west virginia university creative writing mfa

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Creative Writing  Master's

What is Creative Writing at WVU like?

Description

The Master of Fine Arts at West Virginia University is a three-year program that combines work in a primary genre and at least one other genre with course offerings in literature, pedagogy and professional writing and editing.

Our alumni have gone on to further graduate study in English, to careers in editing and publishing and to positions in academia. They have received awards such as the Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship at Colgate and the Emory University Creative Writing Fellowship, won national prizes like the Iowa Award for Poetry and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Prize for Nonfiction and published books with Autumn House Press, Carnegie Mellon University, 42 Miles Press, Ohio University Press, University of Georgia Press, University Press of New England and William Morrow/Harper Collins, among others.

WVU’s MFA graduates have published in hundreds of literary journals, including prestigious venues such as AGNI, Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Field, Prairie Schooner, Tar River Poetry, Ninth Letter, Northwest Review, Missouri Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sewanee Review, The Journal, 32 Poems, Georgetown Review, Controlled Burn, Colorado Review, Pank, Malahat Review, Mid-American Review, The New York Times, Paste, Times, Chelsea, Washington Square, Laurel Review, Slant, New Orleans Review, and in the anthology Layers of Possibility: Healing Poetry. Recent MFA students have won Intro Prizes sponsored by the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and the GreenTower Press’s chapbook prize and have published book-length collections of poetry and fiction. Recent graduates have won honors such as the Iowa Poetry Prize and the Walt Whitman Award.

WVU’s MFA faculty members, Mark Brazaitis, Mary Ann Samyn, Glenn Taylor, Christa Parravani, Jenny Johnson and Brian Broome, have published more than 25 books and have won many prestigious prizes and honors.

Application Deadlines

Each graduate program sets their own term of admission and application deadline. Applicants can only apply for admission for the term displayed below. Any questions regarding the application deadline should be directed to the graduate program representative. Fall:  January 15

At a Glance

• Admission Requirements

Contact Information

• College/School: Eberly College of Arts and Sciences
• Department:
• Degree Designation: MFA
• Degree Program:

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Requirements

What are the requirements to apply for Creative Writing at WVU?

University Requirements

To be eligible for admission into a graduate program at WVU an applicant must submit official, bachelors degree transcripts from a regionally accredited institution and hold a GPA of at least 2.75.

WVU operates decentralized admissions. Decentralized admissions allows each graduate program to set its own application requirements in addition to the University requirements.

Program Requirements

To be eligible for admission into the Creative Writing graduate program an applicant must submit the following documentation:

• Letters of Recommendation - Three
• Statement of Purpose
• Essay/Writing Sample

Additional application requirements:

• For the writing sample: a substantial writing sample in fiction, nonfiction or poetry

Certain application requirements may be waived based on a preliminary review of an application by program.

International Applicants must also submit the materials outlined here .

Who do I contact if I have questions?

Graduate Admissions and Recruitment

Email:   [email protected]

Phone:  (304) 293-5980

International Admissions

Email:   [email protected]

Phone:  (304) 293-2121

Program Contact

Mark Brazaitis

MFA Program Director

Email:   [email protected]

Phone:  3042939707

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• Creative Writing
• Majors and Minors

Creative writing opens doors to the stories that impact our lives and leave us changed.

Available as an undergraduate minor or a graduate degree, English majors who concentrate in creative writing study the craft of writing under the mentorship of faculty who are accomplished authors.

How will I focus my studies?

Learn more at the Creative Writing site

• Announcements
• In The News

Thursday, April 28, 2022

Nine Creative Writing MFA students to give graduation reading

Nine soon-to-be graduates of the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program will give a reading today (April 28) at 7:30 p.m. in the Milano Room of the Downtown Library. The reading is free and open to the public. 

“This is an exciting way to celebrate the hard work and accomplishments of nine dedicated writers,” Mark Brazaitis, director of the WVU Creative Writing program said. “It will be a delight to hear them read their fiction, poetry, and works of nonfiction.” 

The MFA in Creative Writing program typically receives more than 100 applications for nine positions. In the three years they are in the program, students take creative writing workshops as well as classes in literature, professional writing and editing, and pedagogy. 

The nine students giving the reading are: 

Nonfiction writers: Rachael Bradley, West Bloomfield, Michigan; Katie Clendenin, Charleston; and Kasey Shaw, Springfield, Ohio.

Gabriel Bass, Hot Springs, Arkansas; Sharon Reynolds, Dobbs Ferry, New York; and Caroline Riley, Rockville, Maryland.

Fiction writers: Vahid Arefi, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Karen Klein, Kalamazoo, Michigan; and Morgan Roediger, Wapakoneta, Ohio. 

click here to read it now

Read this week's magazine

What You Won’t Learn in an MFA

An mfa can teach you skills, but will it prepare you for a writing career.

By 2018, I had written five books and decided to pursue an MFA in creative writing with a concentration in fiction. For me, earning an MFA gave me the time and space I needed to quit my day job and transition to writing full-time, but that was something I had been building toward for over a decade. Of course, I can’t speak to all MFA programs, but in many cases, they focus almost exclusively on writing skills and don’t give writers the concrete skills they need to make money writing and publishing. I often found myself answering questions for my classmates about what publishing was really like. It simply wasn’t being taught, sometimes because faculty themselves were struggling with how to navigate writing as a business.

