The MA Program in Creative Writing at EMU is designed to promote innovation, experimentation, and conceptual rigor in writing and the arts.  Our Program provides opportunities for writers in digital technologies, multimedia, collaborative projects, performance, community arts, hybrid and mixed genres, as well as poetry and fiction. Distinguished as one of the only interdisciplinary writing programs in the country, we provide a rich space for mixed genre and new media approaches to writing, community service, alternative modes of publishing, editing both print and on-line journals, and interacting with successful writers and artists.

The program is small, ten to twenty students, but it's a diverse group with wide-ranging interests in writing and the arts. We offer our students a welcoming community in which they can experiment and take up an extended examination of language and its various places in culture and the arts.

The MA in Creative Writing is a thirty-credit-hour degree including:

    * Three Writing Workshops
    * One Master’s Writing Project (please meet with Creative Writing Faculty Advisor the semester before you begin your final project)
    * Three Literature courses in Contemporary Studies
    * Three Cognate Courses which students take in other departments of their choice for graduate level coursework that explores other disciplines. (Students have completed cognates in Fine Arts; Women's Studies; Communications, Media, and Theater Arts; Computer Science; Anthropology; Biology; and History for instance.)

Beginning Fall 2010, the requirements for graduation will include two new courses and a reduction of both Literature requirements and Cognate requirements.

The new requirements will be

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

CRTW 550: Community Outreach is a hybrid course that expects students to engage in both the practicum of public projects in the arts and in the seminar that explores the significance of literary arts in community life.

CRTW 506: Contemporary Forms is an advanced, reading-intensive course on contemporary innovative and interdisicplinary forms of literature, emphasizing structural models, formal techniques, conceptual practices, and redefinitions of literary conventions.

For their Final Writing Project, students submit a chapbook or manuscript and prepare an exhibit, performance, or presentation based on, or drawn from, their interdisciplinary Cognate studies. This cognate project may be either intregrated into the writing or independent but integral to the writing. See Courses for specific program information.

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 range of faculty and visiting writers with whom students can work, a diverse mix of students writing fiction, poetry, and hybrid genre work, as well as designing mixed media, multimedia, 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