Writing People: The Art of Profile & Biography
Saturdays: Feb 1 - Mar 1
12 - 2 p.m. EST
Led by MAYUKH SEN
with guest authors Doreen St. Félix, Jiayang Fan, Julie Phillips, & Julianna Escobedo Shepherd
$400
How do you frame a life? How do you condense copious research into a cogent narrative? How do you wrangle archival sources and harness the power of the interview?
Mastering profile writing and biography requires maintaining a reporter’s dogged tenacity, a willingness to go deep with sources, and enormous reserves of empathy. But the exercise, you’ll find, is also a rewarding one: Turning your narrative gaze outward, and writing about other people, might also teach you a great deal about yourself.
Whether you’re an early-career journalist hoping to get a grasp on a form that is crucial in this profession or working on a literary biography but struggling with some aspect of the process, you’ll leave this course armed with pragmatic and invaluable skills.
In this five-session Masters’ Series course led by biographer and journalist Mayukh Sen, along with guest authors Doreen St. Félix, Jiayang Fan, Julie Phillips, and Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, we’ll explore profile and biography’s different forms. Students will:
Gain a better understanding of the form of the magazine profile as well as the literary biography through engaging with exemplary writing and discussing their merits in depth
Communicate directly with acclaimed authors well known for their skill in writing about people
Learn how to write about people with both journalistic rigor and humanistic generosity
Acquire actionable skills such as archival research and synthesizing notes into prose
About the Instructors
Mayukh Sen
Doreen St. Félix
Jiayang Fan
Julie Phillips
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
-
Mayukh Sen is the James Beard Award-winning author of Taste Makers (2021) and the forthcoming Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star (March 2025). He is a 2025 Fellow at New America, where he has been named the inaugural Shourie Family Fellow to write his third book, a history of South Asian immigration to America told through the lives of Hollywood performers. His work has been anthologized in four editions of The Best American Food and Travel Writing. He teaches journalism at NYU.
-
Doreen St. Félix is a writer and critic. She was formerly editor-at-large for Lenny Letter, and has been on staff at The New Yorker since 2017, where she has served as the television critic since 2019. Previously, she was a culture writer at MTV News. Her writing has appeared in the Times Magazine, New York, Vogue, The Fader, and Pitchfork. She was named on the Forbes “30 Under 30” media list in 2016. In 2017, she was a finalist for a National Magazine Award for Columns and Commentary, and, in 2019, she won in the same category.
-
Jiayang Fan is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has worked since 2010. She is at work on her first book, Motherland, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Times Magazine, and The Paris Review, among other places.
-
Julie Phillips is a biographer and book critic and the author of The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Mothering, and the Mind-Baby Problem. Her previous book, James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Hugo and Locus Awards, the Washington State Book Award, and others. She has written for The New Yorker, Ms., The Village Voice, and many other publications. Currently, she review books for 4Columns.org and writes about English literature for the Dutch daily newspaper Trouw. She’s working on a biography of Ursula K. Le Guin.
-
Julianna Escobedo Shepherd has written about music, style, politics, and culture for 25 years. She is currently at work on her first book, Vaquera, about growing up Mexican in Wyoming and the myth of the American West. She is the founder of Hearing Things and has contributed to the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Billboard, and many more.
Class Schedule
We’ll begin with the compact newspaper-length profile and the roomier magazine profile—which can capture, in a few thousand words, a person’s entire essence in unique, vivid color—and work our way up to the sprawling book-length biography—which employs exhaustive research to illuminate a subject’s interior life with verve, creating a narrative that keeps the reader invested with every turn of the page. We’ll discuss how to write about deceased subjects with such detail that you effectively resurrect them on the page, and learn how to write about the living with both journalistic rigor and humanistic generosity. Along the way, you’ll hear from some of today’s brightest journalists and biographers about the joys and challenges of working within these forms.
We'll be joined by guest authors Doreen St. Félix on February 1; Jiayang Fan on February 8; Julie Phillips on February 15; and Julianne Escobedo Shepherd on February 22.
Details
This course will take place on Zoom on Saturdays February 1 - March 1 from 12 to 2 p.m. EST. Participants will receive a Zoom link prior to the course as well as a recording of the course afterward. We cannot offer refunds once the course has begun. Please email courses@offassignment.com with any questions.
FAQs →
Financial Aid
The full price for this course is $400; a limited number of scholarships are available.
Please send a brief statement outlining how and why a scholarship would impact your ability to attend to courses@offassignment.com by January 6 and we’ll get back to you by January 13.
Off Assignment’s Masters’ Series courses are unique five-session courses that delve deep into a specific writing topic by harnessing the expertise and craft tactics of a renowned writer in a particular niche, plus four celebrated authors. Participating writers gain a wealth of advanced techniques while benefiting from a cohesive community of disciplined writers.