mfa creative writing vcu

March 31, 2014

VCU Creative Writing M.F.A. program celebrates 30 years

Nationally ranked program has produced numerous notable authors, poets, share this story.

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By Brian McNeill

Virginia Commonwealth University will mark the 30th anniversary of its nationally ranked Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program this week with a reunion bringing together students, faculty and alumni.

The program, part of VCU's Department of English in the College of Humanities and Sciences , will hold festivities in honor of the anniversary on April 4 and 5 .

"The VCU M.F.A. program community — including both its current students and the extended community created by its graduates — is an accomplished, imaginative, fascinating and mutually supportive group of writers who have significantly expanded the literary life of our region and our country," said Gregory Donovan, Ph.D., director of creative writing and an associate English professor. "And those of us who have worked with them as faculty mentors, both in creative writing and in literature courses, have very much enjoyed that privilege."

The program has invited all M.F.A. alumni to attend the event. It will feature panel discussions such as: "You got an M.F.A. … But what do you do for a living?" and "Your first or second book," as well as alumni readings, a spotlight on faculty publications, an alumni gala reception and more.

Anyone interested in attending is asked to RSVP to Donovan at [email protected] . For more details and the full schedule, go to: http://wp.vcu.edu/english/ 2014/03/14/30th-anniversary- of-the-creative-writing-mfa- program-at-vcu/ .

VCU's M.F.A. program stands out for a number of reasons, Donovan said. Its faculty includes a number of deeply committed teachers who are also accomplished writers, including two recent hires: Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Claudia Emerson and creative nonfiction writer Harrison Candelaria Fletcher. In addition to Donovan, Emerson and Fletcher, other teachers include poets David Wojahn, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and Kathleen Graber, a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and fiction writers Susann Cokal, Tom De Haven and Clint McCown.

Thirty years ago, Donovan said, the M.F.A. program started out small and it has remained fairly small, enrolling a total of roughly 30 to 35 students per year, allowing faculty members to provide more personal attention to students' writing.

"[One thing that has changed is that] students are now recruited from across the country and represent a widely divergent group," he said. "One thing that hasn't changed is a tradition of students supporting and respecting each other while appropriately challenging one another to achieve more in their work."

The M.F.A. program has also continued to evolve in its offerings, most recently expanding its offerings in the genre of creative nonfiction.

The program is home – in collaboration with New Virginia Review Inc. – to the online journal Blackbird , which publishes fiction, poetry, nonfiction, video essays and drama, and has become recognized both nationally and internationally.

The program also hosts three important national literary prizes – the Cabell First Novelist Award for best first novel in a given year; the Levis Reading Prize for the best first or second book of poetry published in a given year; and the Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto Short Fiction Award, which is awarded every other year for the best short story published in Blackbird.

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College of Humanities and Sciences

• Faculty Spotlight
• David Wojahn

Faculty Spotlight: David Wojahn, PhD

Written by Kathleen Graber, PhD, Professor of English

David Wojahn is a distinguished poet, essayist, and Professor of English at VCU. He is currently the Director of VCU’s Creative Writing Program, which is unique in the College of Humanities and Sciences, in that it awards this division’s only degree in fine arts, an MFA in Creative Writing. In recent years, the VCU Creative Writing Program has also been home to three Guggenheim Fellows, including David Wojahn. When I was offered the opportunity to teach poetry here, one of the most compelling factors in my decision was the prospect of working with David, whose reputation as a poet’s poet and a highly effective and dedicated teacher has earned him many other national awards, including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the William Carlos Williams Award, The Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, the Poet’s Prize, and O.B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Indeed, if one were looking for a model of humility, sharp wit, warm humor, kindness, generosity, and measured grace, accompanied by remarkably high creative achievement, one would be hard pressed to find a more exemplary colleague, human being, and educator. This year, five graduate students will complete their studies in poetry in VCU’s MFA program, and, as is usually the case, David will have been the primary advisor or second reader on almost all of their culminating theses. David was the 2008 winner of VCU’s Outstanding Faculty Award, and many of David’s students have gone on to illustrious careers of their own. By his own estimation, he has been teaching literature and creative writing for 45 years. David Wojahn’s first collection of poetry, Icehouse Lights (1981), was chosen by the renowned poet Richard Hugo for the Yale Younger Poets Award, arguably the most prestigious and most competitive avenue by which an emerging American poet might enter the contemporary literary landscape. When I previewed a relatively new textbook (2015) from Oxford University Press designed for creative writing classrooms, I was delighted to see a section entitled “Two Case Studies: Hemingway and Wojahn,” which carefully analyzes a poem from this collection. In his original citation, Hugo writes: "David Wojahn's poems concern themselves with emotive basics: leaving home, watching those we love age and die, the inescapable drone of our mortality,” pointing from the start to the richly elegiac quality that has continued to mark David’s work. During a recent conversation, he cited Allen Grossman’s assertion that the function of poetry is to “preserve the memory of the person.” I thought of another Grossman claim from the same text (Summa Lyrica): the kind of success which poetry facilitates is called “immortality.”

