Creative Writing MFA Program
Our Masters of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing--ranked fourth among the nation's top twenty creative writing programs by U.S. News and World Report (1997) - and among the nation's top five in the Atlantic Monthly's summer Fiction issue 2007 - is a small, two-year course of graduate study. Of the 630-some applications we received last year, we admitted 5 poets and 7 fiction writers. Many of our graduates go on to successful careers in writing and teaching. Several writers from recent graduating classes have distinguished themselves, our Program, and the University by winning important literary prizes (The Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, The New York Times Notable Books list, the Pushcart Series, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, the Yale Younger Poets Series prize, the Barnard Women Poet's Prize, The Prix de Rome, etc.) and have landed major book contracts in recent years. Two of our recent graduates, one in poetry and one in fiction, will be Stegner Fellows at Stanford University in fall 2008.
The writing faculty includes Ann Beattie, Sydney Blair, John Casey, Elizabeth Denton, Rita Dove, Deborah Eisenberg, Jeb Livingood, Debra Nystrom, Gregory Orr, Lisa Russ Spaar, Christopher Tilghman, and Charles Wright.
Visiting poets, novelists, and story writers have included Seamus Heaney, Anne Carson, Francine Prose, Kevin Young, Jennifer Egan, Renate Wood, John Ashbery, David St. John, Robert Stone, Charles Simic, Ellen Bryant Voigt, Mary Oliver, Stanley Kunitz, Howard Moss, David Young, Carolyn Chute, Madison Bell, Richard Bausch, Gerald Stern, Grace Paley, Tomas Transtromer, Louise Shivers, Ellen Douglas, Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, Michael Ryan, Mark Strand, Robert Hemenway, Louise Gluck, William Stafford, Amy Clampitt, Susan Shreve, Ron Carlson, Carolyn Kizer, Henry Taylor, Josephine Humphreys, Jamaica Kincaid, Susanna Moore, Derek Walcott, James Salter, James Merrill, Peter Matthiessen, Marilyn Waniek, Mary Oliver, W. S. Merwin, Lorrie Moore, Marianne Wiggins, Margot Livesey, James Tate, Mark Doty, Charles Baxter, Allan Gurganus, Alice Fulton, Elton Glaser, Lydia Davis, Jane Mead, Don Lee and Amy Hempel.
Recent MFA graduates' first books are profiled in The University of Virginia Magazine (Winter 2007): "Five Emerging Writers."