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Creative writing m.f.a. (ithaca), field of study.

English Language and Literature

Program Description

The M.F.A. Program.

The Creative Writing program in the department of Literatures in English offers an M.F.A. degree only, with concentrations in either poetry or fiction. Each year the department enrolls only eight students, four in each concentration. Our small size allows us to offer a generous financial support package, details of which are outlined on our department website. At the same time, we have a large and diverse graduate faculty with competence in a wide range of literary, theoretical, and cultural fields.

Students participate in a graduate writing workshop each semester and take 6 additional one-semester courses for credit, at least four of them in English or American literature, Comparative Literature, literature in the modern or classical languages, or cultural studies (typically two per semester during the first year and one per semester during the second year). First year students receive practical training by working as Editorial Assistants for Epoch, a periodical of prose and poetry published by the Creative Writing staff of the department. The most significant requirement of the M.F.A. degree is the completion of a book-length manuscript: a collection of poems, short stories, or a novel.

The Special Committee. Every student selects a Special Committee who will be responsible for providing the student with a great deal of individual attention. The University system of Special Committees allows students to design their own courses of study within a broad framework laid down by the department, and it encourages a close working relationship between professors and students, promoting freedom and flexibility in the pursuit of the graduate degree. The student's Special Committee guides and supervises all academic work and assesses progress through a series of meetings with the student.

Teaching. Teaching is considered an integral part of training for the profession. The Field requires a carefully supervised teaching experience as part of the training for the degree. The Department of English, in conjunction with the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines , offers excellent training for beginning teachers and varied and interesting teaching within the university-wide First-Year Writing Program. Graduate students are assigned to writing courses under such general rubrics as "Portraits of the Self," "American Literature and Culture," "The Mystery in the Story," "Shakespeare," and "Cultural Studies," among others. Serving as a Teaching Assistant for a lecture course taught by a member of the Department of English faculty is another way graduate students participate in the teaching of undergraduates.

Contact Information

250 Goldwin Smith Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY  14853

Concentrations by Subject

  • creative writing

Visit the Graduate School's Tuition Rates page.

Application Requirements and Deadlines

Dec. 15 (Fall term admission only)

Requirements Summary:

  (includes Graduate School Requirements )

  The application must be submitted online. Detailed requirement summaries for applicants are available on the  MFA in Creative Writing Program website.

  • Application and fee
  • Academic Statement of Purpose
  • Personal Statement
  • Creative Writing Sample
  • Three letters of recommendation
  • Transcripts
  • English Language Proficiency Requirement  for all applicants

Learning Outcomes

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Table of Contents

Time and sanctuary: Writing program shapes promising voices

Creative Writing Program

By | Kate Blackwood , Cornell Chronicle

Zahid Rafiq worked for 10 years as a journalist in the Indian-held Kashmir, a region that has been seeking independence for several decades and has been a site of repression and violence.

Now a graduate student in Cornell’s Creative Writing Program, he’s still writing stories, but in a new place – Ithaca – and with a new purpose: finding the language to write about war in a meaningful way.

“In journalism in a war, the focus is eventually on numbers,” Rafiq, MFA ’21, says. “One body, two bodies. But in my fiction, the whole point is to focus on the human being. To ask, what it means to live, to die, what it means to waver in between?”

This semester, Rafiq is completing his thesis project, a collection of short stories about everyday life amid war, set in Kashmir. Fiction faculty members Helena María Viramontes and Emily Fridlund are engaging with his work with a willingness, he says, “to understand where I want to go, rather than where they want to go.”

“This program is a kind of sanctuary,” Rafiq says. “It is a moment of respite when you get a space to write with a little bubble of safety around you.”

Giving language to the moment

Succeeding as a creative writer is hard. Publishers accept only 1% to 2% of submitted novels, and getting a teaching position at the college level can have similar odds. Just getting into a graduate writing program poses a challenge; Cornell’s Creative Writing Program , in the College of Arts and Sciences, accepts only eight graduate students a year out of the hundreds that apply.

Ishion Hutchinson

But for those students who make it in, the graduate writing program gives promising fiction writers and poets the time, space and mentoring they need to find their voices, develop their art and produce important work at a time when the world needs insight from artistic voices.

“Creative writers have always given language to a moment that helps to deepen the ways of thinking through it,” says Ishion Hutchinson , associate professor of Literatures in English and director of the Creative Writing Program. “It helps to clarify and to move us beyond sound bites and language that is reductive. Creative writers complicate and push forward the ways in which we talk about our historical moment.”

Established in 1967, the Creative Writing Program is known nationally and internationally for its highly regarded and diverse faculty; intimate size; and postgraduate teaching fellowships. With a recognizable influence on contemporary literature, the sought-after graduate program is now at the forefront of developing today’s young writers into tomorrow’s leading poetic and fictional voices. Graduates follow in the footsteps of the program’s Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winners, best-selling authors and influential faculty.

Smart design

Only four students are admitted in each genre – poetry and fiction – each year. Students complete two years of master’s of fine arts (MFA) work, taking workshops and other classes as they write a creative thesis. During the first year each student also works as an editorial assistant at Cornell’s renowned magazine , Epoch . During the second, students are teaching assistants in undergraduate writing courses.

After completing the MFA , students are awarded a summer fellowship fully funded through the David L. Picket Summer Graduate Stipends in Creative Writing. This supported time allows them to focus on writing and thesis completion. Once finalized, students have the opportunity to stay on for two years as lecturers in creative writing. Both opportunities are a rarity in MFA programs.

“That aspect of the program prepares students for careers in writing, including  becoming professors,” Hutchinson says. “They gain experience in teaching, which is invaluable because the job market is extremely competitive.”

For Michael Prior , MFA ’17, the program’s dual focus on writing and teaching paid off. During his 2018-2019 Picket Fellowship, he revised his MFA thesis, a book of poems exploring intergenerational trauma related to World War II internment camps for people of Japanese descent.

Michael Prior

“My maternal grandparents and their families had their possessions and property stripped and were put into a camp for the war,” Prior says. “The book also explores being biracial.”

He published his book “Burning Province,” in 2020 with Random House, and got multiple teaching offers. He is now a professor teaching creative writing at Macalester College in Minneapolis.

“The creative writing industry is very hard to get a job in,” Prior says. “The experiences at Cornell – teaching and working with faculty and having that extra fellowship – were a huge help on my resume when I was applying.”

The small size of the program allows faculty to grow particularly attentive toward each student’s journey, says poet Valzhyna Mort , assistant professor of Literatures in English. “We say, ‘We are here with you. You have a devoted readership.’ This is what any poet hopes for, to find at least one really curious, empathetic and deep reader. All of us are that for our students during these years.”

“The greatest thing about this program is the intimacy of it because there are so few of us,” says India Sada Hackle, MFA ’22, a first-year poet from Cincinnati, Ohio. “We’re never a number.”

Valzhyna Mort

In addition, Cornell funds every graduate student in creative writing fully and equally.

“A lot of programs have hierarchical funding,” Prior says. “You can be sitting at a workshop table and someone across from you is getting double what you’re getting, based on how the faculty feels about them. I think that breeds unnecessary competition, which is not, ultimately, conducive to a good community or developing writers.”

Barbara and David Zalaznick’s endowment to the program brings well-known writers and poets to campus several times a semester through the Zalaznick Reading Series . Past writers in this series include Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, M.A. ’54, former U.S. poets laureate Billy Collins and Charles Simic, and novelists Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood.

Affecting literary trends with diverse voices

The faculty’s reputation drives the program.

“My colleagues are spectacular writers and poets who have unique voices,” Hutchinson says. “You can’t find this kind of writing anywhere else, and I think that’s what excites students to apply.”

In addition to claiming numerous awards for their work, faculty members publish poems and stories regularly in leading publications. Robert Morgan’s poem “ Cowbell ” appears in the April issue of The Atlantic; Nafissa Thompson-Spires’ story “ Belles Lettres ” was featured on the Symphony Space audio program “Selected Shorts” in June 2020.

Fiction professor Ernesto Quiñonez is a frequent storyteller on The Moth , and Harper’s magazine published Hutchinson’s poem “ Little Music ” in January. His poem “After the Hurricane” appears in the important 2020 anthology “ African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song ” – lending its title to a major section of the anthology.

People at a reception

With this publishing prominence, the writing program has “affected literary trends” in ways other schools have not, says Viramontes. This extends to alumni of the program, she says, including National Book Award winner Susan Choi , MFA ’95; Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz , MFA ’95; Téa Obrect, MFA ’09, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction ; 2018 Kirkus Prize winner Ling Ma, MFA ’95 ; and NoViolet Bulawayo, MFA ’10 , whose novel “We Need New Names” was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Prize.

Poetry alumni have also been recognized for excellence, Hutchinson says, including: Dana Koster, MFA ’08; Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers, MFA ’11; Nicholas Friedman, MFA ’12; and Sally Wen Mao , MFA ’13.

An emphasis on diversity has taken root and grown in the program since Viramontes arrived in the 1990s, she says; that contrasts with her own experience of struggling as an MFA student in California when classmates “were not open” to her writing about Latino characters.

“Here at Cornell there was an effort to always have some diversity,” says Viramontes, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences in English. “I’m happy to say it was faculty members who worked toward pushing marginalized voices into the center. Because we have a diversity of faculty, we have a diversity of graduate students.”

The attention to diversity among faculty and the student body, Prior says, made a lasting impact on his writing.

“When I was going through the program, there were more poets of color than white poets,” Prior says. “One of the things we’re always trying to do as writers is to figure out our own personal canon, our own artistic lineage. The pressure for a writer of color is navigating multiple lineages at once. My professors, like Ishion Hutchinson, like Alice Fulton , like Helena María Viramontes, were helpful and suggested possible directions for the work. I wouldn’t have the book without them.”

