Bio:
Miriam N. Kotzin teaches creative writing, poetry and fiction, and literature courses such as Readings in Poetry and Readings in Fiction, and in the First-Year Writing Program ENGL 103 with the topic Writing and the Natural World. She started teaching at Drexel in 1969 and wrote A History of Drexel University at the request of its president (W. W. Haggerty). She teaches writing and literature because she believes that the process of writing is a process of discovery and that creative reading can have multiple benefits—not only increased self-awareness and understanding other points of view, but paying attention, appreciating bare trees in winter as well as bluets in the spring.
Among other courses, in 1971 she designed and taught a course in women in 19th century American literature; she also has taught writing for business, technical writing, public speaking, conference techniques, American literature, literature and the other arts, a methods course for teaching English in secondary schools, and a course in film and film programming for what was at that time called the School of Library and Information Science. In 2004 she developed the course requirements for the Certificate in Writing and Publishing and served as its Founding Director, later co-directing the program until stepping down in 2012. She was the advisor of Maya, the student literary magazine, for more than a decade.
She was a contributing editor of Boulevard from its start in 1985 for more than 30 years. In 2004 she founded Per Contra, a quarterly journal of literature and art, that she edited for a decade. In addition to interviews and art criticism, she published fiction and poetry by emerging authors—including some of her students—along with established writers such as John Updike, Rachel Hadas, Richard Burgin, Alexis Levitin, Donald Kuspit, and Chimamanda Adichie.
She writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Her poems are both free verse and forms—mostly lyric poetry, but many of her poems have narrative elements. Her love of story-telling explains her interest in writing fiction. Her fiction ranges in length from micro fiction to novels. Her work has been published in anthologies and in journals such as Shenandoah, Boulevard, SmokeLong Quarterly, Eclectica, Mezzo Cammin, Offcourse, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Blink-Ink. Her writing received 12 nominations for a Pushcart Prize.