oregon state creative writing mfa

Oregon State University

Academic Catalog

Writing graduate major (mfa).

This program is available at the following location:

• OSU-Cascades

The School of Writing, Literature, and Film offers the Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing as a Low Residency MFA program on the OSU-Cascades campus in Bend, Oregon.

OSU-Cascades' Low-Residency MFA is a 49 credit, two-year program combining writing workshops with coursework in craft, critical studies, community engagement, and one-on-one mentoring. The program has a particular focus on difference, power, and privilege, including a bilingual English-Spanish workshop, as well as strong connections to the local environment of central Oregon. The program complements remote coursework with two, intensive 10-day residency sessions. Our curriculum builds sustainable writing habits within  a context of critical analysis, develops skills needed to support a creative livelihood after graduation, applies the creative-literary arts to outward-facing engagement, and creates an environment for taking imaginative risks.

Major Code: 8100

Upon successful completion of the program, students will meet the following learning outcomes:

• Conduct research or produce some other form of creative work.
• Demonstrate mastery of subject material.
• Conduct scholarly or professional activities in an ethical manner.
• Analyze elements of the creative writing craft.
• Critique the original creative work of self and peers.
• Design public-facing opportunities for the dissemination of the literary arts.
• Integrate DEI competencies in different program settings and outputs.
• Develop professionalization tools.

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Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing

• Summarized MFA Handbook
• Diversity at OSU

MFA Faculty by Fields of Focus

• Meet Our MFAs
• Alumni News
• Application Guide
• Visiting Writers Series
• The Literary Northwest Series
• Stone Award
• MFA Student Reading Series
• 45th Parallel
• Letterpress Studio
• Internships
• Graduate Course Descriptions

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Contact Info

Email: [email protected]

College of Liberal Arts Student Services 214 Bexell Hall 541-737-0561

Deans Office 200 Bexell Hall 541-737-4582

Corvallis, OR 97331-8600

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Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing

• Summarized MFA Handbook
• Diversity at OSU
• MFA Faculty by Fields of Focus

Meet Our MFAs

• Alumni News
• Application Guide
• Visiting Writers Series
• The Literary Northwest Series
• Stone Award
• MFA Student Reading Series
• 45th Parallel
• Letterpress Studio
• Internships
• Graduate Course Descriptions

You are here

The CLA websites are currently under construction and may not reflect the most current information until the end of the Fall Term.

Kaitlyn Von Behren

Pronouns: she/her/hers

Kaitlyn Von Behren is a first-year poet from Wisconsin. She can't stop writing about mythology, healing, and being a girl. You can find her writing in publications such as The Mochila Review , Redivider , and Red Cedar Review , among others. 

Nicolette Ratz

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Pronouns: He/Him/His

Tor Strand is a poet who promises to write an essay one of these days. He is also trying his hand at the making of abstract art through stained glass. Tor is a recipient of the Mari Sandoz emerging writer award, a Fishtrap fellowship, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency. Samples of his work can be found or forthcoming in Inverted Syntax, The Santa Ana River Review, and Palette Poetry.

Lila Cutter

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Lila Cutter is a first-year MFA candidate studying Poetry, with a background in equitable arts education work. Though originally from Iowa, she spent the past five years in California’s Bay Area, working for the writing nonprofit 826 Valencia as an educator and Internship Manager. Lila studied literature and public action at Bennington College and earned her B.A. from University of Iowa in Creative Writing. Within her poetry, Lila is interested in refracting perceptions of femininity.

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Pronouns: he/him/his

Sam Olson was raised in Portland, OR. He returns to the Oregon after nearly a decade spent between Montana and Washington, where he facilitated poetry workshops, taught environmental science, and patrolled wilderness trails. In part, his poetry seeks to respond to Elizabeth Woody’s demand that "we must all the power of our minds and hearts to bring the salmon back.".

 Hannah Ariesen

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Pronouns: she/they

Hannah Ariesen is a first-year poetry MFA candidate from Las Vegas, Nevada. She most recently worked as a barista and part-time substitute teacher. They enjoy writing about and exploring the relationship between the self, the spirit, and the natural world. When not writing, you can find her walking aimlessly in parks and likely saying hello to trees.