Freedom in the creativity space

The faculty support, the funding, the teaching experience, and the time in which to write do not guarantee literary success – or make the art any easier, current students say. But these aspects do open opportunities.

“Writing is a hard job,” says Rafiq, “but this is a nice place to take a breath. The challenges that are, are far less than they are in the world.”

India Sada Hackle, MFA '22

Hackle says the time and space she now has as a student in the creative writing program translate into freedom.

“Whatever I want to be consuming, I have the freedom,” Hackle says. “Whatever I want to be investing in, I have the freedom to do so. Whether it’s research or the genre, there’s lot of freedom in the creativity space.”

Hutchinson says the students who enter the writing program already have within themselves the instinct to become writers.

“We sharpen it to the best of our capacity,” he says. “At the end of four years, they leave more confident and ready for a long career in writing.”

Read the story in the Cornell Chronicle .

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Cornell University

New york, united states.

Each year the department enrolls eight students, four in fiction and four in poetry. Our small size allows us to offer a generous financial support package which fully funds every student. At the same time, we have a large and diverse graduate faculty with competence in a wide range of literary, theoretical, and cultural fields. Students choose a Special Committee of two faculty members who provide a great deal of individual attention and encourage students to design their own courses of study within the very broad framework laid down by the department.

Students participate in a graduate writing workshop each semester and take 6 additional one-semester courses for credit, at least four of them in English or American literature, Comparative Literature, literature in the modern or classical languages, or cultural studies (typically two per semester during the first year and one per semester during the second year). First year students receive practical training by working as Editorial Assistants for Epoch, a periodical of prose and poetry published by the Creative Writing staff of the department. Teaching is considered an integral part of the program as well. A carefully supervised teaching experience is required for every M.F.A. candidate during the second year of the program. The Department of English, in conjunction with the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines, offers excellent training for beginning teachers and varied and interesting teaching within the university-wide First-Year Writing Program. The most significant requirement of the MFA degree is the completion of a book-length manuscript: a collection of poems, short stories, or a novel.

Contact Information

250 Goldwin Smith Hall Dept. of English Ithaca New York, United States 14853-3201 Phone: 607-255-7989 Email: [email protected] http://english.cornell.edu/mfa-creative-writing

Bachelor of Arts in English/Literature +

Minor / concentration in creative writing +, master of fine arts in creative writing +, graduate program director, j. robert lennon.

Castle. Happyland. Pieces for the Left Hand: 100 Anedotes. On the Night Plain. Broken River. Familiar. See you in Paradise.

http://english.cornell.edu/j-robert-lennon

Ernesto Quinonez

Bodega Dreams.

http://english.cornell.edu/ernesto-qui%C3%B1onez

Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon

Open Interval. Black Swan.

http://english.cornell.edu/lyrae-van-clief-stefanon

Helena Maria Viramontes

Their Dogs Came with Them. The Mothers and Other Stories. Under the Feet of Jesus.

http://english.cornell.edu/helena-mar%C3%ADa-viramontes

Ishion Hutchinson

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He attended the University of the West Indies, Mona, New York University, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Utah. His poetry and essays have appeared in such publications as Attica, Caribbean Review of Books, and LA Review. His first collection, Far District, won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award.

http://english.cornell.edu/ishion-hutchinson

Valzhyna Mort

Valzhyna Mort was born in Minsk, Belarus. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Factory of Tears and Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2008 and 2011). Mort has received the Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry Magazine, and the Burda Prize for Eastern European authors.

https://english.cornell.edu/valzhyna-mort-hutchinson

Emily Fridlund

EMILY FRIDLUND grew up in Minnesota. Her first novel, History of Wolves (Grove Atlantic), was a finalist for the 2017 Man Booker Prize and the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. It won the American Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. History of Wolves was also a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, a New York Times Editor’s Choice, one of USA Today’s Notable Books, an Amazon Best Book of the Month, and a #1 Indie Next pick. The opening chapter was awarded the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Fiction. Fridlund’s debut collection of stories, Catapult (Sarabande), won the Mary McCarthy Prize. Her fiction has appeared in a variety of journals, including Boston Review, ZYZZYVA, FiveChapters, New Orleans Review, Sou’wester, New Delta Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Southwest Review. Fridlund received a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, where she completed a study of simultaneity in modernist and contemporary narratives by women.

https://english.cornell.edu/emily-fridlund

Nafissa Thompson-Spires

https://english.cornell.edu/nafissa-thompson-spires

NoViolet Bulawayo

https://english.cornell.edu/noviolet-bulawayo

Publications & Presses +

EPOCH Magazine

Visiting Writers Program +

Rebecca Morgan Frank, 2023-24

Reading Series +

The Barbara and David Zalaznick Reading Series ( http://english.cornell.edu/zalaznick )

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Master of Fine Arts in Creative Visual Arts

The two-year Master of Fine Arts in Creative Visual Arts program is an intensive, intimate, and diverse community that supports both interdisciplinary and medium-specific practices, augmented by access to the breadth of fields of study across the university. Students work closely with a special advisory committee consisting of Department of Art and affiliate faculty of their choosing in addition to an average of 15 artists and critical practitioners that come to the College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP) to lecture and conduct individual M.F.A. studio visits. The Department of Art hosts two distinguished Teiger Mentors in the Arts annually and provides both experimental and formal exhibition opportunities in Ithaca and NYC. The program also features access to exceptional resources and facilities, an exploratory international travel experience, graduate assistantships, and generous tuition remission.

For more information about the program, please join us for our  Virtual Open House  on November 9, 2023.

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The 10 Best Creative Writing MFA Programs in the US

The talent is there. 

But the next generation of great American writers needs a collegial place to hone their craft. 

They need a place to explore the writer’s role in a wider community. 

They really need guidance about how and when to publish. 

All these things can be found in a solid Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree program. This degree offers access to mentors, to colleagues, and to a future in the writing world. 

A good MFA program gives new writers a precious few years to focus completely on their work, an ideal space away from the noise and pressure of the fast-paced modern world. 

We’ve found ten of the best ones, all of which provide the support, the creative stimulation, and the tranquility necessary to foster a mature writer.

We looked at graduate departments from all regions, public and private, all sizes, searching for the ten most inspiring Creative Writing MFA programs. 

Each of these ten institutions has assembled stellar faculties, developed student-focused paths of study, and provide robust support for writers accepted into their degree programs. 

To be considered for inclusion in this list, these MFA programs all must be fully-funded degrees, as recognized by Read The Workshop .

Creative Writing education has broadened and expanded over recent years, and no single method or plan fits for all students. 

Today, MFA programs across the country give budding short story writers and poets a variety of options for study. For future novelists, screenwriters – even viral bloggers – the search for the perfect setting for their next phase of development starts with these outstanding institutions, all of which have developed thoughtful and particular approaches to study.

So where will the next Salinger scribble his stories on the steps of the student center, or the next Angelou reading her poems in the local bookstore’s student-run poetry night? At one of these ten programs.

Here are 10 of the best creative writing MFA programs in the US.

University of Oregon (Eugene, OR)

University of Oregon

Starting off the list is one of the oldest and most venerated Creative Writing programs in the country, the MFA at the University of Oregon. 

Longtime mentor, teacher, and award-winning poet Garrett Hongo directs the program, modeling its studio-based approach to one-on-one instruction in the English college system. 

Oregon’s MFA embraces its reputation for rigor. Besides attending workshops and tutorials, students take classes in more formal poetics and literature.  

A classic college town, Eugene provides an ideal backdrop for the writers’ community within Oregon’s MFA students and faculty.  

Tsunami Books , a local bookseller with national caché, hosts student-run readings featuring writers from the program. 

Graduates garner an impressive range of critical acclaim; Yale Younger Poet winner Brigit Pegeen Kelly, Cave Canem Prize winner and Guggenheim fellow Major Jackson, and PEN-Hemingway Award winner Chang-Rae Lee are noteworthy alumni. 

With its appealing setting and impressive reputation, Oregon’s MFA program attracts top writers as visiting faculty, including recent guests Elizabeth McCracken, David Mura, and Li-young Lee.

The individual approach defines the Oregon MFA experience; a key feature of the program’s first year is the customized reading list each MFA student creates with their faculty guide. 

Weekly meetings focus not only on the student’s writing, but also on the extended discovery of voice through directed reading. 

Accepting only ten new students a year—five in poetry and five in fiction— the University of Oregon’s MFA ensures a close-knit community with plenty of individual coaching and guidance.

Cornell University (Ithaca, NY)

Cornell University

Cornell University’s MFA program takes the long view on life as a writer, incorporating practical editorial training and teaching experience into its two-year program.

Incoming MFA students choose their own faculty committee of at least two faculty members, providing consistent advice as they move through a mixture of workshop and literature classes. 

Students in the program’s first year benefit from editorial training as readers and editors for Epoch , the program’s prestigious literary journal.

Teaching experience grounds the Cornell program. MFA students design and teach writing-centered undergraduate seminars on a variety of topics, and they remain in Ithaca during the summer to teach in programs for undergraduates. 

Cornell even allows MFA graduates to stay on as lecturers at Cornell for a period of time while they are on the job search. Cornell also offers a joint MFA/Ph.D. program through the Creative Writing and English departments.

Endowments fund several acclaimed reading series, drawing internationally known authors to campus for workshops and work sessions with MFA students. 

Recent visiting readers include Salman Rushdie, Sandra Cisneros, Billy Collins, Margaret Atwood, Ada Limón, and others. 

Arizona State University (Tempe, AZ)

Arizona State University

Arizona State’s MFA in Creative Writing spans three years, giving students ample time to practice their craft, develop a voice, and begin to find a place in the post-graduation literary world. 

Coursework balances writing and literature classes equally, with courses in craft and one-on-one mentoring alongside courses in literature, theory, or even electives in topics like fine press printing, bookmaking, or publishing. 

While students follow a path in either poetry or fiction, they are encouraged to take courses across the genres.