Hence, when asked about what might be called “the fundamentally elegiac impulse” in his work, David said that, while his poems are very often “laced with elegy,” his aim is something more like an “homage,” an effort at expressing “gratitude.” “When I read a good poem,” he said, “I am filled with gratitude.” He sees his own poems, especially those directly dedicated to other poets and artists—such as one of his new poems “Threnody” recently published in Plume (link provided below), which is dedicated to the poet Jean Valentine (1934-2015)—as a way to honor the gifts he feels he has been given by them. His collection World Tree (2011), winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, includes poems in conversation with the poets Nâzim Hikmet, Arthur Rimbaud, Tomas Tranströmer, Czesław Miłosz, and Frank O’Hara, as well other poems foregrounding musicians, including Willy DeVille, Jimmie Rodgers, Warren Zevon and Johnny Cash. In fact, his 1990 collection Mystery Train, with its iconic image of Bob Dylan on the cover, can be seen as an homage to that other more popular branch of the American bardic tradition, rock and roll.

Yet many of David’s poems are driven not by public homage and loss but by deeply personal mourning. Two poems that come immediately to mind are “Elegy: Robot Folding Laundry” and “For the Scribe Gar.Una of Uruk 3,000 B.C.” from his most recent collection, For the Scribe (2017). One of these poems juxtaposes his emerging adult understanding of the narrowness of his mother’s life and her profound loneliness as a housewife in post-war Minnesota with a precise description of the terribly awkward and largely ineffective mechanical movements of an actual robot programmed to fold laundry. In the other, his meditation on the first handwritten signature is precipitated by having opened a book containing the extensive marginalia of his late wife, the poet Lynda Hull.

While David Wojahn is the author of nine collections of poetry, he has also published two collections of essays on poetry and poetic craft and has just completed a third. He says that when he finds it hard to write poems—as it has been for many poets in recent years—he turns to writing essays, which he enjoys doing, and now writes simply for fun. He says that he appreciates the way that this form both enables and challenges him to weave the personal and the scholarly together in a voice that he hopes will not strike a reader as pedantic. This desire to integrate the lived emotional life into the life of the mind and to bring the experiences of the individual into larger cultural contexts is central to David’s work. The poet Linda Gregerson, one of the Judges for the Lenore Marshall Prize, describes the poems in World Tree (2011) as “exquisitely cadenced, politically astute, large of heart, and keen of mind.” “These are,” she adds, “poems of extraordinary moral penetration.” And in her praise for For the Scribe (2017), the poet Linda Bierds writes: “The juxtapositions in this extraordinary book are, in the end, both separate and united. They quiver together like filings on a magnet: This is our fractured world.”

David told me that the first poetry reading he ever attended was in 1972. The poet was Tomas Transtörmer, who would be awarded the Nobel Prize in 2011. What David says he recalls most vividly (and perhaps what spurred him on to a life filled with poetry) was a pointed exchange during the Q & A afterwards. Someone from the audience took the poet to task for having written poems about the dailiness of life—about driving a car, for instance—when there were so many large and terrible things happening with the world. Tranströmer, for his part, responded by saying that he felt all of his poems were ultimately political because they insisted on the primacy of the private life. David added that very few days go by when he does not think about that claim.

Asked about how the world of poetry might have changed since then, he said that he is struck by the pervasiveness of social media. While he is delighted that it has been able to bring both so many more voices and a wider audience to poetry than might ever have been possible otherwise, he worries that the atmosphere of “necessary quiet receptiveness” that so many poems demand is harder to locate or conjure. “A good poem can make one feel as though there are only two people in the world,” he said. “The poet and the reader.”

