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Helpful links, master of fine arts in creative writing.

• The Graduate School

What You’ll Study

Take your passion to the next level. Hone your craft without uprooting your life. A Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing, like master’s degrees in other creative arts, is a studio arts degree that focuses on practice and craft and provides an immersion in the discipline of writing. We bring together graduate students for intensive residencies with their award-winning instructors and fellow writers.

Then, we connect students and teachers online through the rest of the year as they work on their writing from wherever they live. Here are a few aspects of the MFA program that set us apart. 

• Experience teaching from instructors who are both acclaimed writers and experienced mentors.   Over 50 of America’s top literary talents, with well-established teaching experience. 
• Receive focused attention with our 4:1 student-to-faculty ratio.  It’s true, we hire an instructor for every four students we enroll. You’ll also have the chance for 1:1 tutorials directly with our expert faculty.
• Gain support beyond graduation. Annual professional development events for writers and continuing staff support. 
• Immersive travel experiences. Every year in July we travel with a group of students and instructors to one of three South American cities: Buenos Aires, Argentina; Santiago, Chile; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Plus, we’ve taken groups on visits here in the United States as well, including a recent trip to meet with top literary agents and editors at the New Yorker – at the publication’s invitation.

Program Overview

Duration: 2 years, with options to accelerate or lengthen

Credit Hours: 52

Modalities: Low Residency, Asynchronous with 2 weeks in-person per year

Concentrations: Fiction, including Young Adult; Nonfiction; Poetry; Writing for Stage & Screen

Distance Learning

In the distance learning segments on either side of the residencies, students make monthly submissions of their creative writing and read and write in preparation for live seminars on elements of craft.

How Can You Use This Degree?

In the last five years… 

• our alumni have published over 100 books
• 70% of alumni have been published in magazines or journals
• 64% of alumni have gone on to teach
• 48% of alumni have gone on to hold MFA-relevant professional positions

Notable Works by Recent Alumni

• Maria, Maria (W.W. Norton 2022), by Marytza Rubio ’16. Long-listed for the 2022 National Book Award. 
• Perpetual West (Algonquin 2022), by Mesha Maren ’14. Made the 2022 “most anticipated books” lists of at least 6 publications including Oprah Daily, LitHub, and The Millions. Her debut novel, Sugar Run , was a New York Times Editor’s Choice. She joined the Creative Writing faculty at Duke in 2019. 
• Ghost in a Black Girl’s Throat (Red Hen Press 2021) by Khalisa Rae ’16, featured in Publisher’s Weekly, Book Riot, and The Root. 

Program Contact

Samantha Willingham

Program Coordinator, MFA

[email protected] 704-971-5963

Meet Your Professors

Our program has more than 30 highly acclaimed writers as instructors, including Ada Limón, the Poet Laureate of the United States.

In 2022, Ada Limón joined the select list of 24 distinguished poets who have been named the Poet Laureate of the United States by the Library of Congress. Limón has taught in the Queens MFA program since 2014.

Stay Active Outside of the Classroom

• Southern Review of Books Sponsored by the Queens MFA program, this online literary review and event series is staffed predominantly by Queens MFA alumni. 
• Qu: A Literary Magazine A national print and online publication staffed entirely by MFA students. 
• Annual Professional Development Weekend for Writers An event that offers MFA students and alumni an opportunity to reconnect with their fellow writers in social events and seminars on the craft and the business of creative writing.  We also offer the opportunity to participate in small workshops and individual conferences with influential agents, editors, and professional writers. 
• Presence at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Annual Conference An informal gathering of Queens MFA students, alumni, and faculty attending the AWP conference, attended by more than 10,000 writers every year. 

Message from the Director

At Queens, you will find dedicated professionals committed to helping you take your work to the next level. This is a program designed to help you to pursue your passion, write what you most want to write, and bring your work to its highest artistic achievement.

