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Public Facing

Public Facing is Field Studio’s flagship course, created for academics across the social sciences and humanities working at any level who would like to write a scholarly trade book. If you would like to learn how to craft lively, engaging prose which incorporates both conceptual and narrative threads, this course is for you.

Class Purpose

This novel developmental course equips scholars to translate their existing scholarly expertise into writing projects that reach a broader public, providing a clearly structured pathway from ideas to publishable outputs. We will study the craft of books written by academics that broke into mainstream readership, as you learn to write books with conceptual heft and heart, as well as momentum.

What you will learn

Over six weeks, we will work together to strengthen:

  • Voice – how to communicate authentically and vividly to audiences of all kinds, from scholarly to the general public
  • Scenes – learn how crafting dynamic, lively scenes that include vital and specific detail can transform narrative momentum and enact arguments
  • Structure – learn how to incorporate narrative distance and surprise to transform the arc of a book
  • Reader engagement – how to hone the rhythm of your prose at the sentence level to keep your audience reading to the end.

How it will be taught

This six-week course meets four times, for three hours each session, and is a combination of live pedagogy and writing mentorship. The editorial feedback and meetings with a faculty member will take place over the two non-teaching weeks. We will study excerpts from books that achieved a wide public reach by authors including Eben Kirksey, Brian Goldstone, Angela Garcia, and others.

The class combines three modes of learning each week:

  1. Craft lessons – close study of published first books and the choices behind them
  2. Writing exercises – hands-on practice applying craft techniques to your own material
  3. Feedback – structured response to your writing from the instructor and your peers

What you will get

By the end of this class, you will have a clear sense of what it means to create a piece of work that can reach audiences from within the academy and in the general public. Through mentorship and peer feedback, you will have developed a strong sense of your own voice, have a clearer understanding of the structural threads that can carry your book from beginning to end, and have developed a set of concrete craft tools for embodying argument through scene, as well as generating and maintaining narrative momentum across the book’s arc. You will also have had real practice writing and receiving feedback in community with other scholars doing the same public-facing work.

  • I could immediately start using insights from the course in the book that I am writing. The selected texts were inspiring in their own right, and the discussions helped pinpoint the techniques the writers used and the effects that they had.

    Jørgen Carling, Research Professor, PRIO Migration Center

  • Field Studio gave me an excellent crash course on public-facing writing. It was exactly what I needed to jump-start my current book project!

    James Blair, Associate Professor in Anthropology at Cal Poly Pomona

  • I leave the “Public Facing” course energized, inspired, and more confident in my ability to write for a broader audience. I loved the intimate atmosphere and appreciated the skills an and insights Ro and Nomi bring as teachers, writers, and editors.

    Karen Strassler, Professor of Anthropology, Queens College, CUNY

Class Faculty

  • Ro Skelton

    Ro Skelton is an award-winning writer, former reporter, and editor whose investigative journalism has appeared in the Guardian, the International Herald Tribune, and the Observer. She is currently working on her first book, Easement, a memoir about radical acts of gardening, and her fiction has won the Larry Levis Fellowship and appeared in Four Way Review and Waxwing.

  • Nomi Stone

    Nomi Stone is an award-winning anthropologist, poet, and professor whose most recent book, Pinelandia (UC Press, 2022), won four major prizes, including the Gold Medal in Politics/Economics at the Independent Press Awards. Her poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, and Best American Poetry, and her previous collection, Kill Class, was a finalist for the Julie Suk Award. She has a PhD from Columbia and is currently an Associate Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Texas, Dallas.

    A woman with long, dark wavy hair smiles at the camera, one hand on her hip. She wears yellow beaded earrings and a black top, standing in front of a white bookshelf filled with colorful books.

Free • Monthly Sessions

The Writer’s Room

For any writer who wants community — to write, learn craft, and meet others. We meet online every month, starting with a short craft lesson, then moving into a 45-minute generative writing session. We’ll offer a prompt, which you’re welcome to follow or not. Camera on or off — we don’t mind either way.

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