CURRENT CURRICULUM

The MA Program in Creative Writing promotes innovation, experimentation and collaboration across artistic fields and cultural practices. We encourage exploring the relationships between poetry and poetics, experimental prose, cultural translation, community service, pedagogy, and contemporary arts. 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 degree prepares writers for their continuing creative work, and may also be useful for writers who will teach Creative Writing, English, or Contemporary Studies, and for writers who will connect their practice to public arts and outreach opportunities.

Course Requirements
The M.A. in creative writing requires thirty hours of course work to be distributed among required courses, restricted elective courses, and cognate courses as follows:

• Three Graduate Writing Workshops (9 credits of CRTW 522-529)
• 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)

* CRTW 506 Contemporary Forms: This reading intensive course focuses on the interplay between critical theory and aesthetic practice, while offering a range of perspectives on emergent and interdisciplinary forms in poetry, fiction, performance, electronic media, and hybrid genres.  (Required)

* Required Writing Workshops (9 hours)
Three courses from among the following CRTW 522 – CRTW 529:

CRTW 522 Interdisciplinary Writing Workshop: This is a special topics workshop and seminar, with different topics offered each semester. Requirements typically include a substantial portfolio of new creative work, critical reading responses, and seminar presentations. (Fulfills workshop requirement and can be repeated for credit.)

Recent special topics include: Appropriation, Theory and Methods

CRTW 523 Poetry and Poetics
This course combines the study of poetics with creative practice. The investigation of poetics assists writers in articulating the relationship of their poetry to social, aesthetic, historical, linguistic, and philosophical frameworks. Combining creative writing with studies in poetics, students will have the opportunity to develop their writing with an awareness of the larger contexts of art that ground their practice and thought.

CRTW 524 Prose
Enlisting theories of narrative and prose genres as these intersect with method and practice, this workshop covers a variety of topics relevant to the creation of compelling prose. Areas of focus vary from term to term and may include fiction, “new narrative,” poetry in prose, aphorism, and experimental forms.

CRTW 525 Documentary Writing
This workshop sustains an inquiry into historical and contemporary forms of documentary, appropriation, and conceptual writing in both theory and practice. We will discuss methods, read models, problematize ethics, and activate the practice in our own work.

CRTW 526 Sound Poetry
This workshop pursues language as soundscape, training our attention to acoustic aspects of language, as well as the dialectic between performance and technology. The course offers theoretical context and practical models for one’s own endeavors with the sonic possibilities of writing and speech.

CRTW 527 The Essay As Form
When driven by linguistic music and associative speculation as much as by facts, the essay becomes a conceptual hybrid, existing between poetry and prose and making the most of techniques associated with both. This course explores the essay as an unorthodox form, one that organizes experience by way of unconventional approaches to inquiry and knowledge.

CRTW 529 New Media
How are our contemporary aesthetic practices and compositional strategies affected by the digital environment? This workshop explores an expansive view of language that focuses on the rich interplay and overlap of image, text, and electronic media. We’ll situate our writing in the global internet-driven transition from a print-based culture to the new multi-modal, multi-media, multi-discipline economies we now inhabit.  

CRTW 530 Performance Writing
This workshop provides an interdisciplinary approach to the performative dimensions of language and writing.  Topics and genres covered in this course may include but are not limited to speech act theory and theories of avant-garde performance, performance art, visual art,  drama literature,  Poets Theater, poetics, and the social dynamics of poetry in public space.

CRTW 531  Transgenre
Focusing on historical and contemporary innovations, this workshop engages with critical investigations into the function of genre while exploring writing practices that redefine commonly held notions of generic form across various mediums and social contexts. Theories of gender, subjectivity, culture, and media might inform our approach. 

* CRTW 550: Community Outreach
In this course students will pursue an internship in art related public projects while participating in a seminar that explores the literary arts in community life. We will inquire into the promise and problems of collaboration between universities and communities as we create new cultural resources. This course engages an experiential approach to education emphasizing the relational aspects of cultural production and social practice. Requires at least 30 practicum hours of arts-based service learning in a public or nonprofit organization of the student’s choice. (Required)

* ENGL693 Master's Writing Project (3 hrs)

Restricted Elective Courses (9 hours)
Three courses from the following list. Other literature courses with permission of advisor.

• LITR526 Studies in African-American Literature to 1945 (3 hrs)
• LITR566 Studies in 20th-Century British Fiction (3 hrs)
• LITR567 Studies in 20th-Century Irish Literature (3 hrs)
• LITR576 Studies in 20th-Century American Fiction (3 hrs)
• LITR580 Studies in Contemporary Literary Trends (3 hrs)

Cognate Courses (6 hours)
Six hours of coursework from any area outside the English Department: art, foreign language literature, music, women and gender studies, theater arts, history, philosophy, etc.. Selected in consultation with the graduate coordinator.

Graduate Student Handbook
The Graduate Student Handbook is available as a pdf file from the English Department Graduate Studies website. Included in the handbook are specific instructions for the Creative Writing Master's Writing Project and forms including the Contract for Master's Writing Project, Independent Study, and the Graduate Program of Study for the MA in Creative Writing.