Teaching is also a focus in Arizona State’s MFA program, with funding coming from teaching assistantships in the school’s English department. Other exciting teaching opportunities include teaching abroad in locations around the world, funded through grants and internships.

The Virginia C. Piper Center for Creative Writing, affiliated with the program, offers Arizona State MFA students professional development in formal and informal ways. 

The Distinguished Writers Series and Desert Nights, Rising Stars Conference bring world-class writers to campus, allowing students to interact with some of the greatest in the profession. Acclaimed writer and poet Alberto Ríos directs the Piper Center.

Arizona State transitions students to the world after graduation through internships with publishers like Four Way Books. 

Its commitment to the student experience and its history of producing acclaimed writers—recent examples include Tayari Jones (Oprah’s Book Club, 2018; Women’s Prize for Fiction, 2019), Venita Blackburn ( Prairie Schooner Book Prize, 2018), and Hugh Martin ( Iowa Review Jeff Sharlet Award for Veterans)—make Arizona State University’s MFA a consistent leader among degree programs.

University of Texas at Austin (Austin, TX)

University of Texas at Austin

The University of Texas at Austin’s MFA program, the Michener Center for Writers, maintains one of the most vibrant, exciting, active literary faculties of any MFA program.

Denis Johnson D.A. Powell, Geoff Dyer, Natasha Trethewey, Margot Livesey, Ben Fountain: the list of recent guest faculty boasts some of the biggest names in current literature.

This three-year program fully funds candidates without teaching fellowships or assistantships; the goal is for students to focus entirely on their writing. 

More genre tracks at the Michener Center mean students can choose two focus areas, a primary and secondary, from Fiction, Poetry, Screenwriting, and Playwriting.

The Michener Center for Writers plays a prominent role in contemporary writing of all kinds. 

The hip, student-edited Bat City Review accepts work of all genres, visual art, cross genres, collaborative, and experimental pieces.  

Recent events for illustrious alumni include New Yorker publications, an Oprah Book Club selection, a screenwriting prize, and a 2021 Pulitzer (for visiting faculty member Mitchell Jackson). 

In this program, students are right in the middle of all the action of contemporary American literature.

Washington University in St. Louis (St. Louis, MO)

Washington University in St. Louis

The MFA in Creative Writing at Washington University in St. Louis is a program on the move: applicants have almost doubled here in the last five years. 

Maybe this sudden growth of interest comes from recent rising star alumni on the literary scene, like Paul Tran, Miranda Popkey, and National Book Award winner Justin Phillip Reed.

Or maybe it’s the high profile Washington University’s MFA program commands, with its rotating faculty post through the Hurst Visiting Professor program and its active distinguished reader series. 

Superstar figures like Alison Bechdel and George Saunders have recently held visiting professorships, maintaining an energetic atmosphere program-wide.

Washington University’s MFA program sustains a reputation for the quality of the mentorship experience. 

With only five new students in each genre annually, MFA candidates form close cohorts among their peers and enjoy attentive support and mentorship from an engaged and vigorous faculty. 

Three genre tracks are available to students: fiction, poetry, and the increasingly relevant and popular creative nonfiction.

Another attractive feature of this program: first-year students are fully funded, but not expected to take on a teaching role until their second year. 

A generous stipend, coupled with St. Louis’s low cost of living, gives MFA candidates at Washington University the space to develop in a low-stress but stimulating creative environment.

Indiana University (Bloomington, IN)

Indiana University

It’s one of the first and biggest choices students face when choosing an MFA program: two-year or three-year? 

Indiana University makes a compelling case for its three-year program, in which the third year of support allows students an extended period of time to focus on the thesis, usually a novel or book-length collection.

One of the older programs on the list, Indiana’s MFA dates back to 1948. 

Its past instructors and alumni read like the index to an American Literature textbook. 

How many places can you take classes in the same place Robert Frost once taught, not to mention the program that granted its first creative writing Master’s degree to David Wagoner? Even today, the program’s integrity and reputation draw faculty like Ross Gay and Kevin Young.

Indiana’s Creative Writing program houses two more literary institutions, the Indiana Review, and the Indiana University Writers’ Conference. 

Students make up the editorial staff of this lauded literary magazine, in some cases for course credit or a stipend. An MFA candidate serves each year as assistant director of the much-celebrated and highly attended conference . 

These two facets of Indiana’s program give graduate students access to visiting writers, professional experience, and a taste of the writing life beyond academia.

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Ann Arbor, MI)

University of Michigan College of Literature, Science, and the Arts

The University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program cultivates its students with a combination of workshop-driven course work and vigorous programming on and off-campus. Inventive new voices in fiction and poetry consistently emerge from this two-year program.

The campus hosts multiple readings, events, and contests, anchored by the Zell Visiting Writers Series. The Hopgood Awards offer annual prize money to Michigan creative writing students . 

The department cultivates relationships with organizations and events around Detroit, so whether it’s introducing writers at Literati bookstore or organizing writing retreats in conjunction with local arts organizations, MFA candidates find opportunities to cultivate a community role and public persona as a writer.

What happens after graduation tells the big story of this program. Michigan produces heavy hitters in the literary world, like Celeste Ng, Jesmyn Ward, Elizabeth Kostova, Nate Marshall, Paisley Rekdal, and Laura Kasischke. 

Their alumni place their works with venerable houses like Penguin and Harper Collins, longtime literary favorites Graywolf and Copper Canyon, and the new vanguard like McSweeney’s, Fence, and Ugly Duckling Presse.

University of Minnesota (Minneapolis, MN)

University of Minnesota

Structure combined with personal attention and mentorship characterizes the University of Minnesota’s Creative Writing MFA, starting with its unique program requirements. 

In addition to course work and a final thesis, Minnesota’s MFA candidates assemble a book list of personally significant works on literary craft, compose a long-form essay on their writing process, and defend their thesis works with reading in front of an audience.

Literary journal Great River Review and events like the First Book reading series and Mill City Reading series do their part to expand the student experience beyond the focus on the internal. 

The Edelstein-Keller Visiting Writer Series draws exceptional, culturally relevant writers like Chuck Klosterman and Claudia Rankine for readings and student conversations. 

Writer and retired University of Minnesota instructor Charles Baxter established the program’s Hunger Relief benefit , aiding Minnesota’s Second Harvest Heartland organization. 

Emblematic of the program’s vision of the writer in service to humanity, this annual contest and reading bring together distinguished writers, students, faculty, and community members in favor of a greater goal.

Brown University (Providence, RI)

Brown University

One of the top institutions on any list, Brown University features an elegantly-constructed Literary Arts Program, with students choosing one workshop and one elective per semester. 

The electives can be taken from any department at Brown; especially popular choices include Studio Art and other coursework through the affiliated Rhode Island School of Design. The final semester consists of thesis construction under the supervision of the candidate’s faculty advisor.

Brown is the only MFA program to feature, in addition to poetry and fiction tracks, the Digital/Cross Disciplinary track . 

This track attracts multidisciplinary writers who need the support offered by Brown’s collaboration among music, visual art, computer science, theater and performance studies, and other departments. 

The interaction with the Rhode Island School of Design also allows those artists interested in new forms of media to explore and develop their practice, inventing new forms of art and communication.

Brown’s Literary Arts Program focuses on creating an atmosphere where students can refine their artistic visions, supported by like-minded faculty who provide the time and materials necessary to innovate. 

Not only has the program produced trailblazing writers like Percival Everett and Otessa Moshfegh, but works composed by alumni incorporating dance, music, media, and theater have been performed around the world, from the stage at Kennedy Center to National Public Radio.

University of Iowa (Iowa City, IA)

University of Iowa

When most people hear “MFA in Creative Writing,” it’s the Iowa Writers’ Workshop they imagine. 

The informal name of the University of Iowa’s Program in Creative Writing, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop was the first to offer an MFA, back in 1936. 

One of the first diplomas went to renowned writer Wallace Stegner, who later founded the MFA program at Stanford.

 It’s hard to argue with seventeen Pulitzer Prize winners and six U.S. Poets Laureate. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop is the root system of the MFA tree.

The two-year program balances writing courses with coursework in other graduate departments at the university. In addition to the book-length thesis, a written exam is part of the student’s last semester.

Because the program represents the quintessential idea of a writing program, it attracts its faculty positions, reading series, events, and workshops the brightest lights of the literary world. 

The program’s flagship literary magazine, the Iowa Review , is a lofty goal for writers at all stages of their career. 

At the Writers’ Workshop, tracks include not only fiction, poetry, playwriting, and nonfiction, but also Spanish creative writing and literary translation. Their reading series in association with Prairie Lights bookstore streams online and is heard around the world.

Iowa’s program came into being in answer to the central question posed to each one of these schools: can writing be taught? 

The answer for a group of intrepid, creative souls in 1936 was, actually, “maybe not.” 

But they believed it could be cultivated; each one of these institutions proves it can be, in many ways, for those willing to commit the time and imagination.

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MFA Fall Application Deadline Extended until March 1

The deadline for fall applications to our creative writing mfa program has been extended until march 1 2024., apply online.

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cornell university mfa creative writing

Yahdon Israel on Why the Book Proposal Matters

In recent years, the publishing landscape has undergone a fundamental shift in how books are sold, marketed and read. This contemporary landscape […]

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Poster for Life After the MFA

Life After the MFA

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Mostly dividing his time between New York City and Tehran, Iran, Salar regularly publishes personal essays and short stories, plus numerous translations of other authors that appear in journals across the world.

A professor at the City University of New York’s CITY COLLEGE campus in Harlem, he teaches workshops in the English Department’s MFA program and also serves as Director of Undergraduate Creative Writing. Website: salarabdoh.com

cornell university mfa creative writing

Author Website

Spring 2020

Spring 2019

Portrait of Michelle Valladeras

She has been anthologized in Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia & Beyond, and The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry by Indians . Her honors include a Pushcart Prize Nomination and she was awarded “The Poet of the Year” by the Americas Poetry Festival of New York. She is currently working on a book about faith called Searching for Tara.

cornell university mfa creative writing

Naima’s second novel,  Didn’t Never Know , is the story of the integration of a public high school in a small Southern town, which sets off a chain of events that bonds two families together in unexpected and complicated ways over the course of their lives. It is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing.