Monique Lanier

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Monique originally comes from Salt Lake City, UT. She spent the last couple years in Cambridge, MA where she graduated with a Master of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. In her poetry you will find her wrestling with theodicy, the apocalypse, motherhood, gender, and, of course, the Anthropocene and Patriarchy. To lighten things up, she explores longing, elemental distance, and the erotic/sensuality of, in, and lost, with the Beloved.

Selene Ross

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Selene Ross loves words, stories, and sounds. She is an audio producer, fiction writer and musician from Berkeley, California, or more specifically, El Sobrante–a semi-rural "census designated place" just east of Richmond. Her stories have been featured on  The Kitchen Sisters , KALW, NPR, KCRW and independent podcasts. Before moving to Corvallis, she lived in Oakland and was a senior audio producer at Dipsea, where she directed voice actors, oversaw sound-design and led the development of a new genre of sleep audio. Her short stories often explore themes of power and trust and the raptures and ruptures thereof, especially as experienced by teenage girls. She has a B.A. in Environmental Studies & Sociology from UC Santa Barbara and a love of all things weird and wonderful. Learn more at  selross.com . 

Aviva Wei Xue

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Aviva Wei Xue is a first-year fiction MFA candidate from mainland China. Having published a book and several articles in literary and feminist studies with Bloomsbury, Routledge,  International Journal of Women’s Studies  and  Comparative Literature in China , she is now working on her short stories and a novel, delving into counter-narratives and metafictional writing. She describes herself as nimble, hard-working and sensitive, daring like a leaping cat experimenting new things, and meticulous like Australian waxflowers, tiny yet blossom seriously. 

Haley Kennedy

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Haley is a computational linguist with a BA in Linguistics and an MSc in Speech and Language Processing. Her recent fiction explores our relationships with language, housing, wildlife, and water. She wants to be a xenolinguist when she grows up.

Veronica Suchodolski

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Pronouns: She/Her/Hers

Veronica Suchodolski found her way to Corvallis via Western Mass, New York City, and Seattle. She holds a BA from Barnard College and worked professionally as a social media manager. In fiction, she’s interested in women, social class, and expectation — “how we thought it would be, and how it is.” Loves farmers markets, hates driving, friendly with other dogs.

Sukayna Davanzo

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Sukayna is a fiction MFA candidate, originally from Dearborn, Michigan. She previously studied literature at Wayne State University, where she earned a BA and MA in English with a concentration in Middle Eastern representation/Orientalism in modern and post-modern media. In her fiction writing, Sukayna is interested in exploring the intergenerational relationships and tensions between immigrant women. When she isn’t writing, Sukayna can be found taking long walks or watching The Great British Bake Off on repeat.

Elliot Laurence

Pronouns: He/They

Elliot 'Icarus' Laurence is a writer from St. Louis, Missouri. He drove to Oregon with his sister, his dog, and his cat to write about underrepresented groups in a style he calls 'poverty fiction'. As a transgender Air Force veteran and activist for the LGBTQ+ community, Laurence is a recipient of the Young Alumni Award from Webster University, where he earned his B.A. in English, minor in Creative Writing, and certificate in Digital Media. Laurence enjoys hiking when they have time; Laurence likes having time. 

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Grace Hime is a fiction candidate from Wisconsin, who enjoys visual storytelling as much as writing. She is constantly trying to combine the two, creating collages and scrapbooks to accompany her work, which has been described as "camp with an indelible sincerity", "Americana with classical appeals". Grace likes the term "kitschy" and would invite you to the poker table. The buy-in is two Milk-Bones and a cigar.

Miranda Kross

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Miranda hails from Connecticut and identifies as an east coast cynic. She has a B.A. in English with a double minor in Women's and Gender Studies and Philosophy from Southern Connecticut State University. Her fiction deals primarily with grief monsters, garbage, bodily yuckiness, and being a child. "Hi, Mom and Dad." 

Creative Nonfiction

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Emily Podwoiski practices écriture féminine by placing women at the heart of her narratives. Born and raised in Metro Detroit, Emily holds her BA in English from University of Michigan-Dearborn and her MA in English from Wayne State University. She is currently working on a collection of personal essays about love, loss, and the literary roots of Valentine’s Day. In her essays, she obsesses over Old Hollywood Bombshells with a capital B, Emily Dickinson’s love letters, seashell jewelry, Nicolas Cage in Moonstruck (1987), and all things valentine.

