Rice Global Paris Summer Program | 2027 Course Listing
ENGL 305 Introduction to
Creative Nonfiction Writing
SESSION 1 | Monday, May 17 – Friday, June 4, 2027
Instructor:
Rosa Boshier González
Paris Summer Session 1
Monday, May 17 – Friday, June 4
| Move-in May 16 | Move-out June 5
(Summer 2027)
Course image: Cenotaph of Charles Baudelaire, Cimetière (Cemetery) du Montparnasse
Course Description
By embedding themselves into everyday Parisian life, art, and culture, students will engage in the experiential learning of the elements of craft and the fundamentals of nonfiction writing. In this course, students will translate the visual, historical, and sensory realities of Paris into compelling prose. The city serves as our primary laboratory to study narrative development, narrative distance, perspective, tone, form, and the construction of place.
Rather than viewing the city as a passive backdrop, students will use Paris’s specific neighborhoods, archives, and cultural layers to investigate multiple approaches to writing nonfiction. We will look at how the physical architecture and diverse subcultures of Paris shape the authorial voice, testing how a writer’s perspective shifts when navigating unfamiliar geography. Students will be assessed through active class participation, weekly readings of Paris-based or translated Francophone texts, and site-specific writing assignments. The goal of the course is to synthesize these readings, urban reflections, and creative exercises, culminating in two long-form essays to be workshopped in class and one collaborative prose piece, to be performed in public.
Students will complete weekly writing exercises and readings to discuss various approaches to nonfiction narrative and develop their own series of nonfiction pieces. Students will close read and discuss the work of authors such as Annie Ernaux, Fatima Daas, Marguerite Duras, and James Baldwin, among others. The study of these authors, site visits, and the weekly practice of writing, will allow students to experiment with form, setting, structure, and tone, as well as the concepts of disclosure and “truth” in nonfiction writing. Students will read personal essay, memoir, narrative journalism, art writing, and cultural criticism, and study their distinctions, then decide which container may be the right fit for their own stories. By the end of the course, each writer will use this study of craft, form, and technique to complete a weekly portfolio of short writing prompts, submit a two longform writing assignments to be workshopped in class, and write and present a collaborative essay.
Credit Hours
This course is 3 Rice credit hours.
Does this course have prerequisites?
No
Does this course fulfill a Distribution Requirement?
Yes, students will receive D1 credit for this course.
Application Deadline
Priority Deadline: December 9, 2026
Final Application Deadline: February 15, 2027
For details on these two deadlines, please navigate to the How to Apply section of the Program Information & FAQs page.
Questions?
For questions regarding the course content, please contact the course instructor (see below).
For questions regarding the program (budget, application process, financial aid, global awards), first read through the Rice Global Paris Summer Program Information and FAQs page on our website. If you cannot find the answer to your question, email us at globalowls@rice.edu.
Rosa Boshier González, Department of English and Creative Writing
Rosa Boshier González (she/her) is a writer living in Houston. Her fiction, essays, art criticism, and creative nonfiction have appeared in Catapult, Joyland Magazine, Guernica, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Hyperallergic, Artforum, The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Washington Post, among others. She received support from the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, CUE Art Foundation, and the Fulbright Commission. She has taught writing, Latinx cultural studies, and art history at The California Institute of the Arts, Otis College of Art and Design, and Pacific Northwest College of Art, and formerly served as editor-in-chief of Gulf Coast Journal. She earned an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston.