ENGL 2996: Literature of the Land

Highlands University, Fall 2026

Santa Fe Campus, Tuesdays 6:00-8:50pm

This once-a-week course will survey environmental poetry and poetics with options for creative and critical submissions. The goal is to consider the ways we see and narrate the land and to attend to what is absent or denied by the myths and iconographies of American arts and literature. What is the iconography of nature in the United States? What does this iconography suggest about the imperial, colonial, and religious history of this country? And how do our national iconographies influence or determine our relationship to land? American landscape speaks to occupation, marginalization, immigration, and beauty. Our course will discuss these legacies and more.

Readings will include canonical and contemporary authors, with writers from European antiquity such as Theocritus, Virgil, and Taliesin, major British and American authors John Clare, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Lorine Niedecker, as well as living American poets Layli Long Soldier, Brian Teare, Joan Naviyuk Kane, Kyce Bello, and John Kinsella. We will also consider environmental poetry within the southwest and New Mexico, inclusive of native and hispanic traditions and poetic practices influenced by Chinese, Indian, and Japanese philosophy.

To register for this class, go to the Highlands University registrar webpage and follow the instructions: https://www.nmhu.edu/office-of-the-registrar/registration/

This class will be held at the Highlands Santa Fe Center, located on the old College of Santa Fe campus, in the Higher Education Center. The address is 1950 Siringo Road, Santa Fe NM 87505. More information here: https://www.nmhu.edu/landing-santafe-center/