The MFA Program at Wash U is a two-year program where approximately thirty students are working toward MFA degrees in fiction, poetry and creative nonfiction. Entry into the program is highly selective—out of hundreds of applications received, we accept only twelve to fifteen students per year (admitting an equal number in fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction). Our students come from all over the U.S. and around the world. Rather than foreground a particular aesthetic approach, we’re interested in bringing together and nurturing a small group of talented writers with a diversity of literary interests and styles.
Our two-year program is rigorous and challenging but fosters a close-knit community of support that continues long after degrees have been granted. At the heart of the program are our core genre workshops and multi-genre craft courses, plus individual attention from faculty and access to many other courses in the College of Arts & Sciences, including the English Department’s literature courses. All students in the program are equally and fully funded, and all students are mentored while leading two introductory creative writing classes in their own genre during their second year. We buttress all this with a robust events series, including our Visiting Hurst Professor Series, which brings to campus one acclaimed writer in each of the three genres each semester. During their visit, the Hurst Professor gives a public talk and reading in addition to meeting one-on-one with the MFA students in their genre, providing personalized feedback on student work. Recent and scheduled Hurst Visitors include Hernan Diaz, Renee Gladman, and Carmen Maria Machado in fiction; Hanif Abdurraqib, Amy Leach, and Paul Lisicky in creative nonfiction; and Camille Dungy, Sandra Lim, and Karen Solie in poetry.
Collectively, our world-renowned faculty have written, translated, and edited books in all genres They’ve published work in magazines, journals, and newspapers including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Granta, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, and they’ve won fellowships and awards including Guggenheims, Whiting Awards, the Yale Younger Poets Prize, Hodder Fellowships, MacDowell Fellowships, NEA Fellowships, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and teaching awards, among others. Our program is geared toward developing our students’ full potential as writers through core genre workshops, craft classes, individual meetings and an event series that brings renowned national and international writers to campus. Our close partnerships with Dorothy, a publishing project and the Modern Literature Collection at Olin Library provide a multitude of additional opportunities for our students.
Our MFA alumni, meanwhile have gone on to publish an astounding array of books with both commercial and independent publishers. They have also received awards such as the National Book Award, the Whiting Award, the Shirley Jackson Award for short fiction, MacDowell Fellowships, the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the PEN/ Faulkner Award for Fiction, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowships, and many more. Here’s a brief sampling of recent and forthcoming books from our alumni: Katya Apekina’s Mother Doll, Ariana Benson’s Black Pastoral, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People, Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain, Rav Grewal-Kök’s The Snares, Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s Blessings, Rickey Laurentiis’s Death of the First Idea, Asjylyn Loder’s The Good Stuff Doesn’t Break, Gabe Montesanti’s Drag Thing, JoAnna Novak’s Contradiction Days, Lydia Paar’s The Exit Is the Entrance, Paul Tran’s All the Flowers Kneeling, Phillip B. Williams’s Ours, and S Yarberry’s The Robert Poems.
We’d be happy to tell you more about WashU’s creative writing MFA. Feel free to contact the program director, Danielle Dutton (ddutton@wustl.edu) or the assistant director, Shannon Rabong (scrabong@wustl.edu), with your questions.
