Creative Writing Studios
Students write original fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and/or literary translations. Students generate rough drafts and develop reading skills in individually tailored instruction focused on craft, literature, aesthetics, and criticism.
Each semester, students are required to submit five "packets" containing original creative work, critical responses to reading assignments, a bibliography in MLA format of literary works and texts, and letters discussing their own work and their responses to the mentor’s critiques of and advice about that work. In addition, students complete two narrative self-evaluations, one midway through the semester and one at the semester’s end.
Forms and Methods
Students draft, revise, polish a long essay on methods, materials, forms, and process and prepare a generative making session or a talk to be given at their final residency. The goal is broadening and deepening knowledge of diverse artistic sensibilities and articulating aesthetic inclinations as well as the literary models and cultural sources of those aesthetic inclinations. In addition, students draft and revise a teaching philosophy, cover letter, and teaching CV. This is done in packet exchanges with letters between graduate students and faculty mentors.
Creative Writing Thesis and Thesis Presentation
Each student revises and polishes a creative writing thesis with the goal of creating a polished, publishable, book-length manuscript of creative writing work. The creative writing thesis should exhibit deep engagement with substantive and sentence-level revision along with an exploration of aesthetic possibilities.
A thesis committee comprised of three MFA faculty members evaluates the student’s creative writing thesis. At the student’s final residency, the student attends a thesis conference during which the committee discusses the student’s work, its guiding aesthetics, processes around making, and influences, literary and otherwise. This culminates with the student giving a public reading of their creative work.