Naima’s stories and essays have appeared in the  New York Times , the  Rumpus ,  Aster(ix) ,  Kweli ,  The Paris Review Daily , and elsewhere. She has taught writing to students in jail, youth programs, and universities. Naima is currently visiting faculty at the MFA program at City College in Harlem and Antioch University in L.A.

cornell university mfa creative writing

Unger has been a featured writer in book festivals in San Juan, Miami, Los Angeles, Guatemala, Sharjah, Managua, Bogotá, Lima, La Paz, Oaxaca, and Guadalajara.

cornell university mfa creative writing

She received her B.A. and M.A. from the University of Arizona, and her Ph.D. from Stanford University.  She teaches a range of subjects from feminist and critical literary theory, poetics, film studies, contemporary literature, and women’s literature.

cornell university mfa creative writing

He has taught poetry and nonfiction workshops. An independent book editor with an interest in the ways writers engage with the culture, he has also led MFA courses in publishing and authorship.

cornell university mfa creative writing

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cornell university mfa creative writing

EPOCH Magazine

About epoch.

EPOCH  publishes fiction, poetry, essays, comics, and graphic art. In continuous publication since 1947, the magazine is edited by students and faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing, in Cornell University’s Department of Literatures in English.

Submission guidelines, advertising rates, an archive of past issues, and featured poetry and prose from the most recent issue are available at the magazine’s full site, www.epochliterary.com . The past ten years of  EPOCH  are also available to buy as individual issues in the  EPOCH  shop, along with subscriptions.

EPOCH has been a consistent source of funding for Cornell’s first-year MFA graduate students for more than thirty years. The magazine pays students a living wage as they begin their editorial and creative careers, helps fund their travel to the annual AWP conference, and provides valuable professional experience. We welcome gifts to EPOCH to support our students' access to these activities.

EPOCH Links

History of epoch.

Baxter Hathaway in the EPOCH office

EPOCH  was launched in 1947 by Professor Baxter Hathaway, who would remain its editor until 1976. In a brief history composed in 1948, found in the Rare and Manuscript collections at Cornell’s Kroch Library, he wrote:

 EPOCH  came into being as a result of the convergence of two projects. Baxter Hathaway, who had seen at close hand similar magazines in operation at two universities, had done some talking and writing about the founding of such a magazine at Cornell as part of the work in creative writing. Separately, James and Carol Hall and John Segelong had bean talking of starting a literary magazine. These parties merged their interests during the spring of 1947 and in July, 1947, sent a form letter to other members of the Cornell faculty seeking out other interested people. As a result of that letter, Morris Bishop, Robert H. Elias, Robert Arends, and Henry H. Adams joined in the venture. All these, together with Sherry Hathaway, put […] $100 each into the  EPOCH  treasury. As a result of notices in the  Saturday Review of Literature , The Writer , and  Writer’s Digest , manuscripts began to come in, and the first issue appeared. Robert Arends soon was forced to resign from the staff when he had to speed up getting his Ph.D. degree. Henry H. Adams resigned in June, 1948, since he was unable to continue to meet his share of the deficits. Sherry Hathaway, Vivian Sessions, and Helen Elias have done much of the mechanical work of the magazine, and students have given occasional assistance. Messrs. Friedrich Solmsen and Thomas G. Bergin have made donations to the magazine.

Michael Koch in the EPOCH office with MFA students

Since then,  EPOCH  has grown into one of the most prestigious and widely anthologized literary magazines in America. Its most recent editor-in-chief, Michael Koch, is largely responsible for its stellar reputation; Koch led the magazine from the late eighties until his death in 2022, and earned it the first-ever O. Henry Award for best literary magazine of the year, in 1997. Read about Michael Koch’s life and work here .

Cornell University

Ithaca , NY

http://www.arts.cornell.edu/english/graduate/mfa/

Degrees Offered

Fiction, Poetry

Residency type

Program length, financial aid.

All M.F.A. degree candidates are guaranteed two years of funding

Teaching opportunities

At Cornell, teaching is considered an integral part of training for a career in writing. The Department of English, in conjunction with the First-Year Writing Program, offers excellent training for beginning teachers and varied and interesting teaching in the university-wide First-Year Writing Program. These are not conventional freshman composition courses, but full-fledged academic seminars, often designed by graduate students themselves. The courses are writing-intensive and may fall under such general rubrics as “Portraits of the Self,” “American Literature and Culture,” “Shakespeare,” and “Cultural Studies,” among others. A graduate student may also serve as a Teaching Assistant for an undergraduate lecture course taught by a member of the Department of English faculty.

  • Diane Ackerman MFA 1973
  • Gilbert Allen MFA (Poetry) 1974
  • Donald Anderson MFA (Fiction) 1989
  • John Brehm MFA (Poetry) 1981
  • Jason Brown MFA (Fiction) 1995
  • H. G. Carrillo MFA (Fiction) 2007
  • Katherine Lien Chariott MFA (Fiction) 1999
  • Susan Choi MFA (Fiction) 1995
  • Chris Drangle MFA (Fiction) 2013
  • Junot Díaz MFA (Fiction) 1995
  • Chanda Feldman MFA (Poetry) 2003
  • Alice Fulton MFA (Poetry) 1982
  • Aisha Gawad MFA (Fiction) 2013
  • Estella Gonzalez MFA (Fiction) 2009
  • Gabriel Gudding MFA (Poetry) 2000
  • Stephen D. Gutierrez MFA (Fiction) 1987
  • Edward Hardy MFA (Fiction) 1988
  • Terrence Holt MFA (Fiction) 1979
  • Christopher Kempf MFA (Poetry) 2009
  • John Landretti MFA (CNF) 1993
  • Beth Lordan MFA (Fiction) 1987
  • Sally Wen Mao MFA (Poetry) 2012
  • Kenneth A. McClane MFA (Poetry) 1976
  • George McCormick MFA (Fiction) 2006
  • Lorrie Moore MFA (Fiction) 1982
  • Manuel Muñoz MFA (Fiction) 1998
  • Téa Obreht MFA (Fiction) 2009
  • Daniel Peña MFA (Fiction) 2013
  • Adam O'Fallon Price MFA (Fiction) 2014
  • Mark Rader MFA (Fiction) 2002
  • Rob Roensch MFA (Fiction) 2002
  • Elizabeth Lindsey Rogers MFA 2011
  • Anne Marie Rooney MFA (Poetry) 2010
  • Abby Rosenthal MFA
  • Julie Schumacher MFA (Fiction) 1986
  • Wendy S. Walters MFA (Poetry) 1995
  • Autumn Watts MFA (Fiction) 2005
  • Crystal Williams MFA (Poetry) 2000
  • Cori Winrock MFA (Poetry) 2007
  • Jake Adam York MFA (Poetry) 1997
  • Alexi Zentner MFA (Fiction) 2009

Send questions, comments and corrections to [email protected] .

Disclaimer: No endorsement of these ratings should be implied by the writers and writing programs listed on this site, or by the editors and publishers of Best American Short Stories , Best American Essays , Best American Poetry , The O. Henry Prize Stories and The Pushcart Prize Anthology .

cornell university mfa creative writing

College Verdict

cornell university mfa creative writing

The 10 Best MFA Programs in Creative Writing

cornell university mfa creative writing

There's no doubt that the talent is there. America has always been home to a wealth of great writers, from the early days of Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe to more contemporary authors like Toni Morrison and Bret Easton Ellis. But as any writer will tell you, becoming great takes more than just talent. It takes hard work, dedication, and a willingness to explore the craft and learn from others.

That's why a collegial environment is so important for emerging writers. A place where they can hone their skills under the guidance of experienced professionals and learn from their peers. A place where they can explore the role of the writer in a wider community. Most importantly, it is a place where they can get guidance on how and when to published their work.

The aforementioned things can all be found in a comprehensive Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree program. These programs are designed to give writers the tools they need to succeed, both artistically and professionally. And while there are many great programs out there, here are ten that stand out as being particularly strong.

Best Creative Writing MFA Programs in the US

The talent is there. Great American writers of the next generation need a collegial place to perfect their craft. A place is needed for the exploration of the writer's role within a larger community. They would benefit greatly from some direction regarding how and when to go public with their writing. A Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree program can offer all of these things.

There are many programs out there, but not all of them are created equal. Here are some of the best MFA programs in the country, based on my own experience and research:

1. University of Iowa Writers Workshop - This is arguably the most prestigious creative writing MFA program in the country. It's certainly the oldest, having been founded in 1936 by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Sinclair Lewis. The Iowa Writers Workshop has produced some of America's most beloved and influential writers, including John Irving, Kurt Vonnegut, Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, Jane Smiley, and many others. If you want to study with the best of the best and have your work read by some of the most accomplished writers in the country, this is the program for you.

2. Columbia University School of the Arts - Columbia is another top-ranked school with an excellent creative writing MFA program. Located in New York City, one of the world's great literary capitals, Columbia provides its students with unparalleled access to publishing houses, literary agents, and magazine editors. Many of Columbia's alumni go on to successful careers as writers and editors; recent graduates include Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, and Jonathan Safran Foer.

3. University of Michigan - The University of Michigan is another excellent choice for aspiring writers. The faculty here includes some very well-known names in contemporary literature, such as Anne Tyler, Jeffrey Eugenides, Eileen Myles, and James Alan McPherson. Michigan also has a strong tradition of producing successful poets; past students include Margaret Atwood and Philip Levine. And if you're interested in getting your work published while you're still in school, Michigan offers one of the few undergraduate creative writing journals in the country, called DIAGRAM.