Here then is the opening of his very recent poem “Threnody”:

The train coach, Jean—empty except for you,

the lighting dim,

& as I wobble

the jittery aisle toward your seat

you look up from

the notebook you’ve been writing in

& say my name & I say yours.

Read the full text

From the Valley of Making: Essays on the Craft of Poetry.  Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P,  2015.

World Tree (poems). Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2011.

Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2006.

Spirit Cabinet (poems). Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2002.

Strange Good Fortune: Essays on Contemporary Poetry. Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 2001.

The Falling Hour (poems). Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1997.

Icehouse Lights (poems). Foreward by Richard Hugo. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982.

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Virginia Commonwealth University

Virginia, united states.

Building upon its recent 30th anniversary, Virginia Commonwealth University’s Master of Fine Arts in creative writing continues to celebrate its ongoing achievements and programmatic developments, including:

* Expanded creative nonfiction/CNF course offerings and created a “Dual Genre” track allowing our MFA students to formally add CNF to their academic concentrations.

* Small MFA workshop size. Excellent 3 to 1 student to faculty ratio. Currently: 9 full-time MFA faculty, approximately 27 graduate students.

* Every one of the nine full-time faculty members has a new or forthcoming book publication.

* New faculty hires in both fiction and creative nonfiction, including writers Hanna Pylvainen, Sonja Livingston, and Lina Maria Ferreira Cabeza-Vanegas.

* Graduate assistantship stipends have greatly increased, and now range from $12,500 up to $24,000 a year (plus tuition waiver). All current full-time enrolled students are funded.

* Assistantships not only offer teaching opportunities in composition and expository writing, but also undergraduate creative writing classes as well.

* Assistantship assignments also include opportunity to coordinate VCU’s national literary awards, including the Cabell First Novelist, Levis Reading Prize, and Tarumoto Prize in short fiction.

* Offered new coursework in collaborative comic/graphic novelist pairing up MFA students with artists from VCU’s acclaimed School of the Arts.

* Additional and regular offerings in screenwriting, form and theory coursework, and literary editing/publishing seminars.

* Newly established travel stipends for MFA students for summer writing conference and study abroad travel, as well as yearly travel funding and registration waivers for students attending the annual AWP conference.

* Three-year course requirements that enable MFA students to design up to 6 credits of independent study and 6 credits of professional internships, including opportunities to work in electronic publishing (editorial, web design, digital sound editing, and more) via the program’s nationally prominent online literary journal, Blackbird.

Contact Information

900 Park Ave Hibbs Hall Rm 306 Richmond Virginia, United States 23284-2005 Phone: 804-828-1329 Email: [email protected] https://english.vcu.edu/mfa/

Bachelor of Arts in English/Literature +

\nVirginia Commonwealth University offers undergraduate creative writing courses in fiction, poetry, and drama at both the introductory and advanced levels. Limited enrollment allows for individualized attention by instructors. Students frequently cite these courses as one of their most important undergraduate experiences. Of the ten upper-level courses required for the English major, undergraduates can take up to four in creative writing coursework. In addition, while no major in "creative writing" is currently offered, a minor in writing is available to all undergraduates, including English majors. The minor in writing is flexible, and students adapt it individually. It consists of 18 hours chosen from a list of selected writing courses, including creative writing, professional writing, and rhetoric courses. One of the courses in advanced nonfiction writing is required as a keystone course in the minor.

Minor / Concentration in Creative Writing +

Virginia Commonwealth University offers undergraduate creative writing courses in fiction, poetry, and drama at both the introductory and advanced levels. Limited enrollment allows for individualized attention by instructors. Students frequently cite these courses as one of their most important undergraduate experiences. Of the ten upper-level courses required for the English major, undergraduates can take up to four in creative writing coursework. In addition, while no major in “creative writing” is currently offered, a minor in writing is available to all undergraduates, including English majors. The minor in writing is flexible, and students adapt it individually. It consists of 18 hours chosen from a list of selected writing courses, including creative writing, professional writing, and rhetoric courses. One of the courses in advanced nonfiction writing is required as a keystone course in the minor.

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing +

Graduate program director.

