Creative Writing

The Creative Writing Program offers a Masters of Fine Arts degree and an undergraduate minor. The creative writing core faculty are well-regarded practitioners in contemporary fiction, memoir, and poetry. Our professors publish frequently, both with top commercial houses (Pantheon, Doubleday, Viking) and prestigious non-profits (Graywolf, University of Chicago, B.O.A. Editions). They write bestsellers (Julie Schumacher’s 2014 comic novel Dear Committee Members) and works that push genre boundaries (Douglas Kearney's vispo collection I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always).

Honors awarded to creative writing faculty include the Thurber Prize for American Humor, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Cy Twombly Poetry Award, the Carol Shields Fiction Prize, the Women's Prize for Fiction, Guggenheim, NEA, and PEN Fellowships, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, and several Minnesota Book Awards. 

Creative writing faculty are dedicated teachers, as evidenced by multiple University and College of Liberal Arts teaching awards. They are also dedicated readers, publishing book reviews (poet Peter Campion received the Editors Award for Reviewing from Poetry magazine) and editing journals.

With the Department of English now offering an undergraduate minor in creative writing in addition to the program’s longtime MFA degree in creative writing, we are pleased to have recently added two new professors: Aamina Ahmad, author of The Return of Faraz Ali, winner of the LA Times Book Prize's Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction; and Megan Giddings, author of three novels, most recently Meet Me at the Crossroads. 

Read interviews with our outstanding faculty.