Welcome to the Creative Writing Website
The Program
The MFA in Creative Writing at Wichita State University is one of the oldest programs in the nation. Currently in its fourth decade, the creative writing program provides serious, aspiring writers an intensive and challenging apprenticeship in the writing of fiction, poetry and nonfiction, enriched by the study of literature. Throughout the student’s graduate career, distinguished visiting writers and permanent writing faculty offer tutorials, master class seminars and workshops in a program that is highly individualized and designed to maximize each student’s writing potential. The 48-semester-hour MFA concludes with a comprehensive exam based on an individualized reading list and the submission of a book-length manuscript of publishable quality.
Financial Support
A majority of MFA candidates are offered teaching assistantships which provide a stipend and full tuition waiver in exchange for teaching two classes. In addition, two creative writing fellowships are awarded annually to second and third year students. Additional fellowships, scholarships and prizes are awarded each year. For those interested in assistantships, applications for the fall semester should be submitted by February 15, and for the spring semester by November 1.
Our Graduates
In the last decade our graduates have been honored with Guggenheim Fellowships, NEA Fellowships, a Hawthornden Fellowship, the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize, Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook Award for a first collection of short fiction, the Mid-List Press First Book Prize in poetry, the Goodheart Prize, the Whiting Foundation Writer’s Award, the Winnow Press Fiction Prize, a Bread Loaf Scholarship, the Andrew Lytle Prize, and the Rosenthal Award from the Academy of Arts and Letters. In addition, alumni have had work featured in Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, the Pushcart Prize Anthology, the O. Henry Prize Anthology, and American Poetry: The Next Generation.
Current students and recent graduates have published work in a wide range of literary venues from Atlantic Monthly, Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Shenandoah, Southern Review, New Letters, Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, Virginia Quarterly Review and Georgia Review, and they have published books with Coffee House Press, Dufour Editions, Picador USA, Southern Methodist University Press, Tin House Press and others.
Visiting Faculty and Writers
This year we are pleased to announce that novelist Scott Blackwood will join us from October 20 through November 17. Since 2001 he has published We Agreed to Meet Just Here: A Novel (New Issues Press 2009), which won the 2007 AWP Award Series in the Novel, and In the Shadow of Our House: Stories (Southern Methodist University 2001). He has also published stories in such literary journals as the Gettysburg Review, Western Humanities Review, and Callaloo. He held a 2004-05 Dobie Paisano Fellowship and now directs the MFA program at Roosevelt University in Chicago.
In the spring, the poet Michael McGriff will join us from April 4 through 29. He has published the collection Dismantling the Hills (University of Pittsburgh Press 2008) and the chapbook Choke (Traprock Books 2006). Mr. McGriff edited a collection, To Build My Shadow a Fire: The Poetry and Translations of David Wevill (Truman State University Press 2010), and served as a co-translator from Swedish of the work of Tomas Transtromer, producing a bilingual edition Sorgegondolen / The Sorrow Gondola (Green Integer Books 2010). He received a National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowship in 2009. His poetry has appeared in such journals as American Poetry Review, Missouri Review, and Poetry.
Along with these two visiting distinguished writers, the poet Jessica Garratt will join the faculty for the spring 2011 semester. Her collection Fire Pond (University of Utah Press 2009) won the 2008 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. Her poetry has appeared in such journals as Crab Orchard Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and North American Review.
Past Visiting Writers Include:
Lee Abbott, Renee Ashley, Russell Banks, Marvin Bell, Michael Blumenthal, Sharon Bryan, Scott Cairns, Peter Cameron, Ann Copeland, George Cuomo, Richard Currey, Phil Dacey, Robert Dana, Madeline DeFrees, Rick Demarinis, Stephen Dunn, Richard Elman, Carol Frost, Deborah Greger, Ron Hansen, Michael Harper, William Hathaway, Shelby Hearon, Laura Kalpakian, Elizabeth Libbey, Jack Matthews, Jay Meek, Lisel Mueller, Richard Murphy, Jack Myers, Antonya Nelson, Kent Nelson, Achy Obejas, Ed Ochester, Robert Olmstead, Eric Pankey, Bette Pesetsky, Leslie Pietrzyk, Stanley Plumley, Kevin Prufer, Bin Ramke, Nancy Roberts, Mary Elsie Robertson, William Pitt Root, Abraham Rothberg, Hugh Seidman, Bob Shacochis, Terese Svoboda, Mark Smith, Henry Taylor, Michael Waters, Paul West, James Wilcox, C.K. Williams, Hilma Wolitzer, Richard Yates, and Paul Zimmer.