VCU is a state institution with a total enrollment of more than 26,000 students on its two campuses in Richmond, the capital of Virginia. The Medical College of Virginia Campus is near the financial, governmental, and shopping areas of a newly-renovated downtown. The Academic Campus is in Richmond's historic Fan District, which dates back to the 19th century. VCU is Virginia's largest urban university and features one of the nation's most comprehensive evening colleges, a nontraditional student body (nearly half of VCU's students are more than 25 years old), and a well-established, highly respected School of the Arts with programs in painting, sculpture, crafts, theatre, dance, and music. The Jazz Orchestra has many times been judged the best in the country. The city of Richmond is itself an attraction to many students. Founded in 1727, it is now one of the South's fastest-growing and most cosmopolitan cities. Rich in historic significance, Richmond was an important site in the lives of Patrick Henry, Edgar Allan Poe, and Thomas Jefferson, to name only a few. The city offers enjoyable and affordable cultural activities, including a professional symphony orchestra and ballet, several theaters, and a number of important museums devoted to art, history, and science.

Designed to attract students from varied undergraduate backgrounds who are writers of promise, the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program is especially suited for those interested primarily in the writing of fiction or poetry. In addition, to expand students' writing experience and versatility, advanced workshops are also available in nonfiction, screenwriting, the novel, and play-writing. Students may also undertake editorial internships with Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts or with the VCU First Novelist Award, and may serve as well as judges for the annual Levis Reading Prize in Poetry. Additional internships may be arranged with other local publishers.

Students in the program are encouraged to develop a strong personal sense of aesthetic and ethics, and to pursue excellence in writing, scholarship, and teaching. Through the workshop experience, as well as personal conferences with the writing faculty, the program aims to help students to significantly advance the quality of their writing, and to enable them to become sensitive, knowledgeable readers who are expert critics of their own and others' work. Students broaden their literary sophistication in a wide range of available courses which examine the literature of varied historical periods and geographic areas, introduce a spectrum of critical theories and perspectives, and explore the techniques and possibilities of the various literary genres. Innovative graduate seminars in topics of special interest and focus are offered each semester. Degree requirements, while rigorous, are flexible so that they can be individually tailored to fit the student's needs and goals. The program's limited enrollment allows for personal attention to the student's writing by a nationally prominent faculty (graduate workshops are limited to 12 or fewer students), as well as for establishing friendships with other developing writers in a diverse and challenging, yet mutually supportive, community of artists.

Clint McCown

Clint McCown is the author of the novels Haints, The Weatherman, War Memorials, and The Member-Guest, as well as the collections of poetry Dead Languages, Wind Over Water, Sidetracks, Total Balance Farm and The Dictionary of Unspellable Noises: New & Selected Poems, 1975-2018 (forthcoming). Several of his plays have been produced, and he has worked as a screenwriter for Warner Bros. and as a creative consultant for HBO television. As a broadcast journalist he received an Associated Press Award for Documentary Excellence for his investigations of organized crime. He has also toured as a principal actor with the National Shakespeare Company. He is the only writer to have twice won the American Fiction Prize; he has also received the Society of Midland Authors Award, the S. Mariella Gable Prize, the Germaine Breé Book Award, the Midwest Book Award, a Distinction in Literature citation from the Wisconsin Library Association, and a Discover Great Writers designation from Barnes & Noble. His stories, essays, and poems have appeared widely. He has been a contributing editor to a dozen national literary magazines and was the founding editor of the Beloit Fiction Journal, which he published for twenty years.

http://english.vcu.edu/mfa/creative-writing-faculty/

Kathleen Graber

Kathleen Graber is the author of two collections of poetry, Correspondence (Saturnalia Books, 2006) and The Eternal City (Princeton University Press, 2010), which was finalist for the National Book Award, The National Book Critics Circle Award, and the winner of the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Poetry. She is the recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has also been supported by a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and an Amy Lowell Travelling Scholar. Her third collection of poems, The River Twice, is forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

