Standing: Carol Telfa, Lois Griffith, Carlos Henandez, Maria de Dasconcelos, Holly Messitt, Jim Tolan, Joyce Zonana, Diane Simmons.
Sitting: Claire Pamplin, Jane Young, and Cheryl Fish.
Virtually every two-year college in the nation offers prescribed courses in English. But BMCC’s approach to the subject is arguably unique.
“Most first-year programs focus – as they should – on helping students develop fundamental language skills,” says Diane Simmons, a BMCC English professor and co-chair of the writing and literature degree program committee. “What sets BMCC apart is that we’ll enable students who have mastered those basic skills to move into the area of literary art.”
Preparing students for success
This spring, BMCC was one of just four two-year schools to receive an “Outstanding Program in English” award from the National Council of Teachers of English, which recognized the college’s Writing and Literature degree program for “preparing nontraditional students for success as English majors in baccalaureate programs and for successful careers as writers, journalists, teachers and other professionals whose work requires high-level writing, reading and critical thinking proficiency.”
According to Simmons, the program benefits from the presence “of exceptional faculty members who probably wouldn’t teach in a two-year school elsewhere, but are drawn to BMCC because New York City is the publishing, journalistic and intellectual capital of the country.” Her hope, she says, is for BMCC “to become a magnet for a certain kind of New York student who has the talent, drive and creative energy to write.” Toward that end, the program actively recruits talented young urban writers through cooperative ventures with local community groups.
Finding their paths as writers
“Typically, our students have had not had the same educational opportunities that others in our society take for granted,” says Simmons. “But,historically, many of the world’s great writers have come from the lower middle classes.” A few years ago, she says, she read an article in the New York Times about Russell Simmons [no relation], the hip-hop impresario, and how he’d been visiting New York City high schools. “He asked the students how many of them wrote, and 80 percent said they did,” she says. “I want those students to consider coming to BMCC to develop their skills and find their paths as poets, playwrights, journalists, teachers and scholars.”
In addition to introducing students to great literature, Simmons says, the writing and literature program helps them develop skills in writing poetry, fiction, memoirs, drama and journalism. “There are actually fewer journalists of color today than there were a few years ago,” Simmons says. “That’s a crisis we can do something about.” She is also heartened by the number of the program alumni who “who have come back to us to say that their experience here has motivated them to pursue a doctorate and teach in a community college.”