4. Vanderbilt University - Vanderbilt's English department offers an MFA track with a focus on poetry or fiction writing; it also has a highly regarded PhD program if you're interested in pursuing a career in academia. Vanderbilt's location in Nashville gives its students access to one of America's most vibrant music scenes; past students include Michael Chabon and Bret Easton Ellis.

5., 6., 7.: Other excellent programs can be found at UC Irvine, Boston University, Washington University in St Louis, Emory University, Ohio State University, Arizona State University

The University of Oregon's MFA program in Creative Writing

The University of Oregon's MFA program in Creative Writing is a highly respected and well-established program. The program focuses on studio-based instruction, with students working closely with faculty mentors on individual projects. In addition to coursework in poetics, literature, and other formal subjects, students have the opportunity to learn from some of the top writers in the country through the program's visiting faculty series.

Only ten new students are accepted into the program each year, so competition is fierce. But for those who are lucky enough to be admitted, the experience is sure to be transformative. If you're passionate about writing and committed to your craft, there's no better place to study than at the University of Oregon.

Cornell University's MFA Program

Cornell University's MFA program is a two-year program that offers students the opportunity to editorial train and teach writing seminars as part of their degree. The program also offers a joint MFA PhD through the Creative Writing and English departments.

MFA students have the opportunity to participate in workshop and work sessions with well known authors through several endowed reading series on campus. This is a great opportunity for students to learn from some of the best in the business and get feedback on their own work.

The Cornell MFA program is one of the best in the country, and its alumni include some of today's most successful writers. If you're looking for a top-notch creative writing program, Cornell should definitely be at the top of your list.

Arizona State University's MFA Program

If you're looking for a top-notch creative writing program, you'll definitely want to check out Arizona State University's MFA program. Located in Tempe, AZ, the program spans three years and offers a balance of writing and literature classes. Although students can focus on either poetry or fiction, taking courses across genres is encouraged.

The program has a major focus on teaching, which is funded by teaching assistantships and opportunities to teach abroad. The Virginia C. Piper Center for Creative Writing, which is affiliated with the program, provides students professional development opportunities. The Distinguished Writers Series and Desert Nights, Rising Stars Conference bring a wide variety of accomplished writers to the school's campus.

The program is committed to the students experiencing success and has a long-standing tradition of being able to boast phenomenal writers. So if you're looking for a challenging and rewarding creative writing experience, be sure to check out Arizona State University's MFA program!

The University of Texas at Austin's Michener Center for Writers

The Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin is a highly respected creative writing program. It offers a three-year degree with full funding for candidates, and provides an excellent education in various genres of writing.

The program allows students to choose two focus areas from Fiction, Poetry, Screenwriting, and Playwriting. This makes it one of the most flexible and comprehensive writing programs available.

Recent events for alumni include having work published in The New Yorker, being selected for Oprah's Book Club, winning a screenwriting prize, and being nominated for a 2021 Pulitzer Prize. These are just a few examples of the success that graduates of this program have achieved.

If you're looking for a top-notch creative writing program, the University of Texas at Austin's Michener Center for Writers is definitely worth considering.

Washington University MFA in Creative Writing

There are many reasons to consider getting an MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Louis. For starters, the location is excellent. St. Louis is a great city for writers, with plenty of opportunity to get involved in the literary community and meet other writers. Additionally, the program only accepts five students per genre annually, so you'll be working closely with a tight-knit group of peers.

Mentorship is also a key feature of the program. Each student is paired with a faculty mentor who will help them develop their skills and craft throughout the duration of the program. In addition, first-year students are given full funding, allowing you to focus on your writing without stress about tuition costs.

overall, Washington University's MFA in Creative Writing program is an excellent option for anyone looking to pursue a career in writing.

Indiana University

Indiana University's creative writing program is one of the oldest and most respected in the country. The three-year curriculum provides students with a broad foundation in literary studies, while allowing them to focus on their thesis during the third year. Notable instructors have included Robert Frost and David Wagoner, and current faculty members include Ross Gay and Kevin Young.

The Indiana Review and the Indiana University Writers’ Conference are two literary institutions associated with the program. Students have the opportunity to gain professional experience through the magazine and conference. The Indiana Review is a student-run magazine that publishes fiction, poetry, essays, and reviews, while the Writers’ Conference is one of the oldest and largest student-run conferences in the country.

If you're looking for a top-notch creative writing program, Indiana University is a great choice. With a long history of excellence, outstanding faculty, and ample opportunities for professional experience, it's no wonder that so many writers have chosen to study here.

The University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers Program

The University of Michigan has a two-year creative writing program that is workshop-driven. The Helen Zell Writers Program offers a unique opportunity for students to hone their craft in a supportive and stimulating environment. The Zell Visiting Writers Series is the anchor for multiple reading, event, and contest hosted by the school. The Hopgood Awards provide an annual cash prize to Michigan creative writing students. MFA candidates have opportunities to develop their writing skills and create a public image. Michigan has produced many great authors, such as Celeste Ng, Jesmyn Ward, Elizabeth Kostova, Nate Marshall, Paisley Rekdal and Laura Kasischke. If you're looking for an MFA program that will challenge and inspire you, look no further than the University of Michigan.

University of Minnesota's MFA in Creative Writing

The University of Minnesota's Creative Writing MFA program is one of the best in the country, and for good reason. The program structure consists of coursework, a final thesis, and additional requirements such as a list literary works, writing process essay, and thesis defense in front on an audience. This ensures that students are well-prepared for their careers as writers.

In addition to the excellent academic program, the University of Minnesota also offers a number of extracurricular opportunities for students to get involved in the literary community. The Great River Review, First Book reading series, Mill City Reading series, and the Edelstein-Keller Visiting Writer Series are all part of the student experience. These events provide valuable networking opportunities and help students gain exposure for their work.

Finally, the University of Minnesota is home to the Hunger Relief benefit contest and reading, which raises money for Second Harvest Heartland. This event was established by Charles Baxter, and it has become an important tradition at the school. It's just one more example of how the University of Minnesota is committed to helping its students succeed both academically and professionally.

Brown University

Brown University's Literary Arts Program is one of the most comprehensive and unique in the country. With a wide variety of courses and workshops to choose from, as well as a Digital Media track, students can really tailor their education to their specific interests and needs. The program has produced some very successful and noted alumni, such as Percival Everett and Otessa Moshfegh, which is a testament to its quality. If you're looking for an MFA in Creative Writing that will give you the skills and opportunities you need to succeed, Brown University should definitely be at the top of your list!

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop was the first institution to offer an MFA, back in 1936. The first diploma was given to renowned writer Wallace Stegner, who later founded the MFA program at Stanford. The two-year graduate program at the university offers a balance of Writing courses along with coursework from various other departments. The students are required to write a book-length thesis in their final semester, along with taking a written exam.

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop has long been considered one of the best MFA programs in creative writing. The school's MFA program was the first of its kind and many of its students have gone on to become successful writers. The program is very competitive, and only accepts a small number of students each year.

If you’re considering applying to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, here are some things you should know:

The program is two years long. You’ll take both writing and literature courses, as well as courses in other graduate departments. This will help you develop as a writer and thinker.

You’ll need to write a book-length thesis during your time at Iowa. This is a major project, and you’ll be working on it for several months.

The final semester will include a written exam. This is an opportunity for you to show what you’ve learned during your time at Iowa.

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop is a highly competitive program. Each year, there are more applicants than there are spots in the class. So if you’re planning on applying, make sure you put your best foot forward.

If you’re serious about becoming a writer, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop is a great place to start your journey.

In conclusion, a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree program can offer many things to aspiring writers. The guidance from experienced professionals that these programs provide gives writers an opportunity to explore the craft of writing and learn about publishing their work. Of the many great programs out there, ten are listed here as standing out as being particularly strong. If you're hoping for a first-rate creative writing experience, look into one of these MFA programs.

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Your February 2024 Reads

Stories you may like, laundry putting you through the wringer apparel expert has tips.

Look Back: How Two Cornellians Cracked the ‘Small World’ Problem

Look Back: How Two Cornellians Cracked the ‘Small World’ Problem

ILR’s Worker Institute Helps Guide a Newly Energized Labor Movement

ILR’s Worker Institute Helps Guide a Newly Energized Labor Movement

This month's featured titles include a cookbook, a thriller, a self-help guide, and poetry drawn from the Salem witch trials

Did you know that Cornell has an online book club? Check it out!

For more titles by Big Red authors, peruse our previous round-ups .

Have you published a book you'd like to submit? Scroll down for details!

The cover of "Everyday Snack Tray"

Everyday Snack Tray

Frances Largeman-Roth ’96, BS ’97

Largeman-Roth is a registered dietician and author of such previous works as The CarbLovers Diet Cookbook and Eating in Color . Her latest offers (in the words of the subtitle) Easy Ideas and Recipes for Boards That Nourish for Moments Big and Small .

There are tips for snack trays to suit a wide variety of occasions—including playdates, tailgates, romantic get-togethers, and various holidays—as well as guidelines on how to make them more nutritionally sound.

The book boasts a blurb from healthy-eating proponent and award-winning cookbook author Ellie Krieger ’88, who enthuses: “Sure to infuse your family meals and gatherings with pure joy! This book is jam-packed with easy, affordable, and healthful ideas for snack trays that make everyday eating feel like a celebration.”

Thomas Perry ’69

The latest novel from the prolific, bestselling thriller author centers on a woman working for a private security firm that caters to the rich and famous. When she saves some clients from a robbery, killing two assailants in the process, she finds herself in the limelight.

That puts her in the crosshairs of an assassin—who accidentally kills her boss, leading to even more danger and exposing her to legal complications.

Kirkus praises the book as “a cat-and-mouse tale done to a turn by a veteran who doesn’t waste a word or a tear.”

The cover of "Hero"

In addition to his many novels, Perry penned the limited TV series “ The Old Man ,” starring Jeff Bridges, which ran on FX in 2022 and streams on Hulu.