Cooper Dart

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Cooper is an essayist from central Idaho who writes in, of, and from the rural American West. His obsessions include pickled red onions, Muji’s 0.38mm gel pens, and the light fixture aisle of Home Depot. His essays can be found in  DIAGRAM ,  The Adroit Journal , and  Washington Square Review , and he holds a B.A. in environmental studies and anthropology from Bowdoin College.

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Pronouns: they/them/theirs

Bec Ehlers was raised in Seattle and has recently returned to the PNW after years in New York devising accessible theatre and petting bodega cats. Their work centers on the body, through the experiences of living in a body and being a caregiver to the bodies of others. Their writing has been seen in print with Harmony Ink Press and Sinister Wisdom , and onstage with Macha Monkey Productions and Fantastic.Z Theatre

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RT Villa is from the middle of nowhere mid-Atlantic. Her essays and prosetry explore escapism, the mundane horrors of the everyday, and the tension points of relationships between beings and themselves, others, and the objects around them. Their work has been featured in  McSweeney's ,  The Believer,  and  Grub Street , among other publications. They are the nonfiction editor of the  VIDA Review , and currently call Oregon home, along with their chunky child of a cat. 

Isabelle Robinson

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Isabelle Robinson is a cross-genre writer and poet from South Florida, by way of a long line of New York Jews. In 2018, she returned to New York to study English and creative writing at Barnard College. In all forms, her work is moored in themes of grief and loss, violence, and memory. If she had to choose an emblem of her writing, it would be an empty chair. Her other literary and academic interests include playwriting, Shakespeare, gender and sexuality studies, and the photographic essay. She loves rooftops, Scream (1996), the almighty em-dash, and everything bagels — ideally toasted with veggie cream cheese.

Natalie Van Gelder

Natalie Van Gelder’s research, writing, and teaching interests center around the use of narrative medicine in the medical humanities and writing across the curriculum, specifically as it applies to neurodiversity, child development, and trauma studies. She holds an MA in creative writing from California State University Northridge and a BA in English and sociology from CSU Bakersfield. Natalie calls Agua Dulce, California home and is often inspired by her childhood and the natural landscapes of the Mojave Desert where she grew up. When not writing or teaching, Natalie can often be found looking down at the ground in search of insects or up at the stars wondering about extraterrestrials.

Ellison Rose

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Pronouns: They/She

Ellison is a nonfiction writer and poet born and raised in the rural South. They hold a B.A. in English: Creative Writing from the University of Memphis and spent 8 years in food service before making their way to the MFA. While here, they intend to use their work to explore rural cultural wealth, as well as the legacies of immigration, assimilation, and intergenerational trauma. When not hunched over a book or a notebook, you can find them scampering through the forest taking film photographs of water droplets, or else sprawled out on the carpet making flower crowns while listening to podcasts.

Katherine Cusumano

Katherine Cusumano is a writer and editor whose work focuses on gender, culture, and the outdoors. Her essays and reportage are interested in the ways people relate to the world around them: their environments and their obsessions. Before coming to Corvallis, she spent seven years working as a journalist in New York; her writing has appeared in the New York Times , Outside , W Magazine , and many others. She grew up in Bermuda, and she still thinks of it as home. Her full portfolio exists at  katherinecusumano.com .

Contact Info

Email: [email protected]

College of Liberal Arts Student Services 214 Bexell Hall 541-737-0561

Deans Office 200 Bexell Hall 541-737-4582

Corvallis, OR 97331-8600

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Creative Writing Program

The Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon is a two-year, fully-funded residency in which Master of Fine Arts (MFA) students concentrate in either poetry or fiction. The program emphasizes the workshop, integrating concentrated time for writing with craft seminars and individualized reading tutorials.  Each year we invite six writers for our Reading Series: recently we’ve hosted Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Elizabeth McCracken, and Justin Torres on the fiction side; in poetry, Ocean Vuong, Solmaz Sharif, and Robin Coste Lewis.     We offer two tracks for undergraduate study: a minor in Creative Writing , with workshops, seminars, and literature courses, as well as the Walter and Nancy Kidd Creative Writing Workshops , a unique yearlong studio experience in which students pursue their passion for creative writing in small classes with the support of peers and a graduate mentor. Follow us on Instagram to learn more about our program.

