Creative Writing MFA Program

Our Masters of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing is a small, two-year course of graduate study. While writing program rankings are admittedly subjective, we have consistently done well, ranked third in the nation by an article in Poets & Writers (2009), rated among the nation's top five in the Atlantic Monthly's summer fiction issue (2007), and placed fourth among the nation's top twenty creative writing programs by U.S. News and World Report (1997). Of the 630-some applications we received in 2009, 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. of our graduates, one in poetry and one in fiction, were Stegner Fellows at Stanford University in fall of 2008.

The writing faculty includes Ann Beattie, Sydney Blair, John Casey, Elizabeth Denton, Rita Dove, Deborah Eisenberg, Paul Guest, Jeb Livingood, Debra Nystrom, Gregory Orr, Lisa Russ Spaar, and Christopher Tilghman.

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, Amy Hempel, Lynn Tillman, Elizabeth Alexander, Claire Messud, and Tony Hoagland.

Recent MFA graduates' first books are profiled in The University of Virginia Magazine (Winter 2007): "Five Emerging Writers."