Alejandro Cuellar 00S

Co-Director of the Writing Program and Senior Faculty Associate
Hampshire College Writing Instructor Alejandro Cueller
Contact Alejandro

Mail Code WP
Alejandro Cuellar 00S
Writing Resource Center
413.559.5748

On professional leave spring 2025.


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

  • 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.

  • 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

  • Home is where we live in every sense, but "Home" is more than the physical structure we reside in: it is also the psychological, societal, emotional, and even the mythical. In this course we will read a variety of fiction and non-fiction and explore the importance of these spaces, be they physical or metaphysical, to the construction of "home" and more importantly, how these terms, whether we accept them wholly, shun them entirely, or experience via travel and immigration, dictate to us and others a sense of self and identity via our own writing. We will write a mix of critical essays, personal/reflective writings, and creative work as we also delve into the process of writing: topic selection, drafting, and a variety of techniques for revision, including peer review. Individual meetings with the instructor will be required. Limited to Div I Students. Keywords:Writing, Writing Program The content of this course deals with issues of race and power

  • In this course we will look closely at the structure of longform prose, including non-fiction as well as fiction. We will read longform essays, a hybrid work of poetic prose, and a short novel, and we will consider how each is organized by paying close attention to how the craft of each serves the content, and vice versa. We will then read and workshop your projects, which may include works of short fiction, longform non-fiction, and literary journalism. You will propose a project to the class and then follow through with one writing project for the semester. You will also write one 3-5 page analytical essay that engages with the published material. This is an intermediate creative writing workshop and is ideal for rising Division III students Keywords:Writing, Creative Writing, Prose, Fiction is course could be used to fulfill the Division II Project requirement

  • Introduction to Writing: This course will explore the work of scholars, essayists, and creative writers in order to use their prose as models for our own. We'll 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 One Students. KEYWORDS:Writing program, writing

  • We will read short fiction and narrative essays from published authors in order to better understand the decisions they made and how those decisions serve their narratives. In other words, we will read and try to understand their decisions by trying to read them as writers would. We will also think through how these pieces consider the effects of trauma on the body, identity, psyche, and how these authors use these effects to better form their narratives. Authors to include Lahiri, Kincaid, O'Connor, Alexie, and Adichie. Students will write two creative pieces of writing, one non-fiction and one fiction, for discussion and workshop. Final portfolio will include a 5-7 page critical essay that analyzes the published writing, and revised versions of the pieces submitted for workshop. Enthusiastic participation during discussions, and revision, is expected. Keywords:Writing, Creative Writing, Writing Program