A benefit of the Queens workshop model is you have more writers looking at your work during your time with us, you have more opportunity to advance your own critical skills, and you have every chance to build a writing community for yourself that extends well beyond your degree.

But Queens is not only a workshop program; it’s also full of individual, personalized mentoring. Students choose between the workshop model or a one-to-one tutorial model each and every term. All students, regardless of their choice, will have time to discuss with their instructor (a different one each semester) their literary development and aspirations. Join us on campus or travel with us internationally. Or both! Get real editorial experience working on our literary magazine and contributing to the Southern Review of Books. 

Beyond graduation, we bring editors and agents from New York and California to meet with our alumni in five-person groups. Our staff will help you access jobs in teaching and writing, should that be something you’re interested in exploring.

Consider what makes Queens so distinctive: our low student-to-faculty ratio, our pioneering model that utilizes mentoring and workshop approaches, our alumni curriculum, and more than fifty wonderful and illustrious instructors who teach in our program.

We look forward to hearing from you!

All the best,

Fred Leebron MFA Program Director

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Queens University of Charlotte

North carolina, united states.

The Queens University MFA Program offers low-residency programs in Charlotte, North Carolina and in Latin America. The Charlotte program offers a one week residency on campus in January and May; our Latin America program offers a two week residency experience in July of each year rotating among Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Rio de Janeiro. In addition to rigorous academic components, the residencies in both programs offer both formal and informal contact between faculty and students.

In both programs, over the course of two years students focus on a specific genre—either fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, or writing for stage and screen. In addition to the residencies, each semester includes an online workshop (in the Charlotte program) where students share their writing with three or four other students and a faculty mentor for that semester, or tutorial (in the Latin American program), where students work one-on-one with the faculty mentor.

Students also engage in extensive reading for a series craft seminars at the upcoming residency, and, in the case of the Latin America program, cultural seminars tailored to the residency city. Over these four semesters of course work, students develop material for the thesis, a book-length manuscript of original work. At the end of two years, MFA candidates finish the program by returning to campus or the third Latin American city for a graduating residency, in which candidates present their theses, offer a public reading from their work, and lead their fellow students in a craft seminar that has been developed with a faculty advisor.

Support Beyond Graduation

Because all of the faculty and staff of the MFA program are also working writers, we understand that matriculation in an MFA program is only one phase in a writer's life, and a brief one at that. We also know that if an MFA program is about educating you on how to create your best art, there are sometimes a different set of skills required to share that art with a larger audience, sustain a productive writing life and stay in touch with a community of writers. With that in mind, we offer several different programs designed to develop the writer's career beyond the MFA. These include annual alumni gatherings, opportunities to workshop with agent and editors, and an innovative program which pairs a writer with a manuscript draft with an editor from a major publishing house.

Contact Information

MFA in Creative Writing 1900 Selwyn Avenue Charlotte North Carolina, United States 28274 Phone: (704) 337-2499 Email: [email protected] www.queens.edu/mfa

Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing +

Undergraduate program director, master of fine arts in creative writing +, graduate program director.

The paradoxical truth about writing is that it demands both solitude--the time and space to think and write--and community to sustain that work too. The low-residency MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte is expressly designed to meet both of those demands. A community of writers-in-residence and on-line, the Queens MFA program brings together experienced and emerging writers for intensive seven-day residencies on campus twice a year and connects students and teachers on-line throughout the rest of the year as they work on their writing in the privacy and comfort of their own homes. It is aimed at committed writers who want to hone their craft without uprooting their lives.

In keeping with Queens' long-standing commitment to excellence in teaching, the MFA program offers an intensely personalized course of study, with a student-teacher ratio that never exceeds four-to-one. This emphasis on teaching is embodied through daily one-on-one contact between instructors and students and through daily small group contact - with formal written comment on students' work--during the on-campus residencies and through continual Internet contact in the periods between residencies.

