Department of English
M.F.A. in Creative Writing
Dr. James Walton, Department Chair
Dr. Connie Hales, Graduate Program Coordinator
- Background | Literary
Community | Program | Financial
Support | Faculty
| Quick Facts |
MA in English
Background
Our university has enjoyed a thriving graduate creative writing program for over thirty years. The M.A. Option was directed for many years by Pulitzer Prize winning poet Philip Levine, and later by poet C.G. Hanzlicek, who supervised the program's transition from M.A. to M.F.A in 1996.
Alumni from the program's earlier days include such distinguished writers as Sherley Anne Williams, Luis Omar Salinas, David St. John, Larry Levis, Roberta Spear, Lawson Inada, Kathy Fagan, and Gary Soto. Our more recent students show equal promise. New first books include: a collection of poetry by Andres Montoya, a chapbook by Neomi Sanchez, a memoir by Odette Larson, and collections of short fiction by Steve Lattimore and Daniel Chacon. Chacon's first novel was published in 2004 by Atria Books, Simon and Schuster. Manuel DeLuna was awarded an Artist in Residence Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and his first collection of poems will be published by Carnegie Mellon in 2005. Zay Guffy-Bill hosts Literocity, a weekly radio show, and Joseph Voth has launched an excellent new literary journal, The Grassy Knoll. Others are actively publishing in journals and magazines including Atlanta Review, North American Review, Poetry Motel, The Greensboro Review, The Chariton Review, The Blithe House Quarterly, and The New Yorker.
Literary Community
The rich literary culture in California's Central Valley is well known because Fresno was the home of William Saroyan, and is still the home of Philip Levine. It is also the home of Fresno Poets Association, a decades old community organization that hosts monthly poetry and prose readings in conjunction with the creative writing program and the Fresno Art Museum. A wide variety of poetry and prose readings occur regularly at coffee houses and book stores around town, and several excellent anthologies over the years have focused exclusively on the work of writers connected with California's Central Valley, many of whom are former or current students and faculty in the creative writing program.
In How Much Earth: The Fresno Poets (Heyday Books, 2001), the most recent of these anthologies, poet and retired professor Peter Everwine describes Fresno's writing community as "based on mutual respect, genuine friendship, and abiding faith in the power of art to give solace when everything else fails us." Most Fresno writers share this impression, whether they are Fresno natives, transplants to the area, or simply passing through as students. "We've always felt there was an unusual amount of creative force in the valley," says Steve Yarbrough.
Program
Because we believe that the best artists are necessarily well educated in the history and practice of their art, we offer a substantial 54-unit degree program, which gives students the opportunity to focus acutely on their writing while gaining a strong background in literature. We expect a lot of our students and we try to give them all the help they need to accomplish it. We offer small intensive workshops and seminars taught by award-winning poets and prose writers, we work very closely with individual students, and we bring prominent visiting writers to our campus each year.
Our Distinguished Writers Series has included Galway Kinnell, Ha Jin, Geoffrey Wolff, and Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, Vivian Gornick, Li-Young Lee, and the Irish novelist Colm Toibin in recent years, and the Fresno Poets Association has hosted readings and class visits by Maggie Anderson, Philip Levine, Nancy Willard, Josep Novakovich, Chase Twitchell, and many others. We now have a semester-long visiting writers. Our semester-long visiting writers have included: Debora Greger, 2002; David Durham, 2003; and Beverly Lowry, 2004.
The creative writing faculty is dedicated to fostering the growth of a vital community of writers, and to offering a variety of experiences to help the emerging writer embark on a successful writing life. Students are encouraged to participate as editors, organizers, and workshop leaders in the annual Young Writers' Conference; they are encouraged to serve on the editorial staff of the San Joaquin Review; they are asked to give at least two public readings of their own work while they are here; and they are encouraged to enroll in our publishing and editing course in which they help to select the winner of the Levine Poetry Prize, a national poetry book contest sponsored by the MFA Program and Anhinga Press. Many also take part in the annual CSU Summer Arts Program, which takes place during the month of July on our campus.
What our M.F.A. students seem to appreciate most is the intimate and supportive atmosphere at Fresno, combined with rigorous requirements and professional expectations. This is a place where writers meet the friends and the literary community they will have for a lifetime. Soul Vang, a recent M.F.A. graduate in poetry, says about his experience here: "We were a family. The writing workshops were places we could open up and share ourselves without fear of unjust criticism, rejection, or pettiness. My poetry was born in this loving and creative environment."
Financial Support
Many of our students work as Teaching Associates for the English Department's Composition Program, as tutors for the Writing Center, and several teach beginning creative writing classes each year. We also award the William Saroyan Scholarship in fiction and the Philip Levine Scholarship in poetry and the Lillian Faderman Scholarship in Creative Nonfiction to selected entering students. Two Andres Montoya Memorial Scholarships are awarded every year to talented Chicano/Chicana student writers, and a limited number of out-of-state tuition waivers are available to eligible students for their first year.
Background | Literary Community | Program | Financial Support | Faculty | Quick Facts