The MA Program in Creative Writing at EMU promotes innovation, experimentation and collaboration across artistic fields and cultural practices. Distinguished as one of the only interdisciplinary programs for creative writing in the country, we provide a rich space for exploring the relationships between poetry and poetics, experimental prose, cultural translation, community service, pedagogy, and contemporary arts. Locating the writer’s work along the frontiers of social imaginaries and civic possibilities, our program nourishes opportunities to develop a conceptually rigorous and imaginatively engaged writing. The MA emphasizes the importance of aesthetic risk and social application, while offering opportunities for writers to explore multiple arts and mixed genres, sound and performance, digital technologies and new media, as well as community-based and collaborative projects, innovative curating and alternative publishing.

The program is small, with a diverse group of ten to twenty students. We offer our students a welcoming community in which they can experiment , while pursuing a critical examination of language and its various places in culture and the arts. In addition, the BathHouse Event Series sponsored by the EMU Creative Writing Program provides opportunities for graduate students to interact and learn with some of the most compelling interdisciplinary writers working today.

Cognates and Community Outreach

The MA Program in Creative Writing at EMU places a unique set of emphases on “cognate” work and community outreach. The program’s commitment to interdisciplinarity is reflected in our emphasis on cognate courses. By way of cognates, students are required to take graduate level classes in other departments of their choice in order to enrich and inflect their own work through work in other disciplines. Students have completed cognates in Fine Arts; Women's Studies; Communications, Media, and Theater Arts; Photography; Computer Science; Anthropology; Biology; and History.

Extending our commitment to interdisciplinarity with respect to civic life, the program also requires all students to enroll in a Community Outreach practicum and seminar. Community Outreach asks students to engage in public art projects and collaborations while exploring the significance of literary culture in communities beyond the University.

Requirements

The MA in Creative Writing is a thirty-credit-hour degree.
Program requirements include:   

• Three Graduate Writing Workshops (9 credits of CRTW 520-530)
• Two Literature courses (6 credits LITR)
• Two Cognate courses (6 credits)
• One Contemporary Forms (3 credits CRTW 506)
• One Community Outreach for Creative Writers (3 credits CRTW 550)
• One Master’s Writing Project (3 credits ENGL 693)

For the Master’s writing project, students submit a manuscript and prepare a public presentation that integrates their cognate fields. This cognate component of the final writing project may be either integrated into the writing or independent but integral to the writing.

See Courses for specific program information.

BathHouse Events Series

The MA program sponsors BathHouse Magazine, a online literary journal of hybrid literary art, and prominent BathHouse Events Series. The series brings six to ten writers to campus each semester who read or perform or exhibit their work, as well as host discussions with students on a variety of topics such as publishing, translation, and digital culture. EMU's guests represent both new and established voices from diverse quarters of the literary scene whose work draws on performance, new media, as well as print traditions. The aim of the BathHouse Events series is to bring writers to campus who are actively (re)considering what writing can do.

At EMU, we offer a faculty whose wide ranging creative and scholarly interests engage with various forms and mediums. Our student body nourishes a diverse mix of writers working in poetry, prose, and hybrid genre work, including mixed media and performance projects.

The Program expects students to actively participate in and help develop the Creative Writing community.

Click here for Application Procedures and instructions.
For more information contact:
Christine Neufeld, Director of Graduate Studies
Department of English, Language, and Literature
Eastern Michigan University
Ypsilanti, MI 48197
Phone: (734) 487-2670
e-mail: cneufeld@emich.edu