Diversity Statement

Creative Writing News and Events

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What You Can Do with a Creative Writing Degree

Our alumni have a long history of success with publishing, translation, fellowships, and prizes. Recent graduates have received Wallace Stegner Fellowships, the Dylan Thomas Award (University of Wales), the Amy Lowell Scholarship, the Philip Levine Prize in Poetry, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and other honors. Many of our graduates have launched successful careers working for:

• Newspapers, magazines, and book publishers
• Media companies
• Colleges and universities
• Marketing and advertising agencies
• Research institutes

Careers for Undergraduates

Careers for Graduate Students

How a Creative Writing MFA Enhances Your Life

“My time in the MFA was incredibly enriching for both my work and my life. The program's dual commitments to the tradition and our own individual sensibilities proved invaluable for me. The lessons learned therein continue to inform and instruct my poetry as well as my living.”

—Loїc-Aime-Mulatris, MFA in poetry, '21

Our Degree Programs

Students in the Creative Writing Program can pursue a minor or an MFA. We also offer Kidd Workshops, a unique studio experience in which students workshop their creative work in small classes with the support of peers and a graduate mentor.

Declare or Change Minor

Develop as a Literary Artist

Deepen your intellectual life and expand your writing skills within a community of like-minded peers in our Kidd Workshops, and hear from award-winning writers in our annual Reading Series.

Kidd Workshops Reading Series

Learn from Experts in the Field

Our faculty comprises award-winning authors and poets, including Pushcart Prize winners, National Endowment for the Arts recipients, and honorees of the Walt Whitman and O. Henry awards. In addition to a broad range of novels, nonfiction books, and poetry collections, their work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Best American Short Stories , and many other venues.

Publications Faculty Directory

Scholarships and Funding

The Creative Writing Program offers awards for both undergraduate and graduate students. Our MFA program fully funds students during their two-year residency program.

Undergraduate Scholarships    Graduate Funding

Academic Support

Our academic advisors can help students understand their major or minor requirements, plan their course of study, explore study abroad opportunities, and more.

Undergraduate Advising    Support for Graduate Students

Give to the Creative Writing Program

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The Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon is a two-year residency in which Master of Fine Arts (MFA) students concentrate in either poetry or fiction. The Program emphasizes the workshop, integrating concentrated time for writing with craft seminars and individualized reading tutorials.

You’ll hear our program is not for the faint of heart. It isn’t—and we’re proud of that. We hope to offer our students the rigorous apprenticeship we undertook with our own teachers.

Program Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of this program, students will be able to:

• Proficiency in close reading. We expect our MFA candidates to read widely and meticulously while pursuing their studies. Our aim is for each student to encounter a variety of historical periods, aesthetic styles, and critical approaches. Any student graduating from our program should be capable of examining a single text for its many formal conventions and the style or styles with which it is conversant.
• Development of vocabularies for assessing literature, with an emphasis on craft. Our graduate students are expected to acquire the clear and sophisticated language that enables them to speak at length about a range of craft considerations for any single piece of literature. This applies to the published works they encounter in our craft seminars, but it is equally essential in the Creative Writing Workshop, when they comprehensively critique the works of their peers.
• Application of the formal elements of craft in either genre. We expect our apprentice poets and fiction writers to be able to identify, assess, and deploy many of the formal conventions they encounter in the Creative Writing workshop and craft seminar. We believe that the practice of exploring formal challenges is necessary for the MFA student in order to build on his or her own resources as an artist. We especially believe that a knowledge of such conventions is a responsibility of any writer in our MFA program.
• Familiarity with fundamental concepts, forms, modes, and traditions in literary fiction and/or poetry. At the graduate level, this outcome is particularly geared toward and measured by the MFA exam that all of our graduating students take at the end of their second year. Our expectation is that our students will demonstrate a command of the texts they have encountered while earning their degrees, along with the multitude of aesthetic concepts, compositional possibilities, and artistic concerns to which they have been exposed.

NOTE: The list of outcomes above builds on the basic expectations we also hold for  our undergraduate students in the Creative Writing Program. Because our pedagogical  goals are continuously fundamental in nature, both at the undergraduate and graduate  level of study, we view our curriculum and the varietal redundancies below as a  cumulative process, one through which our poets and fiction writers build a portfolio of  knowledge whose components are interactive. This is to say we view historical periods,  critical modalities, and aesthetic movements to be in constant conversation with one  another. 

