Creative Writing

The Creative Writing Program offers a Masters of Fine Arts degree. The creative writing core faculty are well-regarded practitioners in contemporary fiction, memoir, and poetry. Our professors publish frequently, both with top commercial houses (Pantheon, Doubleday, Viking) and prestigious non-profits (Graywolf, University of Chicago, B.O.A. Editions). They write bestsellers (Julie Schumacher’s 2014 comic novel Dear Committee Members) and works that push genre boundaries (Douglas Kearney's Photoshop poems).

Honors awarded to creative writing faculty include the Thurber Prize for American Humor, the Cy Twombly Poetry Award, Guggenheim, NEA, and PEN Fellowships, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, and several Minnesota Book Awards. Poet and flash fiction/nonfiction writer Ray Gonzalez has been recognized with two lifetime achievement awards for his contributions to Latino Literature, the latest in 2015 from the national writers’ collective Con Tinta.

Creative writing faculty are dedicated teachers, as evidenced by multiple University and College of Liberal Arts teaching awards. They are also dedicated readers, publishing book reviews (poet Peter Campion received the Editors Award for Reviewing from Poetry magazine) and editing leading journals or series (Ray Gonzalez has been the Poetry Editor at The Bloomsbury Review since 1980).

With the Department of English now offering an undergraduate minor in creative writing in addition to the program’s longtime MFA degree in creative writing, we are pleased to have added four new professors in the past eight years: V.V. Ganeshananthan, author of the novel Love Marriage, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Book; Douglas Kearney, author of several poetry and essay collections; Kathryn Nuernberger, also a poet and essayist; and Kim Todd, author of three creative nonfiction books with an environmental science slant. Two more new faculty members will start in fall 2022.

Read interviews with our outstanding faculty.