In this writing workshop, students will learn to craft profile essays, creating stories about living artists from a range of performance fields and the visual arts, including, but not limited to, music, dance, theater, and film. The course is organized around journalistic and literary traditions of arts writing, not academic criticism or theory. Students will analyze a broad range of coverage from contemporary media, and learn skills requisite to writing profiles (background research, interview preparation, observation, and interview techniques). The workshop consists of open critiques of individual student writing in class, with rewriting and editing built into a series of assignments. Class sessions will meet twice per week, but one class meeting will frequently be devoted to discussion and peer editing.