‘Open City’ author Teju Cole to teach creative writing at Harvard
Novelist, critic, and essayist Teju Cole will teach creative writing courses in the spring as the first Gore Vidal Professor of the Practice. Among other works, the boundary-crossing author is known for his debut novel “Open City” (2011), whose early admirers included Harvard professor and New Yorker critic James Wood. Cole received the PEN/Hemingway Award in 2011, the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2015, and a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship. A photographer who has had solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe, he is also the photography critic for The New York Times Magazine. Q&A Teju Cole GAZETTE: Welcome to Harvard. What form will your teaching take here? COLE: Writing, language, and thinking are continuous for me, if not necessarily coterminous. In my published work, I try to break down the distinctions between them, and I do the same in my teaching. Writing is language-work, writing is thinking, and language-work is thinking. I’m going to...