Gregory Donovan

Gregory Donovan is the author of the poetry collections Torn from the Sun (Red Hen Press, 2015), given a starred review by Library Journal and named to its 2015 list of “Exciting New Works for National Poetry Month and Beyond” as well as being selected as a finalist for the Julie Suk Award from Jacar Press, and Calling His Children Home, winner of the Devins Award from the University of Missouri Press. In addition to poetry, essays, translations, and fiction published in The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, diode, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Copper Nickel, TriQuarterly, and many other journals, his poems have been collected in a number of anthologies, including The Devins Award Poetry Anthology and Common Wealth: Contemporary Poets of Virginia. He has won the Robert Penn Warren prize sponsored by New England Writers and judged by Rosanna Warren, as well as grants and fellowships from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Ucross Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. With the writer/director Michele Poulos, he is a producer of A Late Style of Fire, the feature-length documentary film on the life and work of the poet Larry Levis with original soundtrack composed by Iron & Wine which premiered in 2016 at the Mill Valley Film Festival in California as well as being selected for seven more film festivals and featured in special screenings at poetry festivals and universities across the country. Donovan has often served as a visiting writer and guest faculty member for summer conferences such as the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Chautauqua Writers’ Center, the Chesapeake Writers Conference, the Vermont College of Fine Arts Postgraduate Writers’ Conference, the University of Tampa MFA Program, and the Other Words Conference of the Florida Literary Arts Coalition. He also has been a faculty member with VCU study abroad programs in Scotland and most recently in Peru. Donovan is the director of the Levis Reading Prize as well as the Rebecca Mitchell Tarumoto Short Fiction Prize, and he is Senior Editor of Blackbird: an online journal of literature and the arts. For additional information, his author website is: http://www.gregoryedonovan.com.

David Wojahn

David Wojahn was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1953, and educated at the University of Minnesota and the University of Arizona. His first collection, Icehouse Lights, was chosen by Richard Hugo as a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, and published in 1982. The collection was also the winner of the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Book Award. His second collection, Glassworks, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1987, and was awarded the Society of Midland Authors’ Award for best volume of poetry to be published during that year. Pittsburgh is also the publisher of four of his subsequent books, Mystery Train (1990), Late Empire (1994), The Falling Hour (1997) and Spirit Cabinet (2002). Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982–2004, published by Pittsburgh in 2006, was a named finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the O. B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He is also the author of a collection of essays on contemporary poetry, Strange Good Fortune (University of Arkansas Press, 2001), editor (with Jack Myers) of A Profile of 20th Century American Poetry (Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), and editor of two posthumous collections of Lynda Hull’s poetry, The Only World (HarperCollins, 1995) and Collected Poems (Graywolf, 2006). A new volume of his essays on poetry, From the Valley of Making, will appear in 2015 from the University of Michigan Press. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Virginia, Illinois and Indiana Councils for the Arts, and in 1987–88 was the Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholar. He has taught at a number of institutions, among them Indiana University, the University of Chicago, the University of Houston, the University of Alabama, and the University of New Orleans. He is presently Professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, and is also a member of the program faculty of the MFA in Writing Program of Vermont College of the Fine Arts. His newest collection, World Tree, was published by Pittsburgh in the 2011, and was awarded the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the Library of Virginia Book Award in Poetry, and the Poets’ Prize.

Sonja Livingston

Sonja Livingston's latest book, The Virgin of Prince Street: Expeditions into Devotion undertakes a series of sojourns through place and time to contemplate shifting religious and cultural concepts of devotion. She’s the author of the award-winning nonfiction books, Queen of the Fall and Ghostbread (winner of the AWP Prize and a Bronze Prize by Foreword), as well as Ladies Night at the Dreamland (named a best nonfiction book of 2016 by Kirkus). Recent essays appear The Kenyon Review, Salon, Sojourners and Lithub. Her work is widely anthologized in texts on writing and craft, including in Best of Brevity, Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, Waveform: Twenty-First Century Essays by Women, Poverty & Privilege: A Reader, and many others. Sonja’s nonfiction has received fellowships from the New York State Foundation for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Deming Fund, as well as awards from Arts & Letters, The Iowa Review, and Ruminate Magazine. Sonja taught in the MFA Program at the University of Memphis before coming to VCU and has also taught for Writing Workshops Abroad in Edinburgh, San Miguel de Allende, and Cork. She serves as Writer-in-Residence at the Gap Creek Writers Studio and faculty at Vermont College of Fine Art’s Postgraduate Writers’ Conference.

https://english.vcu.edu/mfa/creative-writing-faculty/

Gretchen Comba

Gretchen Comba is the author of the story collection The Stillness of the Picture (Kore Press, 2016). Her fiction has appeared in the Alaska Quarterly Review, The Greensboro Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, New Orleans Review, The North American Review, River City, The South Carolina Review, and Yemassee. She is a recipient of the F. Scott Fitagerald Award for Short Fiction and the Yemassee Award for Exceptional Contribution to the Magazine; in addition, she was selected as a finalist for the Danahy Fiction Prize (Tampa Review), and her work has earned Special Mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology. Gretchen’s scholarship on William Maxwell has appeared in MidAmerica: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, Oxford Bibliographies in American Literature Resources for American Literary Study. She received her MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Katy Resch George