The cover of "A/An"

Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, MFA ’14

Gutmann-Gonzalez , who teaches creative writing at Clark University, drew inspiration for this poetry chapbook from archival research on the Salem witch trials.

“As state-legislated violence, witch hunts were constitutive to the colonial order, reinforcing what was normal and what aberrant,” observes the publisher, End of the Line Press. “Rather than regarding the witch hunts as historical curiosity or speculating to fill the gaps, A/An considers the court examination as poetic form, a hybrid of legal language and lyric utterance.”

As the poet writes in an entry titled “Sarah Good’s Confession”:

“From prosperity I fell: twist of wounded falcon / become stone, petrified midair, silver wing / flits first & fits fist next—is tragedy to fall / or be born down? Neither, seems; tragedy / reserved for kings.”

Unshrinking

An associate professor of philosophy on the Hill, Manne previously penned two books on misogyny: Entitled and Down Girl . Her latest volume , subtitled How to Face Fatphobia , was hailed by the Chicago Review of Books as a “breathtaking work of meticulous research, philosophical rigor, and personal anecdote.”

In it, Manne explores the deeply engrained societal prejudice against being overweight, and the many ways in which it’s damaging—while weaving in her own lifelong struggle to conform to conventional standards of thinness.

The cover of "Unshrinking"

“The straitjacket of fatphobia is a source of pressure and discomfort for most, if not all, of us,” she writes.

“But it makes life even harder when our bodies do not fit within certain rigid confines, which some bodies—including mine—will always strain against and spill over. And much like a straitjacket, fatphobia serves as a powerful social marker: it signals that some bodies should be ignored, disregarded, and mistreated. It marks fat bodies as undeserving of care—and of education, employment, and other basic forms of freedom and opportunity.”

The cover of "Reason to Be Happy"

Reason to Be Happy

Kaushik Basu

In this self-help book , Basu—an economist and the Carl Marks Professor of International Studies on the Hill—argues that the key to contentment lies in logical thinking.

Specifically, he advocates applying game theory (defined as “the art of deductive reasoning in social situations”) to everyday life.

Along the way, he ponders such issues as whether non-rational behavior can sometimes be rational; why it can seem like our friends have more friends than we do; how to book the best available plane seats amid ever-changing options; and more.

“The book, taken in a few pages at a time, should do for the mind what jogging does for the body,” he writes in the intro.

“We go jogging not because it generates output or income, but to enhance our physical well-being so that we can be more effective when we do everything else. Likewise, logic and game theory can help train our minds, so that when there’s something we need, we can get it more effectively.”

Ugly White People

Stephanie Li, MFA ’04, PhD ’05

In this scholarly book accessible to general readers, Li explores the work of such authors as Dave Eggers and J.D. Vance, “as they grapple with whiteness as its own construct rather than a wrongly assumed norm,” according to the publisher, University of Minnesota Press.

Li is on the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, where she holds an endowed professorship in English.

Her previous books include biographies of writers Toni Morrison, MA ’55, and Zora Neale Hurston.

The cover of "Ugly White People"

“Revealing white recognition of the ugly forms whiteness can take, Stephanie Li examines the tension between acknowledging whiteness as an identity built on domination and the failure to remedy inequalities that have proliferated from this founding injustice,” the publisher says, noting the book poses questions “about the nature and future of whiteness [that] are vital to understanding contemporary race relations in America.”

To submit your book for consideration, email cornellians@cornell.edu . Please note that to be included in our listings of new titles, books must be recently published by a conventional publisher—not self published, pay-to-publish, publish on demand, or similar—and be of interest to a general audience. Books not featured will be forwarded to Class Notes.

Published February 22, 2024

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Juniper Literary Festival 2024

Celebrating 60 years of the umass mfa for poets & writers. all events are free and open to the public., friday, april 5, 2024 herter hall, 231.

3:30pm: Editor Chat with Anjali Singh

6pm: Visiting Faculty Reading with Hannah Brooks-Motl & Bianca Stone

7pm: Reception

8pm: LiveLit (current student reading)

Saturday, April 6, 2024 Commonwealth Honors College Events Hall

3:30pm: Writer/Editor Chat with Sarah Ghazal Ali & Carey Salerno of Alice James Books

6pm: MFA Alumni Reading with Yvette Ndlovu, Sarah Ali, Eric Baus, and Susan Straight

8pm: Open Mic

The Juniper Literary Festival is produced by the University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA for Poets and Writers and the Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action. The Festival is also supported by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the UMass English Department and the UMass Arts Council.

Sarah Ghazal Ali

Sarah Ghazal Ali is the author of THEOPHANIES (Alice James Books, 2024), selected as the Editors' Choice for the 2022 Alice James Award. A 2022 Djanikian Scholar and winner of The Sewanee Review Poetry Prize, her poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Pleiades, The Yale Review, Poem-a-Day, Guernica, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. A Stadler Fellow, Sarah is the poetry editor for West Branch. She has received fellowships and residencies from Tin House, the Stadler Center for Poetry and Literary Arts, the Hambidge Center, the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Community of  Writers, and others. She holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was a Juniper and MFA Fellow, and currently lives in the Bay Area, California. 

E Baus

Eric Baus is the author of five books of poetry: How I Became a Hum (Octopus Books, 2020) The Tranquilized Tongue, (City Lights 2014), Scared Text, winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry (Center for Literary Publishing, 2011), Tuned Droves (Octopus Books, 2009), and The To Sound, winner of the Verse Prize (Wave Books, 2004). He is also the author of several chapbooks, most recently The Rain Of The Ice (Above/Ground Press 2014) and Euphorbia (Above/Ground Press 2019). His poems have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, and Finnish. He is a graduate of the PhD program in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Denver as well as the MFA program for poets and writers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He teaches literature and creative writing at Regis University’s Mile High MFA program in Denver, which he co-directs with poet Andrea Rexilius.

Hannah Brooks-Motl

Hannah Brooks-Motl was born and raised in Wisconsin. She is the author of the poetry collections The New Years (2014), M (2015), and Earth (2019). Her poetry, essays, and criticism have appeared in the Best American Experimental Writing, the Cambridge Literary Review, the Chicago Review, Modernism/modernity, and in edited collections from Cambridge University Press and Wesleyan University Press. With Stephanie Burt she helped edit Randall Jarrell on W.H. Auden (2005). She earned an MFA from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and PhD from the University of Chicago. She lives in western Massachusetts.

YN

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean sarungano (storyteller). Her debut short story collection Drinking from Graveyard Wells (University Press of Kentucky, Spring 2023) was selected for the 2021 UPK New Poetry & Prose Series. She received her MFA at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 2023. She has taught at Clarion West Writers Workshop online and earned her BA at Cornell University. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Tin House Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers Workshop, and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. She received the 2017 Cornell University George Harmon Coxe Award for Poetry selected by Sally Wen Mao, and was the 2020 fiction winner of Columbia Journal’s Womxn History Month Special Issue and the 2021 Black Warrior Review Fiction Contest winner selected by K-Ming Chang. She is the co-founder of the Voodoonauts Summer Workshop for Black SFF writers. Her work has been anthologized in African Risen (Tordotcom Publishing, 2022) and has appeared or is forthcoming in F&SF, Tor.com, FANTASY Magazine, Columbia Journal, Fiyah Literary Magazine, Mermaids Monthly, and Kweli Journal.

CS

Carey Salerno serves as the executive director & publisher of Alice James Books where she has been dedicated to broadening the spectrum of the American poetic voice since 2008. She is the author of Tributary (2021), Shelter (2009), and a co-editor of Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books (2013). She serves as co-chair for LitNet: The Literary Network and teaches publishing arts and poetry writing for the University of Maine at Farmington. Salerno is a frequent guest of writing programs, conferences, and festivals, where she conducts consultations and delivers talks on publishing arts, editing, poetry, manuscript compilation, and other topics. You may find her essays, poems–and articles and interviews regarding her literary and publishing work–in print and online, including in NPR, Poets & Writers, and American Poetry Review.

AS

Anjali Singh started her career in publishing in 1996 as a literary scout. Formerly Editorial Director at Other Press, she has also worked as an editor at Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Vintage Books. She is best known for having championed Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis after stumbling across it on a visit to Paris. She has always been drawn to the thrill of discovering new writers and among the literary novelists whose careers she helped launch are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Samantha Hunt, Preeta Samarasan and Saleem Haddad. As an agent she represents Bridgett Davis, author of the acclaimed memoir The World According to Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers ; Susan Abulhawa, bestselling author of Mornings in Jenin and Against the Loveless World ; Nawaaz Ahmed, author of the PEN-Faulkner finalist Radiant Fugitives; Mai Al-Nakib, author of An Unlasting Home and Rachel Harper, author of The Other Mother . Her graphic novel list includes Rebecca Hall and Hugo Martinez’ Wake: The Hidden History of Women-led Slave Revolts , Rhea Ewing’s Fine: A Comic About Gender , Gillian Goerz’s two Shirley and Jamila books and Deena Mohamed’s Shubeik Lubeik as well as new and forthcoming works by Gillian Goerz, Steenz, Salman Toor, Fouad Mezher and Tessa Hulls. She grew up between New Delhi and Alexandria, VA, graduated from Brown University and holds a diploma in French language and literature from the Sorbonne. She is a devoted New Yorker but still manages to spend a great deal of time in Rhode Island.

SS

Susan Straight is the author of several novels, including the national bestseller Highwire Moon , a finalist for the National Book Award, and A Million Nightingales , a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, as well as the memoir In the Country of Women , named a best book of 2019 by NPR and Real Simple . Her most recent novel Mecca , was published March 2022 by FSG. Mecca was a national bestseller, a finalist for The Kirkus Prize, and named a best novel of the year by The Washington Post and NPR, as well as a Top Ten California Book by the New York Times, and winner of the Southwest Book of the Year for Fiction. She is the recipient of the Edgar Award for Best Short Story, the O. Henry Prize, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her stories and essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, Harper’s , and elsewhere. She was born and continues to live in Riverside, California, with her family, where she serves as Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.