The focus of each semester is the writing workshop itself, which begins during the residency and continues on-line for the remainder of the semester. Under the direction of an accomplished faculty leader, each student must produce six submissions during the semester (two during the residency and four in the distance learning component of the semester) and must comment as well on the work that he or she receives from the two or three other students in the workshop. This on-line workshop is specifically designed to insure that all participants experience a sense of a larger writing community throughout the entire semester, not just during the residency.

During residencies, students also attend daily seminars. Craft Seminars focus on technical and aesthetic issues relevant to the student's genre, while Gateway Seminars cross genre lines to explore key issues of the writer's vocation, including "Reading as a Writer," "Literary Reviewing," "Shaping the Book," and "Teaching Creative Writing." At each May residency, all MFA students participate in a Core Seminar that investigates the broader cultural contexts of creative writing, including basic tenets of contemporary literary theory and the role of the writer in a culture of images.

Each residency also features panel presentations on professional issues, such as submitting work for publication and preparing book proposals.

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing - Latin America +

We are pleased to announce Queens' latest opportunity for writers seeking to further develop their craft while being immersed in, and inspired, by the multifaceted culture of Latin America.

Each academic year of this two year low-residency program begins with an annual 15-day residency abroad, rotating annually among Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro and Santiago. In addition to the program's creative writing curriculum in fiction, young adult, creative nonfiction, and poetry, these residencies include a cultural curriculum specific to each city.

The residencies are followed by two consecutive semesters of distance learning. The program ends with a third and final graduating residency.

We offer study in five genres: fiction, young adult, creative nonfiction, poetry and writing for stage and screen.

Website: http://www.queens.edu/Academics-and-Schools/Schools-and-Colleges/College-of-Arts-and-Sciences/Academic-Departments/MFA---Creative-Writing-Program/Creative-Writing---Latin-America.html

Mary Gaitskill (Fiction)

Mary Gaitskill is the author of the novels “Two Girls, Fat and Thin” and “Veronica,” as well as the story collections “Bad Behavior,” “Because They Wanted To” and “Don't Cry.” Her story “Secretary” was the basis for the feature film of the same name. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. In 2002 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction.

Francisco Goldman (Fiction/Creative Nonfiction)

Francisco Goldman has published four novels and one book of non-fiction. His most recent novel is Say Her Name, published in April 2011. His books have been published in 16 languages. The Long Night of White Chickens won the American Academy’s Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction; his other novels have been finalists for several prizes, including The Pen/Faulkner and The International IMPAC Dublin literary award.

Manuel Gonzalez (Fiction)

Manuel Gonzales is the author of THE MINIATURE WIFE AND OTHER STORIES published by Riverhead Books and the forthcoming novel, THE REGIONAL OFFICE IS UNDER ATTACK!, also to be published by Riverhead Books. He has published fiction and nonfiction in Esquire, The Believer, McSweeney's, Guernica, Virginia Quarterly Review, and One Story Magazine.

Ada Limón (Poetry)

Ada Limón is the author of three collections of poetry. Her most recent book Sharks in the Rivers (Milkweed Editions, 2010) was named one of the top 30 books of 2010 by Coldfront Magazine. Her second collection This Big Fake World was the winner of the 2005 Pearl Poetry Prize, while her first collection Lucky Wreck, was selected by Jean Valentine as the winner of the 2005 Autumn House Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals including, Harvard Review, TriQuarterly Online, Poetry Daily, and The New Yorker. She has received fellowships from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry.

Orlando Menes (Poetry)

Orlando Menes was born in Lima, Perú, to Cuban parents but has lived most of his life in the U.S. Since 2000 he has taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame, where he currently directs the Creative Writing Program. His third poetry collection, Fetish, won the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in Fall 2013. He is also the author of Furia (Milkweed, 2005) and Rumba atop the Stones (Peepal Tree, 2001).