An MFA program may be the right choice to help you become a better writer, or because you want the qualification to teach writing at a college; it may not give you insights into navigating the publishing landscape.

Here are some of the professional development skills you may need to gain outside of the classroom on your writing journey.

Getting published

Many MFA programs don’t talk to authors about the good, the bad, and the ugly in both traditional publishing and self-publishing. There is often an assumption that if you’re in an MFA program, you’ll be seeking a traditional publishing deal. But most programs also don’t teach writers the skills to query small presses or agents who can query large presses. Even as self-publishing has become an increasingly popular publishing choice, many MFA programs aren’t giving students a clear picture of what it involves.

Contracting

My MFA program was great, but never once during my studies did I hear anyone talk about how to read, negotiate, or understand a contract. As an indie author, you’ll have fewer contracts to interact with than authors who choose to traditionally publish their work, but contracts will still come up—contracts with designers who are working on your books, contracts with podcasts or magazines publishing excerpts of your work. In my MFA program, students who were publishing were left to talk with each other to try to understand how contracts work. Most writers aren’t legal experts, and we benefit from having either a private attorney or an attorney through an organization such as the Author’s Guild review our contracts. I would love to see MFA programs better prepare writers to navigate these business interactions, to negotiate writing rates, and to understand what rights we may be signing away with a particular contract.

Writing to market

The culture of MFA programs often shames or diminishes the idea of writing to market, and instead prioritizes creating literary art for the sake of art. This is a completely valid way to approach your writing life. However, if your goal is to publish your work and sell books, understanding the market and how to write books that appeal to readers is important. There’s nothing wrong with writing books with mass-market appeal, but, depending on the program you attend, you may not hear that in classes. Especially for writers considering the self-publishing route, learning how to understand current trends and how to write books that connect to them is invaluable.

Writing is your passion, and seeing your name in print might be your dream, but when it happens, your writing also becomes a business. Understanding how to manage a writing business is something that most new writers won’t have a lot of experience with. For example, when you get paid from book sales, speaking arrangements, or most anything to do with your books, taxes aren’t going to be withheld. Instead, you’ll need to put money aside to pay your taxes. MFA programs generally don’t cover these details or highlight the importance of hiring an accountant or tax professional to help you with setting up your writing business. You may need to form an LLC for your self-publishing business, open a business bank account, and file taxes appropriately for your writing work. As a self-published author, you also may need to keep records tracking orders and inventory.

Most authors are not able to make a living from books alone. Many writers are balancing a variety of different content creation and income streams. This may include teaching at a college or university (for which a terminal degree such as an MFA is required), freelance writing, and independent teaching, to name a few possibilities. The more writing programs can give MFA students the tools they need to understand the business side of their work, the more successful they will be.

Sassafras Lowrey writes fiction and nonfiction and was the recipient of the 2013 Lambda Literary Award for emerging LGBTQ writers.

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Low- Residency MFA in Creative Writing

• Online Application
• Student Handbook (PDF)
• McKinney Fellowship

Application deadlines

Winter Residency: October 1

Summer Residency: March 1

» Admissions Requirements

Email : mfa@wvwc.edu

Phone : (304) 473-8523

Doug Van Gundy

Director, Master of Fine Arts Program

59 College Avenue, Box 32

West Virginia Wesleyan College

Buckhannon, WV 26201

IRENE MCKINNEY, FOUNDING DIRECTOR

West Virginia Wesleyan’s MFA Program was founded by Dr. Irene McKinney, author of seven books and Poet Laureate of West Virginia from 1994 until her death in 2012. Irene envisioned a program that would provide students with a high-quality, apprenticeship-model MFA education, and the faculty is committed to carrying on her vision.

Listen to Irene read at the 2010 West Virginia Book Festival:

In September 2013, WV Wesleyan Press released Irene’s final poetry collection Have You Had Enough Darkness Yet? with an afterword by poet Maggie Anderson. Read an in-depth review here by poet Ida Stewart.

“What this book is is consciousness on fire, the dream come true—‘plangent, like a bell.’”

– Gerald Stern

“These striking poems build their energy and gather resilience from silence, breath, and daily noticing. Whether describing the domestic, foreign, or supernatural, Have You Had Enough Darkness Yet? asks us to pause in Keatsian awe as McKinney names a bright world of her own fashioning.”

– Dorianne Laux

All proceeds from the sale of this book go to the Irene McKinney Memorial Scholarship for Writers which, when mature, will provide tuition scholarships for Wesleyan MFA students. Buy the book from Amazon.com or order directly from WV Wesleyan so that more of your dollars go to our scholarship fund: email Jessie van Eerden, Program Director at vaneerden@wvwc.edu to order, or mail your order to Jessie at 59 College Avenue, Box 46, Buckhannon, WV 26201. Cost: $16, free shipping & handling; check made out to WVWC. To order this book for your classroom, please go through your school’s distributor.

For a rich exploration of Irene’s full body of work, view West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s edited one-hour documentation video of the Celebrating Irene McKinney event hosted by Poet Laureate Marc Harshman on September 15, 2013 at the Culture Center in Charleston, WV.

Celebrating the Spring 2024 MFA Graduates

Read more news.