Bianca Stone

Bianca Stone  is the author of the poetry collections What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022) which won the 2023 Vermont Book Award in Poetry; The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018), Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Octopus Books and Tin House, 2014) and collaborated with Anne Carson on the illuminated version of Antigonick (New Directions, 2012). Her work has appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The Nation. She teaches classes on poetry and poetic study at the Ruth Stone House (501c3) where she is editor-at-large for ITERANT magazine and host of Ode & Psyche Podcast. 

RM

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J. Robert Lennon portrait

Writer J. Robert Lennon, the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences, has previously played around with genre elements – from mazy, existential mysteries to dystopian satire – but his new novel, “Hard Girls,” is his first straight-up thriller.

Lennon chases down literary thrills in new series

By david nutt, cornell chronicle.

For writer J. Robert Lennon , the plot was hatched on a walk with his wife.

He’d been enjoying the work of literary writers who had recently turned to crime fiction – Colson Whitehead, Dan Chaon, his friend Adam O’Fallon Price, MFA ’14 – and he realized he was a little jealous of them. After all, Lennon has been an avid reader of the genre his whole life. And, as readers of his eclectic oeuvre know, he loves a literary exercise.

“I joked that I should do a thriller series, and spitballed, off the top of my head, the silliest thing I could think of: badass twin sisters, estranged by a traumatic event in their past, whose mom may or may not have been in the CIA,” said Lennon, the Ann S. Bowers Professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences. “And before I even finished laughing, I was working the angles, trying to figure out how to make something like that plausible, entertaining and emotionally rich.”

Hard Girls book cover

For all its dark subterfuge and espionage hijinks, the heart of Lennon’s book is the relationship between twin sisters Jane and Lila Pool.

The result: “ Hard Girls ,” his 10th novel, published Feb. 20 by Mulholland Books. While in the past Lennon has played around with genre elements – from mazy, existential mysteries to dystopian satire – “Hard Girls” is his first straight-up thriller.

He drew inspiration from classic and contemporary crime writers, among them Lee Child, Tana French, Richard Stark and Patricia Highsmith, plus a few unlikely outliers.

“My joke elevator pitch is that the sisters are Anna and Elsa from ‘Frozen’ crossed with ‘Jack Reacher,’” he said. “The royal family of Arendelle, with fists like frozen turkeys.”

Lennon honored many conventions of the genre – family intrigue, shadowy government operatives, international travel and wild gunplay – putting his own spin on some tropes while bucking against others.

“As much as I love a good police procedural, I didn’t want any cops in this series. They are always just over the horizon, not quite noticing what’s going on,” he said. “And I’m never going to name the music the characters are listening to, or the booze they’re drinking. They like talk radio or silence, and half of them are recovering alcoholics.”

In early drafts, Lennon had to actively strip away some of the overt literariness, but overall, genre distinctions don’t mean all that much to him. It’s all one big sandbox. And his indelible voice – witty and avuncular, playful and accessible – remains intact.

“I wanted this to be a departure, and I tried to make it one, but ultimately it really is recognizable as my work. It’s plottier, but I’ve always liked plot. It’s over the top, but I’ve never been a straight realist,” he said, citing his novels “Broken River” and “Familiar” as kindred works.

For all the dark subterfuge and espionage hijinks, the heart of the book is the relationship between twin sisters Jane and Lila Pool, whose lives splintered in high school and who now follow very different paths. Jane is a suburban mom who does administrative work at a local college. Lila, the wilder sibling, has been AWOL for a decade until she starts sending Jane encrypted messages. The backstory of their early trauma and fracture is braided through their present-day mission to track down their mother while they themselves are pursued by clandestine figures, and their academic father reckons with a mystery of his own.

Part of the fun, Lennon said, was figuring out how far he could delve into the technical aspects of a thriller – the trickery, the tradecraft – without losing sight of what makes the sisters’ relationship special.

“I think when a family is troubled, siblings have to rely on each other more, and can also come to resent each other more,” he said. “The sisters’ terrible mother shaped them as much by her absence as by her presence, and the two women’s personalities formed around different aspects of hers.”

A weird hike

Lennon’s path through publishing has been its own kind of tense thrill ride.

His first two novels, “The Light of Falling Stars” (1997) and “The Funnies” (1999), were published by Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin. Sales were healthy. Reviews were good. His career was off to a promising start.

“I started out when people still thought they might be able to make a living at this,” he said. “I got overhyped a couple of times, then dumped.”

His third novel, “On the Night Plain,” landed at Henry Holt after Riverhead rejected it, but the book had the misfortune of being published in September 2001. (Lennon learned of the terrorist attacks at the beginning of his book tour; he was standing in an airport, wondering why all the flights were cancelled.)

“You have all kinds of failures for reasons you can’t predict,” he once said in an interview. “Your career is not on rails. It’s a weird hike through the wilderness. And you have to kind of enjoy having it even when no one is paying attention to you.”

His hike got even weirder: His fourth novel, “Mailman” (2004), was rejected by Holt and published by W.W. Norton, which accepted his next novel, “Happyland,” only to cancel the book’s publication “over paranoia about lawsuits,” Lennon said.

The darkly comic satire was inspired by the story of American Girl magnate Pleasant Rowland, who controversially gave $40 million to Wells College in Aurora, New York, to revitalize its downtown; many people criticized the gift as a ploy to remake the town in her image. Lennon created a wholly fictionalized world with a very different character at its center, but Norton balked and his agent dropped him.

Happily for “Happyland,” Harper’s Magazine took the rare step of serializing an abridged version of the book across five issues in 2006 – the first time it had done so in 50 years. In 2013, the complete novel was published as an e-book.

After that experience, Lennon began to feel commercial publishing was a waste of time, he said, and since the late 2000s his literary work has been issued by Graywolf, a renowned nonprofit press that he calls “the very greatest of independent publishers.”

“I’ve made less money and been much, much happier,” he said.

It’s a lesson that is hopefully not lost on his students, who have included such literary success stories as Téa Obrect, MFA ’09 and Ling Ma, MFA ’15 .

“I think young writers today are in an excellent position to start unusual careers amidst a flourishing of new small presses,” he said. “There will still be a select few who get a big paycheck and some minor fame, but I think that indies have moved in and brought new life to territory abandoned by the big presses. I hope my students will embrace the artisanal peculiarity of the industry and make writing a labor of love.”

As his publishing trajectory shifted, Lennon’s fiction grew more “ creepy, ‘thrillery’ and fantastical .” But he has not completely abandoned the big publishing houses, nor they him. His new sideline in crime is being published through Mulholland, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group that is known for edgy and quasi-literary mysteries. He’s already putting the finishing touches on the next entry in the series, “Buzz Kill.”

A sense of place

“Hard Girls” marks the return of Nestor, Lennon’s fictional stand-in for Ithaca. Much like the late Alison Lurie ’s Corinth, Nestor serves as a proxy for everything Lennon loves, and sometimes lovingly satirizes, about the town where he has lived for decades.

“My oldest daughter read an early draft and immediately asked, ‘Is this part of the extended J. Robert Lennon literary universe?’” Lennon said. “Place is really important to my fiction, but not in the sense that I want to accurately portray real places … I just want to evoke the sense of a place, fictional or not. To make it feel lived in. ‘Hard Girls’ goes to some places I’ve never actually been, including Panama, rural Missouri and prison, so I watched a lot of YouTube road trip videos and read a lot of testimonials.”

Lennon, who grew up in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, and received his bachelor’s degree and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and University of Montana, respectively, moved to Ithaca in 1997. He and his first wife lived in a house where a notorious local murder had taken place, and they made a living through freelance writing and teaching at regional colleges (Wells, Syracuse University, Ithaca College) and “freeloaded at the local libraries.”

Lennon came to Cornell as a guest lecturer in the Knight Writing Program in 1998. In 2004, he was offered a visiting professorship and taught several undergraduate writing classes. In 2006, he joined the Department of Literatures in English’s Creative Writing Program.

For Lennon, writing and teaching are not separate spheres. They are deeply connected.

“I try to share with students whatever I’m trying to puzzle out in my work, and I learn about my own work trying to help guide theirs,” he said. “You think you’ve seen it all, but you never have – it’s a real delight to encounter new literary problems I’ve never seen before, and to perpetually have to justify to other people why I think something is or isn’t good. Students are always upending what I thought was settled law.”

On top of all of that, he also finds time to edit EPOCH, Cornell’s long-running literary magazine, and he is a longtime musician . As with his writing, his music romps across borders, from indie rock to electronica to the rootsy Americana of the Starry Mountain Sweetheart Band.

Despite the dramatic twists in his career and his evolving aesthetics and interests, Lennon sees a consistent thread running through it all.

“I feel as though I’ve gotten a little less sentimental and cloying, a little more enigmatic and oblique. But I’d like to think there’s an overarching clarity and accessibility to my work,” he said. “I do experiments now and then, but ultimately I’m always singing Nina Simone … ‘I’m just a soul whose intentions are good…oh lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood…’”

Lennon will hold a book launch event Feb. 21, 7 p.m., at Ithaca’s Odyssey Bookstore, 115 W. Green Street.

Media Contact

Abby kozlowski.

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Faculty Workshop | Generative A.I. in a Writing Classroom

2/20/2024 By | Tracy Hamler Carrick

Generative A.I. in a Writing Classroom

The Center for Teaching Innovation and the John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines invite writing instructors across disciplines to come together as a community to discuss strategies for teaching writing in the age of A.I. These workshops are an opportunity to learn more about generative A.I. as it applies to writing courses; hear what other instructors have tried; ask questions and share ideas; and participate in the co-creation of a generative A.I. toolkit for writing courses. We encourage you to sign up for and attend both sessions, as they build upon each other, but you can also attend just one. Please bring your laptop to both sessions.