Katy Resch George is the author of the story collection Exposure, published by Kore Press with support from the National Endowment for the Arts. The collection was a finalist for the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Award, the Press 53 Fiction Award, and the Snake Nation Press Serena McDonald Kennedy Award. Her stories have appeared in Blackbird, West Branch, Painted Bride Quarterly, Pank and other magazines and have been recognized by the annual Wigleaf Top 50 Very Short Fictions list and the storySouth Million Writers Awards. She is the recipient of artist grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and Richmond CultureWorks. Katy has taught for New York University, the City University of New York, and Virginia Commonwealth University. She is a proud graduate of the fiction MFA program at VCU and the poetry MFA program at Brooklyn College.

Jessica Nelson

Jessica Hendry Nelson is the author of the memoir If Only You People Could Follow Directions (2014), which was selected as a best debut book by the Indies Introduce New Voices program, the Indies Next List by the American Booksellers' Association, named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus Review, received starred reviews in Kirkus and Publisher's Weekly, and reviewed nationally in print and on NPR—including twice in (O) Oprah Magazine. It was also a finalist for the Vermont Book Award. She is also co-author of the forthcoming textbook and anthology Advanced Creative Nonfiction along with the writer Sean Prentiss (Bloomsbury, 2020). Her work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, Tin House, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, The Carolina Quarterly, Columbia Journal, Painted Bride Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, PANK, Drunken Boat and elsewhere.

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The department has a range of course offerings, from traditional, canonical courses (e.g., Shakespeare) to literature of diversity (e.g., Multiethnic Literature; Black Women Writers; African American Literature) to contemporary genres and authors (e.g., Popular Cultural Studies; Fan Fiction). It also has a host of courses in creative writing, professional writing and digital rhetoric.

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Master of Fine Arts in Design with a concentration in visual communications

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About the Program

The Master of Fine Arts in Design with a concentration in visual communications prepares graduate students to assume a leadership role in a complex and expanding profession. To this end, the program develops the philosophy and personal direction of each student and focuses your resources on functional and expressive visual communications. You will concentrate on the philosophical, communicative, and aesthetic relationships of visual problem-solving and interacting skills leading to the effective articulation of concepts.

The program is oriented toward individuals interested in conducting visual or theoretical research, and in investigating the intersection of function and expression in design problem-solving. The faculty emphasizes a rigorous theoretical framework, a historical perspective, and an awareness of contemporary issues as the basis for addressing present and future communication problems. The program encourages and actively integrates ethical issues and a concern for the natural environment into its curriculum. Faculty continually stress the contextual significance and influence of visual communications design on society and culture and its capacity to affect both the perception and reality of the individual’s quality of life.

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June 30, 2014

Smith, graduate of VCU Creative Writing M.F.A. program, named poet laureate of Virginia

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By Brian McNeill

Ron Smith, an award-winning poet and a 1985 graduate of Virginia Commonwealth University's Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, on Friday was named the poet laureate of Virginia.

"I am delighted and humbled to be poet laureate of the 'Cradle of Presidents' (and also of poets)," Smith said.

Smith, who is the writer-in-residence and George O. Squires Chair of Distinguished Teaching at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, is the author of three books of poetry, "Its Ghostly Workshop" (2013), "Moon Road: Poems 1986-2005" (2007) and "Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery" (1988).

He has won numerous awards for his work, including the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize in 2005, Southern Poetry Review’s Guy Owen Prize and Poetry Northwest’s Theodore Roethke Prize. He was a finalist for the position of poet laureate of Virginia four times previously.

"As poet laureate, I hope to celebrate poetry in general and Virginia poets in particular," he said. "Virginia is rich in poets, poets who deserve much more recognition and more readers than they currently have."

Smith's work has been published in a number of national and international publications, including The Nation, The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, College English, Shenandoah, Kansas Quarterly, The Tampa Review, Blackbird, Plume, Puerto del Sol and Verse.

In addition to his MFA from VCU, Smith holds degrees in philosophy, humanities and creative writing from the University of Richmond, and also studied British drama at Oxford University, writing at Bennington College, and Renaissance and modernist culture at the Ezra Pound Center for Literature in Merano, Italy.

