Madelyn Kent said she is particularly interested in attracting students who share her NJ roots for the new English creative writing program she is cofounding coordinator of.
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September 23, 2009
The State of Israel is known for growing Jaffa oranges, teaching rabbis, and, increasingly, for its high-tech prowess.
But if former Millburn resident Madelyn Kent has her way, the Jewish state will also soon be known for producing the next generation of top English-language writers.
Kent is the founding coordinator of Bar-Ilan University’s new Creative Writing Semester in Israel, the first-ever fully accredited creative writing undergraduate study abroad program in the Middle East.
She has brought her years of screenwriting and teaching experience from New Jersey and New York to Israel, where she hopes to continue working with the top future writers from the United States in an environment that, she said, has served as an inspiration for the world’s top writers for millennia.
“It’s a program that will encourage beginning and emerging writers to enjoy and experience the vibrant and thriving areas of Israeli culture and be inspired by the interaction of the new and the old,” Kent told NJJN. “It combines the nurturing of students’ creative talents with an intensive exploration of the relationships among writing, personal identity, Jewish studies, and the experience of living in Israel.”
Since her days at Millburn High School, Kent has directed and written plays performed in New York, was a founding member of the Obie Award-winning writer-director lab at SoHo Repertory Theater, and started an acclaimed theater program at a New York public high school. She taught playwriting and screenwriting at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and the New Jersey Writers Project. As part of the project, Kent ran workshops for diverse private and public schools and developed writing residencies for public and private schools at the Essex Playwrights Theater and throughout the state.
Filling a niche
Last winter Kent made aliya, settled in Tel Aviv, and became connected to Bar-Ilan University’s Shaindy Rudoff graduate program in creative writing.
The semester-abroad undergraduate program is to be held at Bar-Ilan, which is located in Ramat Gan and is Israel’s second-largest academic institution.
“It was a niche that needed to be filled,” Kent said. “We’re hoping that our students come back for graduate school when their undergraduate studies are done, so it could feed into our master’s in creative writing.”
Kent spent much of September in the United States recruiting students for the program’s spring semester, which will take place from early February until late June. She said she is particularly interested in attracting students who share her NJ roots.
Students on the program will take a full course load of four classes with 16 credits: Writer as Witness, a writing workshop, a Jewish studies elective, and an English literature elective. They also will have the option of studying in an intensive Hebrew-language ulpan.
The program will include guest lecturers, field trips around Israel, and social action projects alongside international and Israeli peers. The students will publish their own literary journal at the end of the semester.
The fee is $12,000, which includes tuition, accommodations, trips, cultural events, insurance, and ulpan. Scholarships are available through the Jewish Agency’s Masa program.
Classes will be limited to 12 to 15 students in an effort to make them interactive and participatory. The students will be given an opportunity to express their thoughts and feelings, while learning different genres of writing: fiction, nonfiction, screenwriting, and playwriting.
“My goal is to have a free-flowing conversation in English with students from North America and around the world,” Kent said.
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