Héctor Tobar (Fiction, Nonfiction)

Hector Tobar is a Los Angeles born novelist and journalist. He is the author of three books. Most recently, The Barbarian Nurseries, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and named a New York Times Notable Book in 2011 and won the California Book Award Gold Medal for Fiction.He was also part of the reporting team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots.He is the author of Translation Nation: Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States (Riverhead Books) and The Tattooed Soldier, a novel (Penguin). His next book is a work of literary non-fiction about 33 trapped Chilean miners: it's scheduled to be published in 2014 by FSG.

Fred Leebron (Program Director, MFA)

Fred Leebron directs the MFA in Creative Writing program at Queens. He also is a professor of English at Gettysburg College, and a former director of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His novels include "Six Figures," "In the Middle of All This" and "Out West." He has received a Pushcart Prize, a Michener Award, a Stegner Fellowship, and an O. Henry Award. He is co-editor of "Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology" and co-author of "Creating Fiction: A Writer’s Companion."

Morri Creech (Poetry)

Morri Creech is the author of three collections of poetry, Paper Cathedrals (Kent State U P, 2001), Field Knowledge (Waywiser, 2006), which received the Anthony Hecht Poetry prize and was nominated for both the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Poet’s Prize, and The Sleep of Reason (Waywiser 2013), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. A recipient of NEA and Ruth Lilly Fellowships, as well as grants from the North Carolina and Louisana Arts councils, he is the Writer in Residence at Queens University of Charlotte, where he teaches courses in both the undergraduate creative writing program and in the low residency M.F.A. program.

http://www.morricreech.com

Publications & Presses +

Qu: A Literary Magazine

Reading Series +

MFA Faculty Reading Series ( www.queens.edu/mfa )

English Department Reading Series ( www.queens.edu/mfa )

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Queens University of Charlotte

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MFA Program

Faculty for the U.S. track of the program:

Poetry : Cathy Smith Bowers, Morri Creech, Bob Hicok, Marcus Jackson, Ada Limón, Rebecca Lindenberg, Rebecca McClanahan, James McKean, Orlando Menes, Jon Pineda, Robert Polito, Claudia Rankine, Jeffrey Thomson Fiction : Ann Cummins, Jonathan Dee, Elizabeth Evans, Elizabeth Gaffney, Myla Goldberg, Zachary Lazar, Fred Leebron, Daniel Mueller, Naeem Murr, Jenny Offill, David Payne, Susan Perabo, Patricia Powell, Steven Rinehart, Elias Rodriques, Elissa Schappell, Dana Spiotta, Maxine Swann, Ashley Warlick Nonfiction : Kristin Dombek, Emily Fox Gordon, Rebecca McClanahan, James McKean, Rebecca McClanahan, Jon Pineda, Robert Polito,  Writing for Stage and Screen : Hal Ackerman, Khris Baxter, Peter Behrens, Nandi Bowe, David Christensen, Trish Harnetiaux, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Brighde Mullins, Daniel Pinchbeck Young Adult:  Laura Ruby

Faculty for the Latin American track of the program:

Poetry : Ada Limón, Orlando Menes, Jon Pineda Fiction : Carolina De Robertis, Mary Gaitskill, Cristina Garcia, Francisco Goldman, Manuel Gonzalez, Fred Leebron, Chris Offutt, Nelly Rosario, Maxine Swann, Héctor Tobar Nonfiction : Francisco Goldman, Chris Offutt, Jon Pineda, Maxine Swann, Héctor Tobar Writing for Stage and Screen:  Khris Baxter, Chris Offutt Young Adult:  Cristina Garcia, Laura Ruby

Qu: A Contemporary Literary Journal , Southern Review of Books

The program offers a concentration in writing for stage and screen, in addition to concentrations in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Students can also concentrate in young adult writing. Mode of instruction is the student’s choice, either workshop or tutorial (one on one).

Students attend two weeklong residencies each year, in January and May, at the Queens University campus in Charlotte, North Carolina. Students in the Latin American track of the program attend a 15-day residency each July/August, which rotates each year among Buenos Aires, Argentina; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Santiago, Chile. The 2023 residency will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Students may move back and forth between Charlotte and Latin American tracks.

