Literary Focus is a nonprofit organization that provides live, online literature courses for college-bound students in Grades 7-12 and professional development for secondary school English teachers.
Would you like to discuss literature in small, seminar-style classes to prepare for the rigor and challenge of college-level coursework?
Would you benefit from individual instruction to learn how to read more closely, write more clearly, and think more deeply?
Would you like to share thoughts and ideas with a diverse group of highly motivated students from around the country and world?
November 20, 2025
"After searching extensively for an English class that didn’t feel like just another part of the college-prep juggernaut, I was thrilled to stumble upon Derek’s class. It was exactly what we had been looking for—a course that fosters a love of literature, encourages thoughtful analysis, and builds strong writing skills. We have also been deeply grateful for the way Derek has been willing to adjust the class for our daughter, who is navigating a French curriculum while being introduced to the great classics. It has been wonderful to see her connect with other students—especially those back in the States (as she misses home)—and to hear her engage with us about the thought-provoking questions discussed in class. This is what an honest and well-rounded education is all about: nurturing the whole person. All this to say, we highly recommend this course!"
- Vanessa C.
Barcelona, Spain
Tuition
Individual Courses
$225 per course
Half-Year Program
Any three courses during the academic year for $200 per course
Full-Year Program
All six courses during the
academic year for $175 per course
Literary Focus is a non-profit organization that is committed to providing academic opportunities for every student who has a desire to enroll in one of our courses—regardless of that student's financial situation. If your family has financial concerns, please complete a scholarship application with your parent or guardian to receive assistance.
Winter Courses
2026
We teach six books each session at three levels of difficulty to accommodate various ages and abilities:
Level I
Our Level I books are typically taught in Grades 7-9 and utilize relatively simple vocabulary and straightforward syntax. The underlying themes can be nuanced, however, and students will need to learn how to read closely and think deeply to uncover the work's hidden meaning. These books offer a solid foundation for those students who are still developing the basic skills and knowledge necessary for more advanced literary analysis.
Level II
Level II books are generally taught in Grades 10-11 and contain more advanced vocabulary, challenging syntax, and complex themes. Students will need to learn how to read between the lines to understand the writer's true intent. The most widely read classics in American and World Literature fall in this category, and most colleges will expect incoming students to have read these books at some point in their high school careers.
Level III
Level III books are the most challenging that students will read at the high school level. They are usually reserved for AP classes in Grade 12 and represent the type of books that students will read at the college level. These books are subtle and complex, often employing difficult syntax that requires careful reading to decipher the underlying themes. When students are comfortable with Level III books, they know that they are ready for college.
Session One
January 13 - February 5
Morning Courses
Level I
Duration:
Four Weeks
​
Dates:
January 13 - February 5
​
Days:
Tuesdays and Thursdays
Time:
10:00 a.m. - 10:50 a.m. MT
​
Tuition:
$225
​
Born in Transylvania, Elie Wiesel was a teenager when he and his family were taken from their home in 1944 to the Auschwitz concentration camp and then later to Buchenwald. Night, published in 1956, is the terrifying record of the death of Wiesel’s family, the death of his own innocence, and his despair confronting the evil of which humans are capable. Wiesel’s memoir is one of the most important documents of our time with its message that this type of horror must never be allowed to happen again.
Level II
Duration:
Four Weeks
​
Dates:
January 13 - February 5
​
Days:
Tuesdays and Thursdays
Time:
11:00 a.m. - 11:50 a.m. MT
​
Tuition:
$225
​
When The Awakening was first published in 1899, the critical outcry proved so vociferous that the novel was banned for decades. Now praised as a classic of early feminist literature, Kate Chopin’s novel has inspired generations of readers by rejecting conventional female roles and celebrating a woman’s journey towards self-discovery. As the heroine, Edna Pontellier, awakens to her own desires, she begins to question her ideas about marriage, motherhood, society, art, and the nature of love itself.
Level III
Duration:
Four Weeks
​
Dates:
January 13 - February 5
​
Days:
Tuesdays and Thursdays
Time:
12:00 p.m. - 12:50 p.m. MT
​
Tuition:
$225
​
In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, published in 1899, Marlow, a seaman and wanderer, recounts his physical and psychological journey in search of the infamous ivory trader Mr. Kurtz. Travelling upriver to the heart of Africa, he gradually becomes obsessed by how this enigmatic figure has gained power and control over the local people, which makes him question, not only his own nature and values, but those of Western civilization itself in this highly influential Modernist masterpiece.
Afternoon Courses
Level I
Duration:
Four Weeks
​
Dates:
January 13 - February 5
​
Days:
Tuesdays and Thursdays
Time:
4:00 p.m. - 4:50 p.m. MT
​
Tuition:
$225
​
One of the best-loved stories of all-time, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, published in 1960, is gripping, heart-wrenching, and wholly remarkable coming-of-age tale set in the Depression-era South during a time that is poisoned by virulent prejudice. Lee's novel views a world of great beauty and savage inequities through the eyes of Scout, a young girl whose father, Atticus Finch, a crusading local lawyer, risks everything to defend a Black man unjustly accused of a terrible crime.
