Literature & Writing at COA offers a rich and diverse curriculum for students interested in reading and teaching literature, creative writing, and journalism. Students receive individual training from faculty who are noted novelists, poets, journalists, technical writers, and scholars. All classes are taught in interactive, seminar style; the average class size is twelve. Introductory and intermediate seminars are strongly interdisciplinary to introduce students to the broad contexts of all literature and writing. Advanced classes allow students to compose novels or autobiographies as well as to engage in serious scholarship. Students focusing in literature and writing at COA often go on to creative work, graduate study, teaching, professional writing careers, or education.

Literature and writing students choose courses from other areas of the curriculum-from painting to psychology, education to botany-to craft a course sequence suited to their goals and passions. The college helps students find internship opportunities and teaching placements to prepare them for graduate or professional work in literature, journalism, law, education, and other fields requiring strong analytic and expressive skills. Those who enter the work force directly after COA have the intellectual tools and communication skills to ensure success. Students work closely with faculty as writing tutors, teaching assistants, and research assistants, providing excellent preparation for teaching and any career that necessitates strong writing and communication.

Henry David Thoreau, Rachel Carson, and Native American orators appreciated the environment through their literature well before there was an environmental movement. Writers are often the most passionate and effective speakers for all kinds of social change; writing is also one of the primary modes of self-discovery and personal change. Ancient and classical writing clearly guides us to examine human nature and society. Today's world literature articulates the deepest dilemmas and hopes of humankind. A mirror of life that helps us explore its most profound questions, literature and writing at COA help students trace the history and beliefs of cultures across the world as well as find their own deepest truths.