approach storytelling by thinking about what these narrators add to our stories, and of course what they know and what they think they know, with respect to the story they are telling, and how all of that affects the reader's understanding of the piece. You will submit two stories for workshop, and write a short analytical essay (3-5 pgs) on one of the published works we read. Keywords:writing, creative writing, fiction
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This course will explore the work of scholars, essayists, and creative writers in order to use their prose as models for our own. We will analyze scholarly explication and argument, and we'll appreciate the artistry in our finest personal essays and short fiction. Students will complete a series of critical essays across the curriculum and for varied audiences and purposes. Students will have an opportunity to submit their work for peer review and discussion. Students will also meet individually with the instructors. Frequent, enthusiastic revision is an expectation. Limited to Division I Students. Keywords:writing, process, critical analysis, reading, creative
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Exploration of Sexophone Performance
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This course will explore the work of scholars, essayists, and creative writers in order to use their prose as models for our own. We will analyze scholarly explication and argument, and we'll appreciate the artistry in our finest personal essays and short fiction. Students will complete a series of critical essays across the curriculum and for varied audiences and purposes. Students will have an opportunity to submit their work for peer review and discussion. Students will also meet individually with the instructors. Frequent, enthusiastic revision is an expectation. Limited to Division I Students.
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Food is so much of who we are. It is a basic function of staying alive, but it is also tethered to so many things that are beyond the basic and in fact can be quite sumptuous and decadent. Much can be discerned about ourselves and our priorities, our beliefs, our past, and our future, by studying how and what we eat. Where does our relationship to food become more than a basic function? How are these basic tenets of food and food culture capitalized upon and shaped by marketers and corporations? We will read a variety of writers whose work deals with these questions, and we will, by writing across the curriculum, study our personal, cultural, historical, and perhaps even mythical relationship to food. Limited to Division I Students Only. Keywords:writing program, writing