The program hosts a biennial professional development weekend for alumni and matriculated students that offers small workshops with editors and agents. Other features include the post-graduate Book Development program, during which students work on a manuscript with an editor from a major press.

The application deadline is March 1 for the summer term, July 1 for the fall term, and October 1 for the spring term. Please check the program website for more information.

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• Queens University of Charlotte Athletics Summer Camps

Creative Writing Camp

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Have a budding poet, storyteller, or thespian? If so, enroll your child in our week-long Creative Writing camp taught by nationally recognized, award-winning faculty at Queens. Young artists will come together in a fun and supportive environment to explore fiction, poetry, and theater through collaborative, interactive experiences. Students will choose a favorite character to create their own fan fiction, learn how to write form and free verse poetry, and participate in the creation of a one act play. Campers will take an urban writer’s walk to Freedom Park for a picnic and writing field trip. Students will receive one-on-one feedback about their writing, and at the end of the week, students will create a literary journal of their original work and participate in a public reading showcase for parents.

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Welcome to the Queens University of Charlotte Digital Archive

This series of historic images chronicles the history of Queens College from its founding in 1857 by the Reverend Robert Burwell, president and his wife Margaret Anna Robertson Burwell.

This website is a collection of digital images taken from physical items held in the Queens University of Charlotte Archive. They consist of images scanned to archival resolution, telegrams, handbooks, and photographs of Queens memorabilia. They may be searched and sorted by subject or date. We invite your comments and any information you may have about the origins of these items. 

Statement on Archival Materials

Queens University of Charlotte has a long history of service to its communities. The 1930 adoption of the motto, "Not to be served, but to serve," underscores the commitment to service as a way of life by the entire Queens community. The history of the University is reflected in materials from the University’s archives, which span many decades and perspectives, and which show how the campus and students have changed over the years .  Archival materials are presented in a form that is unredacted and uncensored. They are historical documents and will remain available for research purposes and as aids to understanding the history of the University. Some material, including a number of images and text in the university’s yearbooks, is racist, prejudiced, dehumanizing, and derogatory. Such content is not condoned by the University and is not reflective of our  mission and values  nor our commitment to  ending systemic racism .

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Creative Writing Courses

Writing the City

Writing Memoir

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Intermediate Writing in Prose

Intermediate Writing in Poetry: Poetry and Culture

Department of english, queen's university.

Watson Hall 49 Bader Lane Kingston ON K7L 3N6 Canada

Undergraduate

Queen's University is situated on traditional Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territory .

Creative Writing Program Marks Three Decades of Growth, Diversity

By Luisa A. Igloria

2024: a milestone year which marks the 30 th  anniversary of Old Dominion University’s MFA Creative Writing Program. Its origins can be said to go back to April 1978, when the English Department’s (now Professor Emeritus, retired) Phil Raisor organized the first “Poetry Jam,” in collaboration with Pulitzer prize-winning poet W.D. Snodgrass (then a visiting poet at ODU). Raisor describes this period as “ a heady time .” Not many realize that from 1978 to 1994, ODU was also the home of AWP (the Association of Writers and Writing Programs) until it moved to George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

The two-day celebration that was “Poetry Jam” has evolved into the annual ODU Literary Festival, a week-long affair at the beginning of October bringing writers of local, national, and international reputation to campus. The ODU Literary Festival is among the longest continuously running literary festivals nationwide. It has featured Rita Dove, Maxine Hong Kingston, Susan Sontag, Edward Albee, John McPhee, Tim O’Brien, Joy Harjo, Dorothy Allison, Billy Collins, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sabina Murray, Jane Hirshfield, Brian Turner, S.A. Cosby, Nicole Sealey, Franny Choi, Ross Gay, Adrian Matejka, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ilya Kaminsky, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Jose Olivarez, and Ocean Vuong, among a roster of other luminaries. MFA alumni who have gone on to publish books have also regularly been invited to read.

