Writing at Bowdoin

Naturally there is plenty of ambient literary energy at the school that produced Hawthorne and Longfellow, as well as hip, younger writers such as Jason Brown and Willing Davidson.

The Writing Project is a tutoring program in which students recognized for excellent writing serve as editors for their peers., These students are there to receive first drafts of papers and return them, prior to the due date, with nonjudgmental advice for revision.

The Bowdoin Orient, the student newspaper, enjoys the distinction of being the oldest. continuously published campus weekly in the county; The Quill is a student-run literary magazine; and the Bowdoin Forum, initiated in the late nineties, is an annual compilation of essays by students, faculty, alumni, and staff, and its primary focus is an analysis of international events. Several underground newspapers have come and gone, and the conservative Bowdoin Patriot has recently reemerged as a counterweight to what it calls Bowdoin's generally liberal tendencies.

In addition to all of these outlets, the English department continues to be recognized as first-rate. Scholars such as Pete Coviello, Ann Kibbie, Anthony Walton, are outstanding in their fields, and the Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford was recently signed on to teach a semester's creative-writing course here.