Additionally, what distinguishes the outcomes below from their undergraduate  counterparts is that we expect all our MFA candidates to wear two hats simultaneously:  that of the apprentice writer and that of the apprentice teacher, given that all of the  people enrolled in our program teach Creative Writing classes in their first year and  Composition in their second. The following outcomes should be considered very much  in this context, in that our graduate students are expected to both pursue these goals as  scholars then contemplate the many ways these skills translate to their own pedagogical  experience.

The entirety of our curriculum is structured with the expectation that we enable our  MFA graduates to continue to grow intellectually and develop as writers and masters of  the craft once they have received their degrees, long after they have left the University  of Oregon.

Master of Fine Arts Degree Requirements

The candidate must complete the graduate work during six consecutive terms in residence at the university. The candidate must pass a written examination on a reading list of works of fiction or poetry.

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California Institute of the Arts

Mfa: creative writing.

School of Critical Studies

Next Words Reading Series. Photo by Angel Origgi.

Experimental Practice

The two-year Creative Writing MFA at CalArts was designed to be rigorous and wild, erasing the division between “creative” and “critical.” Here, writing is understood as an art form best practiced alongside the other arts, and students benefit from having access to the CalArts community of artists as their peers and fellow travelers.

Writers Showcase at REDCAT. Photo by Angel Origgi.

for four-year special-focus institutions (2022)

in the Creative Writing MFA program (fall 2023)

in the School of Critical Studies

Pursue your imaginative impulses

MFA Creative Writing

The CalArts MFA in Creative Writing combines a dedication to experimental practice with a resolutely non-genre tracking curriculum. These commitments are intertwined: Our MFA program uniquely allows our students to channel ideas through whichever genre the work takes you—including into hybrid genre forms of your own.

Related programs

• MA Aesthetics and Politics

Let’s connect

Our dedication to a resolutely non-genre-tracking curriculum emerges from CalArts’ foundational commitment to experimentation and interdisciplinarity. Students who come to our program regularly engage in substantial projects in multiple genres across their coursework and beyond. As a Creative Writing MFA student, you’ll design your own path through our curriculum, invoking questions of genre and practice to inform your work as it develops. This structure gives special import to the work you create, with guidance and support from your faculty mentor, other faculty, and peers throughout your time in the program. Meeting with your mentor multiple times each semester, you’ll discuss your plan of study, creative work, and larger questions related to a life in writing and the interconnectedness of writing, other art forms, and intellectual endeavors. Our commitment to the mentor relationship is foundational to the pedagogy of CalArts.

Graduate students in the Creative Writing MFA are encouraged to situate their creative practice in a critical context—to engage with the history, theory, and politics of contemporary writing, and to deeply contemplate what and why they write. The program offers the chance to further develop both your craft and your knowledge base, and to attend workshops combining attentive critique of student work with discussion of readings on and in the various genres—or on special topics particularly relevant to writing today.

Our program proudly grounds its dedication to experimentation in traditions beyond purely formalist and Eurocentric models of the avant-garde, embracing speculative, performative, theoretical, divinatory, shamanistic, and other decolonizing modes of practice. At CalArts, realist literary fiction hangs out with speculative fiction and horror, lyric poetry meets documentary modes, and the essay mingles with memoir, performance, auto-theory, and hybrid forms.

Our core courses attend closely to questions of form and aesthetics, as well as to the historical and critical contexts of literary work. Most classes combine workshopping of student-generated work with discussion of assigned texts. While not all classes are offered every year, students choose from a wide selection of courses throughout the two-year program, honing individual visions and practices while experimenting with new forms and subjects. Creative Writing students also benefit from being able to take courses for elective credit in the MA Aesthetics and Politics program, as well as other MFA-level courses throughout the Institute.

Admission requirements

To be considered for the MFA Creative Writing program, you must complete the application process and all program-specific requirements, including a portfolio of representative work, an artist statement, and two letters of recommendation. Before applying, be sure to familiarize yourself with the detailed application requirements and resources available to assist you in this important process.

Application requirements

Degree requirements

The CalArts MFA Creative Writing is unique in the field for the way it combines a dedication to experimental practice and a resolutely non-genre tracking curriculum. Students in Creative Writing design their own path through our curriculum, in consultation with their faculty mentor, engaging with what questions of genre and practice inform their work as it develops.