From an initial cohort of 12 students and three creative writing professors, ODU’s MFA Creative Writing Program has grown to anywhere between 25 to 33 talented students per year. Currently they work with a five-member core faculty (Kent Wascom, John McManus, and Jane Alberdeston in fiction; and Luisa A. Igloria and Marianne L. Chan in poetry). Award-winning writers who made up part of original teaching faculty along with Raisor (but are now also either retired or relocated) are legends in their own right—Toi Derricotte, Tony Ardizzone, Janet Peery, Scott Cairns, Sheri Reynolds, Tim Seibles, and Michael Pearson. Other faculty that ODU’s MFA Creative Writing Program was privileged to briefly have in its ranks include Molly McCully Brown and Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley.

"What we’ve also found to be consistently true is how collegial this program is — with a lively and supportive cohort, and friendships that last beyond time spent here." — Luisa A. Igloria, Louis I. Jaffe Endowed Professor & University Professor of English and Creative Writing at Old Dominion University

Our student body is diverse — from all over the country as well as from closer by. Over the last ten years, we’ve also seen an increase in the number of international students who are drawn to what our program has to offer: an exciting three-year curriculum of workshops, literature, literary publishing, and critical studies; as well as opportunities to teach in the classroom, tutor in the University’s Writing Center, coordinate the student reading series and the Writers in Community outreach program, and produce the student-led literary journal  Barely South Review . The third year gives our students more time to immerse themselves in the completion of a book-ready creative thesis. And our students’ successes have been nothing but amazing. They’ve published with some of the best (many while still in the program), won important prizes, moved into tenured academic positions, and been published in global languages. What we’ve also found to be consistently true is how collegial this program is — with a lively and supportive cohort, and friendships that last beyond time spent here.

Our themed studio workshops are now offered as hybrid/cross genre experiences. My colleagues teach workshops in horror, speculative and experimental fiction, poetry of place, poetry and the archive — these give our students so many more options for honing their skills. And we continue to explore ways to collaborate with other programs and units of the university. One of my cornerstone projects during my term as 20 th  Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth was the creation of a Virginia Poets Database, which is not only supported by the University through the Perry Library’s Digital Commons, but also by the MFA Program in the form of an assistantship for one of our students. With the awareness of ODU’s new integration with Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) and its impact on other programs, I was inspired to design and pilot a new 700-level seminar on “Writing the Body Fantastic: Exploring Metaphors of Human Corporeality.” In the fall of 2024, I look forward to a themed graduate workshop on “Writing (in) the Anthropocene,” where my students and I will explore the subject of climate precarity and how we can respond in our own work.

Even as the University and wider community go through shifts and change through time, the MFA program has grown with resilience and grace. Once, during the six years (2009-15) that I directed the MFA Program, a State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) university-wide review amended the guidelines for what kind of graduate student would be allowed to teach classes (only those who had  already  earned 18 or more graduate credits). Thus, two of our first-year MFA students at that time had to be given another assignment for their Teaching Assistantships. I thought of  AWP’s hallmarks of an effective MFA program , which lists the provision of editorial and publishing experience to its students through an affiliated magazine or press — and immediately sought department and upper administration support for creating a literary journal. This is what led to the creation of our biannual  Barely South Review  in 2009.

In 2010,  HuffPost  and  Poets & Writers  listed us among “ The Top 25 Underrated Creative Writing MFA Programs ” (better underrated than overrated, right?) — and while our MFA Creative Writing Program might be smaller than others, we do grow good writers here. When I joined the faculty in 1998, I was excited by the high caliber of both faculty and students. Twenty-five years later, I remain just as if not more excited, and look forward to all the that awaits us in our continued growth.

This essay was originally published in the Spring 2024 edition of Barely South Review , ODU’s student-led literary journal. The University’s growing MFA in Creative Writing program connects students with a seven-member creative writing faculty in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.

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