Gloria Biamonte - Writing
"You don't write about what you know, you write in order to find out what you know. Writing is a vehicle for discovery," says Gloria Biamonte. Encouraging students to find their voices as writers, Gloria creates an environment in her classes that fosters openness and risk-taking. "Trying to give shape to your thoughts and perceptions on paper can be both scary and exciting. You are reaching inward to understand and form your ideas, while reaching outward to communicate with your readers."
Believing that writers are, most importantly, readers, Gloria teaches students to read and think about literature while helping them explore their options as writers. In her writing seminars, Gloria examines authors ranging from Mark Twain to Zora Neale Hurston to Elie Weisel, grapples with texts that blur the line between fact and fiction, and even considers what makes a good mystery novel. "My writing seminars on autobiographical narratives create a space for students to explore the meeting ground of memory and imagination and to move toward understanding their own writing as a site for learning.
Gloria's own loves include literature of the 19th and 20th centuries and the works of women writers, in particular Toni Morrison and Virginia Woolf. "Morrison's language soars. It arcs, as she says, 'toward the place where meaning lies.' I follow her quite willingly to this place time after time. I am word struck and hope my students will be too."
B.A., M.A., Montclair State University, 1982; Ph.D., University of Massachusetts, 1991; Marlboro College, 1996 –