The Writing Fellows Program supports the teaching of writing across the curriculum, with a focus on integrating reading and writing pedagogy into discipline-specific classwork and assignments. Writing Fellows:

• Lead in-class workshops on topics related to reading, writing, and speaking.
• Provide support for writing-related classroom activities led by faculty members.
• Consult with faculty members, at their request, on writing and speaking aims, assignments, progressions and process work, and other pedagogical strategies (for both in-person and online teaching).
• Are available by request to consult on assessment, including how/what to mark, focusing feedback, and working with English-language learners and students with learning differences. Writing Fellows will not, however, grade papers or otherwise serve as teaching assistants.

Our Writing Fellows

Architecture
Neena Verma (neena.verma@cooper.edu) is an architect, teacher, and theorist. Her office pursues small-scale, forward-thinking projects. Neena's current research and writing focus on the intersection of architectural practice with society; she aims to challenge norms of perception and beauty. Neena has published in Architectural Research Quarterly and is currently working on a book about immigrants finding place. Her collaborative design work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale. A former attorney, she has experience in complex civil litigation and real estate transactional law.

Art
Anne Brink (anne.brink@cooper.edu) earned her BA in English and Creative Writing from Barnard College, and her MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. She is currently completing her MDiv in Buddhism and Interreligious Engagement at Union Theological Seminary, where she studies the relationship between social ethics, poetry, and embodied practices.

Engineering
Karen Holmberg (karen.holmberg@cooper.edu) is an archaeologist and volcanologist who looks at radical climate changes of the past to determine what they can or cannot tell us about our environmental present and future. She holds an MA, MPhil, and PhD from Columbia University and a BA from the University of Virginia. Her research has been funded by Fulbright, Mellon, Wenner-Gren, National Geographic, and Make Our Planet Great Again awards. She has taught at Brown and Stanford Universities.  In addition to serving as the Engineering Writing Fellow at Cooper Union, she is a Research Scientist at NYU, Director of the NYU-Gallatin WetLab, and member of the *This is Not a Drill* working group on technology, the climate emergency, equity, and creative practice through the Future Imagination Fund at NYU-Tisch. She is deeply interested in how creative outreach of science and engineering insights can contribute to more sustainable and equitable societies.

Humanities and Social Sciences
Pam Newton (pamela.newton@cooper.edu) has a Master’s degree in English from the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College. She currently teaches writing in the Humanities program at Cooper Union and in the English department at Yale. Pam also writes for magazines as an art/culture journalist and essayist. She has written for publications including The New York Times Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, American Theatre, National Book Review, Killing the Buddha, and the Huffington Post, as well as being a theatre critic for Time Out New York and a book critic for O the Oprah Magazine. She wrote one of the monologues in Nora Ephron’s play, Love, Loss, and What I Wore.

Contact Us

For general information about the program, or to request support from a writing fellow, contact:
Pam Newton
Coordinator of the Writing Fellows Program
pamela.newton@cooper.edu