Level II
Duration:
Four Weeks
​
Dates:
January 13 - February 5
​
Days:
Tuesdays and Thursdays
Time:
5:00 p.m. - 5:50 p.m. MT
​
Tuition:
$225
​
Chinua Achebe’s critically-acclaimed narrative about Africa’s cataclysmic encounter with European colonialism is told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s. Things Fall Apart, a classic of world literature that was originally published in 1958, explores one man’s futile resistance to the devaluing of Igbo customs and traditions in a way that broadens our understanding of contemporary realities in a post-colonial world.
Level III
Duration:
Four Weeks
​
Dates:
January 13 - February 5
​
Days:
Tuesdays and Thursdays
Time:
6:00 p.m. - 6:50 p.m. MT
​
Tuition:
$225
​
In Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, published in 2003, we meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they bestow on their firstborn, Gogol, betrays all the conflicts of honoring tradition in a new world—conflicts that will haunt Gogol on his own winding path through divided loyalties. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Jhumpa Lahiri brilliantly illuminates the tangled ties of the immigrant experience.
Session Two
February 17 - March 12
Morning Courses
Level I
Duration:
Four Weeks
​
Dates:
February 17 - March 12
​
Days:
Tuesdays and Thursdays
Time:
10:00 a.m. - 10:50 a.m. MT
​
Tuition:
$225
​
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies remains as provocative today as when it was first published in 1954 for its startling, brutal portrait of a group of ordinary English boys marooned on a coral island. Alone in a world of uncharted possibilities, devoid of adult supervision or rules, the boys begin to forge their own society, exposing the duality of human nature—the dark, eternal divide between order and chaos, intellect and instinct, structure and savagery.
Level II
Duration:
Four Weeks
​
Dates:
February 17 - March 12
​
Days:
Tuesdays and Thursdays
Time:
11:00 a.m. - 11:50 a.m. MT
​
Tuition:
$225
​
A classic of American literature, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, tells the story of Janie Crawford’s evolving selfhood as a fair-skinned, long-haired, dreamy child who grows up trying to enjoy her life without being one man’s mule or another man’s adornment. Even though the story does not end happily, it draws to a satisfying conclusion as Janie becomes a woman who refuses to live lost in sorrow, bitterness, fear, or foolish romantic dreams.
Level III
Duration:
Four Weeks
​
Dates:
February 17 - March 12
​
Days:
Tuesdays and Thursdays
Time:
12:00 p.m. - 12:50 p.m. MT
​
Tuition:
$225
​
Published in 1987, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding novel that won the Pulitzer Prize for its unflinching look into the abyss of slavery. Sethe escaped to Ohio after being born a slave, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm in Kentucky where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby girl, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
Afternoon Courses
Level I
Duration:
Four Weeks
​
Dates:
February 17 - March 12
​
Days:
Tuesdays and Thursdays
Time:
4:00 p.m. - 4:50 p.m. MT
​
Tuition:
$225
​
On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window and learns that her family—along with thousands of other Japanese Americans—have been reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens and are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty incarceration camp in the Utah desert. Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine, written in 2003, is a lean and devastatingly evocative novel that tells this family’s story from five flawlessly realized points of view.
Level II
Duration:
Four Weeks
​
Dates:
February 17 - March 12
​
Days:
Tuesdays and Thursdays
Time:
5:00 p.m. - 5:50 p.m. MT
​
Tuition:
$225
​
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, one of the undisputed classics of American literature, was published in 1925 and brings to life the Jazz Age of the Roaring ‘20s. Nick Carraway, a Yale graduate and veteran of the Great War, moves to West Egg, Long Island, eager to leave behind his native Middle West, and rents a small house next to the fabulously wealthy and enigmatic Jay Gatsby, a man who comes to represent both the promise and the corruption of the American Dream.
Level III
Duration:
Four Weeks
​
Dates:
February 17 - March 12
​
Days:
Tuesdays and Thursdays
Time:
6:00 p.m. - 6:50 p.m. MT
​
Tuition:
$225
​
Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is a profoundly important classic of world literature for its searching depiction of an unequal, technologically-advanced future where humans are genetically bred, socially indoctrinated, and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively uphold an authoritarian ruling order—all at the cost of our freedom, our full humanity, and perhaps our souls. Huxley’s masterpiece is as relevant today as it was in 1932 when it was published amid the rise of European fascism.
—Teachers—
Are you a veteran teacher interested in incorporating new instructional strategies and curricular designs into your existing practice?
Are you a new teacher looking for a comprehensive framework to teach any novel or play in an effective and engaging manner?
Are you a teacher eager to share your thoughts and ideas with other dedicated professionals outside your existing school?
—Donate—
Please support our mission by donating what you can to provide scholarships for students in financial need or from underrepresented communities.
Students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunches as part of the USDA National School Lunch Program automatically receive tuition waivers to attend our academic enrichment classes.
Your generosity provides financial support for these students, and since we are a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization, your contribution is 100% tax deductible.