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J'Lyn Chapman

J'Lyn
Chapman
jchapman@naropa.edu | 303-546-4665

Assistant Professor | Core Candidate | Director, MFA in Creative Writing
Core Faculty

Programs

BA in Creative Writing and Literature
MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics

Education

PhD in Literature, University of Denver
MFA in English, University of Central Florida
BA in English, Colorado Christian University

From the heart

Naropa attracts curious and innovative thinkers, who are especially concerned with improving both themselves and their communities. My most satisfying teaching experiences have occurred in the Naropa classroom, where, as a faculty member, I also have the freedom, even the expectation, to experiment, question, and challenge. All of this occurs within an atmosphere that assumes that an academic education coincides with a growing self- and other-awareness.

Honors/Awards

At the University of Denver, I received the Evan Frankel Fellowship. My manuscript, Our Last Days, was a finalist for the Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize and the Burnside Review Chapbook contest.

Recent Publications

Calamari Archive will publish my manuscript, Beastlife, in early 2016. H/S Magazine will publish my essay, "Consenting to the Emergency / the Emergent as Consensuality" in late 2015. “Five Essays on Flight" is forthcoming in Zone 3 and the short story, “The Clean Rooms,” is forthcoming in DIAGRAM.

Recent publications include the following: two short stories in Fence Magazine; "The Good Beast" in Denver Quarterly, “Nowhere Now,” published on the site, Two Serious Ladies; 15 poems in the journal Caketrain; and the essay “To Limn: On Francis Ponge’s ‘La Mounine or Note Struck in Afterthought on a Provence Sky’” on the website, Evening Will Come. My digital chapbook, "The Form Our Curiosity Takes: A Pedagogy of Conversation" was recently published by Essay Press and is available online.

Creative Activity summary

In spring 2015, I chaired the panel “Ekphrasis Goes Prose” at the AWP Conference in Minneapolis, MN. I am currently working on a panel proposal for the 2016 PhiloSophia conference that will extend a talk on "Endangered Lifeforms" I gave at the 2015 Summer Writing Program; this panel also draws from a forthcoming essay I've written for H/S Magazine. 

Courses I teach

  • Writing Workshop: Creative Nonfiction
  • Writing Workshop: Somatic Forms
  • Poetics Seminar: Introduction to Critical Theory
  • Multigenre Workshop: Text and Image
  • Poetics Seminar: Contemporary Trends
  • Poetics Seminar: Women Writers, Open Texts
  • Poetry Workshop: Documentary Poetics 

What book do you find yourself regularly pressing into the hands of students? 

I encourage students to read Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva. I've been lately heralding all of Maggie Nelson's books, especially The Argonauts and Bluets, as well as Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely and Citizen. 

Naropa Faculty

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