“Students at AUBG tend to be more mature, more worldly, and really kind of hungry for new experiences.

This is exciting for me as a teacher. Because I am constantly trying to push them in different directions creatively and they are really receptive to that,” says Michael Cohen, a Brown University graduate and published author of short fiction stories and plays. He teaches Composition, Literature, and Creative Writing classes, and has been at AUBG for over five years. 

“I absolutely enjoy working with AUBG students. There are students from not just Bulgaria and the Balkans but former Soviet republics, China now. I do not know any other school in the world that is like it. They are mostly polyglots, they speak minimum two languages.

Most of them speak three, four, even more languages, which brings a kind of a depth to them, at least for writing.

This is really refreshing too because they have such diverse experiences that they bring to the classroom.”

On liberal arts:
The liberal arts approach is a really nice balance to the typical more narrow, more focused, more specialized, almost vocational style of education.

Students are going to have the opportunity to gain this broad base of knowledge in addition to studying one particular subject more deeply.

On students’ achievements:
I’ve had students who went on to MFA – Master of Fine Arts programs in Creative Writing. A lot of them are in grad school, some of them are journalists, a lot of them are involved in NGOs. I’ve been here 5 years so they are just beginning to make their way in the world, but I expect big things.

His method:
I think just by

being myself and not putting too much of a hierarchy between myself and students,

the students feel more at ease, they feel more comfortable.

Exciting projects:

We had a student who did poetry and put it in bubbles and released them up in the river and they had to catch them further down on the river.

On diversity:
Diversity at AUBG cuts behind this empty rhetoric of the world shrinking and global society and so on, makes it quite real. I really have the sense of not just being American anymore, but being part of a global society. It makes me feel more connected, makes my vision of the world larger.

Cohen’s current projects include working on a novel and short story collection, as well as putting together a book-length collection of Bulgarian folk and fairytales translations.