MFA Program in Creative Writing

OVERVIEW

The MFA Program in Creative Writing offers degree tracks in fiction and poetry, emphasizing the art and craft of literary writing and concentrating on the student's written work. Close work with faculty and visiting writers is encouraged through seminars, conferences, and classroom interaction during the three-year course, the third year of which is normally devoted to thesis preparation.

Students who intend to pursue a career in teaching literature and writing at the college level have the opportunity to study the pedagogy of creative writing. Also offered are classes in the craft of literary publishing, with coursework in both the production of a literary annual (The Idaho Review) and of books for a small press (Ahsahta Press); internships and graduate assistantships are also available with these publishers. The program also publishes Free Poetry featuring essays and poetry from today's leading poets. Graduate students publish the literary magazine cold-drill.

Each spring the program brings a Distinguished Visiting Writer to campus for a semester to teach a course in a special topic of interest within his or her genre, as well as writers from a wide assortment of aesthetics who appear in our reading series.

FACULTY

 

 

Martin Corless-Smith
is the director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing and the author of Swallows (Fence Books, 2006), Nota (Fence Books, 2003), Complete Travels (West House Books, 2000) and Of Piscator, which was published by University of Georgia Press as winner of their 1997 Contemporary Poetry Series competition, as well as several chapbooks. He holds both an MFA in Poetry from the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he was a Truman Capote Fellow, and an MFA in Fine Arts and Printmaking from SMU. He was a Steffenson Canon Fellow at University of Utah, where he earned the Ph.D. in Creative Writing.

Janet Holmes
Poet and editor of Ahsahta Press since 2000, Holmes is author of F2F (2006), Humanophone (2001) and The Green Tuxedo (1998), all from the University of Notre Dame Press, and The Physicist at the Mall, which Joy Harjo selected for the Anhinga Prize in 1994. Her poems have twice been chosen to appear in editions of The Best American Poetry. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and prizes, including the Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod Magazine, selected by W.S. Merwin. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a BA from Duke University. MORE >

Brady Udall
A recipient of many awards and fellowships, Udall received his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His widely anthologized stories and non-fiction have been published in journals and magazines such as Story, Esquire, GQ and The Paris Review. He is the author of a short story collection, Letting Loose the Hounds, and a novel, The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, which was an international bestseller and translated into more than twenty languages.

Mitch Wieland
Mitch Wieland holds an MFA from the University of Alabama, where he served as fiction editor of Black Warrior Review. His novel, Willy Slater’s Lane (SMU Press, 1996), received starred reviews in Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist, and was optioned for a film. The New York Times called Willy Slater’s Lane “immensely moving.” His short stories have appeared in The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, The Yale Review, Prairie Schooner, The Sewanee Review, and many other journals. In addition to teaching courses in fiction writing and editing/publishing, he serves as founding editor of the award-winning literary journal, The Idaho Review. He is the recipient of a Christopher Isherwood Fellowship, and two Literature Fellowships from The Idaho Commission on the Arts. His new collection of short stories, God’s Dogs, is forthcoming from SMU Press in 2009. He is currently working on a novel set in Tokyo, where he lived for several years.