MFA Creative Writing academic requirements

While our program is non-tracking we do offer four optional emphases that help guide our students through our curriculum and the course offerings of other schools and programs in the Institute. We call these emphases our Concentrations . These non-required Concentrations are Image + Text , Writing and Performativity , Writing and its Publics and Documentary Strategies . Image + Text traces the relationship of the written word and the visual image, including the cinematic, the static image, and the materiality of language. Writing and Performativity offers students an array of courses focused on the creative and critical practices of performative writing. Writing and Its Publics deals with the public face of writing, be it publishing, community-based work, or writing for various art audiences, while Documentary Strategies takes on a wide array of artistic engagements with documentation, witnessing, and archives of all kinds. Students whose work and interests closely engage one of these four areas can formalize that engagement by declaring an official Concentration, which may be advantageous in their professional lives after the MFA.

Interdisciplinary opportunities

In addition to CalArts’ naturally collaborative atmosphere, the Institute provides several programs of study that can be pursued concurrently with a student’s chosen metier, such as a concentration in Arts Education or Integrated Media.

Learn more about minors and interdisciplinary opportunities  

Courses you might take

What courses would you take as a graduate student in Creative Writing? Browse our available courses in the CalArts course catalog.

Creative Writing courses

School of Critical Studies courses  

Interested in this program?

View our step-by-step application guide to learn more.

Meet the faculty

At CalArts, faculty and students are collaborators, teaching, learning, and working together as members of our community of artists. 

• All Creative Writing faculty

Anthony McCann

Gabrielle Civil

Muriel Leung

Brian Evenson

Lecture and reading series

Katie jacobson writer in residence.

Established in memory of beloved alum Katie Jacobson (MFA 10), this residency brings an influential writer to campus each year for intimate workshops, a lecture, and public reading.

• Meet the writers

Writing Now

Structured around the work of several visiting contemporary writers, this reading series and seminar is a required year-long course for all first-year MFA Creative Writing students. 

• Browse the series

Some of our alumni

• Douglas Kearney (MFA 04), poet ( Patter ;  Fear, Some ;  The Black Automaton ), performer, librettist -- Whiting Writers Award
• Emerson Whitney (MFA 14), author ( Daddy Boy, Heaven , Ghost Box ) poet, journalist -- Maine Literary Award for Memoir
• Allie Rowbottom (MFA 11), author ( Jell-o Girls: A Family History , Aesthetica)
• Sam Cohen (MFA 10), writer ( Sarahland ) -- Best Jewish Story Collection of 5781 by alma.com
• Kenneth Reveiz (MFA 22), poet ( Mopes ) -- Fence Modern Poets Series Prize
• Colin Dickey ( MFA 01), nonfiction writer ( Afterlives of the Saints, Craniokepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius )
• Malik Gaines (MFA 99), performance artist, curator, co-founder of My Barbarian
• Janice Lee (MFA 08), Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State, author ( The Sky Isn’t Blue, Imagine a Death, Separation Anxiety ) -- finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award
• Henry Hoke (MFA 11), author ( Sticker, Open Throat ) -- finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award

More School of Critical Studies alumni

Read about author Henry Hoke’s journey after graduating from the Creative Writing MFA, and how his time at CalArts has influenced his genre-spanning creative process. “It just became really exciting for me to keep separate projects going all at once,” he explains, “because that’s what was encouraged in each professor’s course.” 

On fringe culture, conspiracies, the paranormal, and death

Alumni interview

Shortly after the publication of his fifth book, Under the Eye of Power, in 2023, Creative Writing alum Colin Dickey (MFA 01) sat for an interview with The Sun’s David Mahaffey. “A lot of our anxiety around chaos and disorder is fundamentally tied to our denial of death,” he said. “I had a real terror of death for the longest time, and that’s part of why I started writing about ghosts: to lessen that anxiety.”

• Read The Sun Interview

Colin Dickey. Photo © Rynn Reed, The Sun .

Carribean Fragoza

Faculty Story

“I think as writers, many of us go through some point or another when we’re just wondering, ‘Is this gonna work? Am I gonna be able to sustain this longer?’ I mean, there’s some pretty funky places we can go to as writers.”

Carribean Fragoza’s lifelong dedication to the arts has seamlessly intertwined with her deep commitment to community, as both artist and advocate. From her early admiration for CalArts to co-founding SEMAP, her work reflects a passion for fostering creative spaces that empower marginalized voices, culminating in a multifaceted career where art, activism, and cultural preservation intersect.

• Read the profile

CalArts professor Carribean Fragoza.

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