Claire McCabe
Biography
Claire McCabe has a strong interest in experiential learning for all of her students. She currently teaches creative writing classes, from introductory courses to senior capstone, as well as poetry writing and special topics courses including graphic storytelling/comics, novel writing following the NANOWRIMO model, and creative nonfiction focus on animal topics. She has also taught composition honors courses that focus on food topics. When she first joined the English Department faculty, she taught business writing classes that benefited from her 13 years of professional writing and editing experience. These courses included a service-learning component in which her students worked with local non-profit organizations to research and produce writing that fulfilled class requirements as well as contributed to the community. In all of her courses, students are encouraged to experience, explore, and question their world.
Professor McCabe is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet whose creative writing has appeared in anthologies as well as in print and online regional and national creative writing journals. She is a member of the Association of Writing Programs, The International Women's Writing Guild, The Eastern Shore Writers Association, and local online and in-person writing critique groups.
She believes that poetry is best when read out loud. She has been a featured reader at open mics in Delaware and Pennsylvania, as well as an audience reader at numerous open mics in person and online. She has been both a regional and state judge in Maryland Poetry Out Loud high school competitions.
Professor McCabe believes in literary citizenship and has presented workshops for writers on topics including pairing visuals with writing, ekphrastic poetry, and documentary poetry. As faculty advisor, she mentors University of Delaware students in their writing and production of the Department's undergraduate literary arts journal Caesura. During the pandemic, she initiated a University-wide open mic online that includes students from the remote associate in art campuses.
McCabe holds an MFA in Creative Writing, Poetry, from the Solstice Program at PMC/Lasell University; a master's degree in English Linguistics from the University of Delaware; bachelor's degrees in Journalism and English Literature from Virginia Commonwealth University; associate in science from J.S. Reynolds Community College.