He chaired the English department at St. Christopher's for 21 years and has taught courses in poetry and poetry writing at the University of Mary Washington, VCU and the University of Richmond.

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Creative Writing

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Humanities Research Librarian

Online Resources

The Web contains many tools, groups, projects, and sites that may be of help in improving your writing. This is a small selection of them.

• Critique.org A site hosting many ongoing writing workshops in all genres of fiction.
• NaNoWriMo An international initiative geared to support participants in writing a 50,000-word draft novel in the month of November.

Browsing the Shelves

Some books on technique, marketing, formatting, etc., can be found on the fourth floor in the PN147 s or PS320 s. Many books, however, are filed throughout the Ps in their respective author's section.  These can be found most efficiently with the VCU Libraries Search, narrowing by these subject headings: Fiction -- Authorship Poetry -- Authorship Works about screenwriting and playwriting are found under a number of different headings, though VCU Libraries has less of these works than for fiction and poetry.  Word searches for "drama and authorship," "motion picture and technique," or similar will return useful works.

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• URL: https://guides.library.vcu.edu/creative-writing

At a Glance

The University of Virginia's Creative Writing Program offers a master of fine arts in poetry and fiction writing, undergraduate English concentrations in poetry and literary prose, and elective coursework at the undergraduate and graduate levels. If you are just beginning, we have 2000-level classes in our undergraduate curriculum that are open enrollment (though some sections are restricted to first- and second-year students). Intermediate and advanced writers can take courses from our full-time faculty by instructor permission, and citizen scholars can also apply. See our undergraduate page for more information. 

At the graduate level, we offer one of the best MFA programs in the country with award-winning faculty and alumni whose poetry and prose is in print or forthcoming from some of the top houses and prizes.

In the News

Tolbert wins frontier open.

Congratulations to MFA student MaKshya Tolbert, winner of the 2023 Frontier Open . 

Brian Teare's Poem Bitten by a Man

Congratulations to poetry faculty member Brian Teare on his new book, Poem Bitten by a Man , and this review on The Poetry Foundation website .

MFA Support Increases to $30,600

Posted October 24, 2023

Starting in the 2024-2025 academic year, MFA in Creative Writing students at the University of Virginia will receive total support packages of up to $30,600 per academic year. See our program funding page for full details. 

Program Rankings

Ranking graduate creative writing programs is a fraught process because we're all so different. But here's a site that tries to do so by quantitatively scoring alumni publications in publications like Best American Short Stories , Best American Poetry , The Pushcart Prize , etc. UVA stacks up well

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Discussions about the writing craft.

How many of you have an MFA? How valuable do you think one is? And for those who do have one, how essential was it for you (if at all)?

I have an undergrad degree in creative writing and, while I could've learned everything I know on my own without it, I consider the workshopping process, feedback from instructors, and the opportunity to learn and grow from the mistakes and triumphs of others to be invaluable. I imagine the MFA process to bemore of the same but on steroids. Thoughts?

MFA in Creative Writing

About the Program

Our innovative MFA program includes both studio instruction and literature courses. Writers can take workshop courses in any genre, and they can write a thesis in fiction, nonfiction, poetry or “hybrid” (multi-genre) form. In the second year, they teach popular Creative Writing courses to Davis undergraduates under faculty supervision, gaining valuable experience and sharing their insight  and enthusiasm with beginning practitioners.

Questions? Contact:

Sarah Yunus Graduate Program Coordinator, MFA Program in Creative Writing [email protected]   Pronouns: she/her  

Admissions and Online Application

Events, Prizes, and Resources

• Funding Your MFA

At UC Davis, we offer you the ability to fund your MFA. In fact, all students admitted to the program are guaranteed full funding in the second year of study, when students serve as teachers of Introduction to Creative Writing (English 5) and receive, in exchange, tuition and health insurance remission as well as a monthly stipend (second year students who come to Davis from out of state are expected to establish residency during their first year). We have a more limited amount of resources – teaching assistantships, research assistantships, and out of state tuition wavers – allocated to us for first year students, but in recent years, we’ve had excellent luck funding our accepted first years. We help students who do not receive English department funding help themselves by posting job announcements from other departments during the spring and summer leading up to their arrival. We are proud to say that over the course of the last twenty years, nearly every incoming student has wound up with at least partial funding (including a tuition waiver and health insurance coverage) by the time classes begin in the fall.  