  • Register here:  Thursday, February 15, 2024, 2:00 - 3:15 p.m., in person.
  • Description: In Part 1, we will discuss what generative A.I. can do and how writing instructors and students have been using these tools. Short presentations showcasing generative A.I.-related strategies will kick off a group working session, followed by a larger discussion that will set the stage for the second session. 
  • Register here:  Thursday, February 22, 2024, 2:00 - 3:15 p.m., in person.  
  • Description: In Part 2, we will focus on brainstorming and co-creating a generative A.I. Toolkit for writing courses, so that everyone can leave with ideas to implement in future class sessions. 

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Cti workshops | generative a.i. in a writing classroom.

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2024 Peer-Tutor Writing Center Conference

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  2. M.F.A. in Creative Writing Faculty

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  3. Fellowship supports MFA creative writing student Yessica Martinez

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  4. M.F.A. in Creative Writing

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  5. Fellowship supports MFA creative writing student Yessica Martinez

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  6. Meet the professor behind Cornell’s new creative writing MFA

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  3. WORKSHOP ACADEMIC WRITING CLINIC

  4. Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program Info Session

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COMMENTS

  1. MFA Program in Creative Writing

    The Creative Writing Program offers the MFA degree with a concentration in either poetry or fiction. Students pursue intensive study with distinguished faculty, participate in a graduate writing workshop and a teaching assistantship, and complete a book-length manuscript. The program is small, flexible, and generous with funding and support.

  2. Creative Writing M.F.A. (Ithaca)

    Learn about the M.F.A. degree in Creative Writing offered by the department of Literatures in English at Cornell University, with concentrations in poetry or fiction. Find out the requirements, financial support, teaching experience, and Special Committee for this program.

  3. Creative Writing

    Ishion Hutchinson W.E.B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities Academic Interests: Creative Writing Postcolonial and Anglophone J. Robert Lennon Ann S. Bowers Professor of English Editor, EPOCH Literary Magazine Academic Interests: Creative Writing Valzhyna Mort Associate Professor Academic Interests: Creative Writing Ernesto Quiñonez

  4. Procedural Guide for MFA in Creative Writing Students

    The Creative Writing Program offers the MFA degree, with a concentration in either poetry or fiction. MFA students pursue intensive study with distinguished faculty committed to creative and intellectual achievement. Each year the department enrolls only eight MFA students, four in each concentration.

  5. Graduate Study

    The Creative Writing Program offers the MFA degree, with a concentration in either poetry or fiction. MFA students pursue intensive study with distinguished faculty committed to creative and intellectual achievement. Learn more about the MFA in Creative Writing PhD in English Language & Literature

  6. MFA Timeline

    Please see the MFA in Creative Writing Procedural Guide for more details. Philip H. Freund '29 Teaching Fellowship Lectureship Year 1 Fall Teach 2 courses (1 section each): First -Year Writing Seminar

  7. Time and sanctuary: Writing program shapes promising voices

    Now a graduate student in Cornell's Creative Writing Program, he's still writing stories, but in a new place - Ithaca - and with a new purpose: finding the language to write about war in a meaningful way. "In journalism in a war, the focus is eventually on numbers," Rafiq, MFA '21, says. "One body, two bodies.

  8. Cornell University Fully Funded MFA in Creative Writing

    Cornell University Fully Funded MFA in Creative Writing Cornell University Cornell University, based in Ithaca, New York, offers a two-years of fully funded MFA in creative writing program. This Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree concentration in either poetry or fiction.

  9. Meet the professor behind Cornell's new creative writing MFA

    In that the Iowa Writers' Workshop - which in 1936 offered the world's first creative writing master's in fine arts degree - is full-residency, Cornell expects to attract a different audience ...

  10. Cornell University

    Graduate Program Director Helena Viramontes Director of Creative Writing 250 Goldwin Smith Hall Department of English Ithaca New York, United States 14850. Each year the department enrolls eight students, four in fiction and four in poetry. Our small size allows us to offer a generous financial support package which fully funds every student.

  11. Master of Fine Arts in Creative Visual Arts

    The two-year Master of Fine Arts in Creative Visual Arts program is an intensive, intimate, and diverse community that supports both interdisciplinary and medium-specific practices, augmented by access to the breadth of fields of study across the university. Students work closely with a special advisory committee consisting of Department of Art ...

  12. Literatures in English Department Faculty

    Daniel R. Schwarz. Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English Literature & Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow. Academic Interests: 20th and 21st Century British. Cultural Studies. Literary Theory.

  13. Fully Funded MFA Programs in Creative Writing

    Cornell University offers a fully funded MFA program in Creative Writing. As part of our series How to Fully Fund Your Master's Degree, here is a list of universities that have fully funded MFA programs in creative writing.A Master's of Fine Arts in creative writing can lead to a career as a professional writer, in academia, and more.

  14. The 10 Best Creative Writing MFA Programs in the US

    University of Oregon (Eugene, OR) Visitor7, Knight Library, CC BY-SA 3.0. Starting off the list is one of the oldest and most venerated Creative Writing programs in the country, the MFA at the University of Oregon. Longtime mentor, teacher, and award-winning poet Garrett Hongo directs the program, modeling its studio-based approach to one-on ...

  15. M.F.A. in Creative Writing Faculty

    M.F.A. in Creative Writing Faculty | Cornell College Faculty and Staff Cornell faculty, rotating guest faculty, and a diverse slate of visiting writers, publishers, and agents who will attend residencies, guarantee you the opportunity to learn from a wide range of styles and creative approaches.

  16. MFA Fall Application Deadline Extended until March 1

    He switched to writing in English in 2012, and has published short stories and essays in The New York Times, The Guardian, London Review of Books, Massachusetts Review, Asymptote, openDemocracy. He earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Queensland in Australia, and an MFA in creative writing from NYU.

  17. EPOCH Magazine

    About EPOCH EPOCH publishes fiction, poetry, essays, comics, and graphic art. In continuous publication since 1947, the magazine is edited by students and faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing, in Cornell University's Department of Literatures in English.

  18. MFA in Creative Writing Graduation Reading

    The Department of Literatures in English Program in Creative Writing proudly presents the 2023 MFA in Creative Writing Graduation Reading!

  19. Cornell University

    At Cornell, teaching is considered an integral part of training for a career in writing. The Department of English, in conjunction with the First-Year Writing Program, offers excellent training for beginning teachers and varied and interesting teaching in the university-wide First-Year Writing Program. These are not conventional freshman ...

  20. The 10 Best MFA Programs in Creative Writing

    A Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing degree program can offer all of these things. ... Cornell University's MFA program is a two-year program that offers students the opportunity to editorial train and teach writing seminars as part of their degree. The program also offers a joint MFA PhD through the Creative Writing and English departments.

  21. Creative Writing

    The College Departments and Programs Directory Student Life Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Leadership Awards Facilities Creative Writing With a minor in creative writing, you'll take five courses in creative writing, literature and cultural studies. You can concentrate in a single genre (fiction or poetry), or freely study both.

  22. MFA in Creative Writing Reading Series

    215 N Cayuga Street Dewitt Mall Featuring prose and poetry by students and lecturers of the MFA in Creative Writing Program. Friday, October 14 @ 5pm Mackenzie Berry, Poet Rogelio Juárez, Fiction Writer Imogen Osborne, Poet Courtney Michelle Raisin, Fiction Writer Friday, October 28 @ 5pm India Sada Hackle, Poet Vivian Hu, Fiction Writer

  23. MFA in Creative Writing First-Year Reading Series

    Fridays, 10/27, 11/10, 11/17 at 5pm Buffalo Street Books 215 N Cayuga Street Dewitt Mall Featuring prose and poetry by students and lecturers of the MFA in Creative Writing Program. Em Setzer, Poet Em Setzer is a poet and translator from Maryland. They are a graduate from Bard College, where they studied Poetry and Classics, and were awarded the William Frauenfelder Translation Prize.

  24. MFA creative writing program : r/Cornell

    Oh nice 👍 ya, if you have the time and resources then you may as well apply if you're interested. Almost any humanities program (including the English PhD at Cornell) will accept students directly from undergraduate. The usual career path is to become a writer, in one form or another, but yes, many folks teach with an MFA.

  25. Your February 2024 Reads

    A/An. Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez, MFA '14. Gutmann-Gonzalez, who teaches creative writing at Clark University, drew inspiration for this poetry chapbook from archival research on the Salem witch trials. "As state-legislated violence, witch hunts were constitutive to the colonial order, reinforcing what was normal and what aberrant," observes the publisher, End of the Line Press.

  26. Juniper Literary Festival 2024 : English : UMass Amherst

    He teaches literature and creative writing at Regis University's Mile High MFA program in Denver, which he co-directs with poet Andrea Rexilius. Hannah Brooks-Motl was born and raised in Wisconsin. She is the author of the poetry collections The New Years (2014), M (2015), and Earth (2019).

  27. MFA in Creative Writing First-Year Reading Series

    Buffalo Street Books 215 N Cayuga Street Dewitt Mall Featuring prose and poetry by students and lecturers of the MFA in Creative Writing Program. Ngoc Pham, Poet Mathew Bettencourt, Fiction Writer

  28. Lennon chases down literary thrills in new series

    Lennon came to Cornell as a guest lecturer in the Knight Writing Program in 1998. In 2004, he was offered a visiting professorship and taught several undergraduate writing classes. In 2006, he joined the Department of Literatures in English's Creative Writing Program. For Lennon, writing and teaching are not separate spheres.

  29. Faculty Workshop

    Senior Lecturer and Director of the Writing Workshop & Graduate Writing Service M101 McGraw Hall and 174 Rockefeller Hall Ithaca, NY 14853 United States Email John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines 607-255-2280