We have other resources for students, too – like the Miller Fund, which supports attendance for our writers at any single writer’s workshop or conference. Students have used these funds to attend well-known conferences like AWP, Writing By Writers, and the Tin House Conference. The Davis Humanities Institute offers a fellowship that first year students can apply for to fund their writing projects. Admitted students are also considered for University-wide fellowships.

Cost of Attendance

• Course of Study

The M.F.A. at Davis is a two-year program on the quarter system (our academic year consists of three sessions of ten-week courses that run from the end of September until mid-June). The program includes classes and a thesis project. It requires diverse, multidisciplinary study and offers excellent mentorship.  

Writers concentrate in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or “hybrid” (multi-genre) forms. They take at least four graduate workshops, and they’re required to take one workshop outside their primary genre (many of our students choose to take even more). Writers at Davis also take graduate courses in literature from abundant options, including the program’s Seminars for Writers. Writers can also take graduate courses in literary study taught by scholars in the English Department. And many of our writers enroll in courses relevant to their work in other departments like art history, comparative literature, linguistics, and performance studies.  

At the end of the first year, writers form a thesis committee with a Director and two additional readers from the faculty. In the second year, writers at Davis concentrate on Individual Study units with these mentors, working closely with their committee to create a book-length creative work. Writers present their projects at intimate, intense, celebratory defense in May with all members of their committee in attendance.

• History of the Program

We’re a new MFA, but we’ve been a successful and respected Creative Writing Program since 1975—a “sleeper” program, as one guide to MFA programs called us. The people who founded the CW program at UC Davis were all lovers and teachers of literature, and chose to call the program an MA, rather than an MFA because they wanted to ensure that the degree would not be seen as a “studio” degree but one in which the study of literature was integral.  In the 1980’s and 1990’s, most often under the leadership of Jack Hicks and Alan Williamson, the program emphasized writing on the American West and the wilderness. Our high profile faculty included Sandra McPherson, Gary Snyder, Sandra Gilbert, Clarence Major, Katherine Vaz, Elizabeth Tallent, Max Byrd, and Louis Owens.  

We also created an introductory sequence of workshops taught by graduate students, which has become one of the highlights of the program for the second years who teach the courses and the undergraduates who take them. There’s more to teaching these courses than learning to teach; teaching helps our writers understand their own writing in ways that no other aspect of a writing program can do. Pam Houston joined the program in the early 2000’s and she led a faculty that included Lynn Freed and Yiyun Li. As an MFA, we remain a place that values sustained literary study as core to the making of art, but we’re also allowing our vision of genre to expand and embrace the other arts and media.

The town of Davis began as "Davisville," a small stop on the Southern Pacific railway between Sacramento and the Bay Area.  Some of our graduate students choose to live in Sacramento or the Bay Area, making use of the commute-by-train option, which is still very much in place.  For those commuting by car, Davis is a 15-25 minute drive from Sacramento and a 60-90 minute drive from the Bay Area.

Students also choose to live in Davis itself, which CNN once ranked the second most educated city in the US.  Davis is a college town of about 75,000 people. Orchards, farms and ranches border it on all sides. The town boasts a legendary twice-weekly farmers market (complete with delicious food trucks and live music). Bike and walking paths lead everywhere (many students prefer not to own a car while they are here) and there are copious amounts of planned green space in every subdivision. The flatness of the land makes Davis ideal for biking, and the city over the past 5 decades has installed bike lanes and bike racks all over town. In fact, in 2006,  Bicycling Magazine , in its compilation of "America's Best Biking Cities," named Davis the best small town for cycling. Packed with coffee houses, bookstores, and restaurants that serve cuisine from every continent, Downtown Davis has a casual vibe. It’s a great place to hole up and write. Davis is filled with hard wood trees, and flower and vegetable gardens, and wild ducks and turkeys walk the campus as if they own the place. It’s a gentle place to live. Although summers get quite hot, the other three seasons are mild, and each, in their own way, quite beautiful. For more about the town, check out  the Davis Wikipedia page .

Woodland and Winters, two small towns close by to Davis, are also options for housing—and they’re good options for those who are not so desirous of the college town scene.  Yet another option is to live in the scenic rural areas Davis is surrounded by.

To the west of Davis, Lake Berryessa and the Napa valley are close by.  To the east, the Sierra mountains are close by; Reno and Tahoe are just a couple hours drive in that direction.