MFA Collective A creative writing magazine written by students in creative writing programs.

ASU Creative Writing offers an exceptional program in creative activity—a curricular model that guides talented individuals in writing original poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and plays. Equally, this model informs service projects that reach out to Arizona, the nation, and an international community of writers. Program innovation and vitality together with exemplary mentorship from a superior teaching faculty combine to shape and define pragmatic, successful outcomes for students of the Master of Fine Arts program—new century graduates we distinguish as artist-citizens.

Nationally classified by the Associated Writing Programs as a major interdisciplinary “studio/academic program,” MFA students divide work equally between writing workshops and literature and theory courses. In a flexible curriculum, poets and prose writers work mainly with professors in the Department of English; playwrights study with professors in the Department of Theatre. While the MFA is a professional, not a vocational degree program, each student confronts the challenge of producing primary works of literature in a real-world setting. Courses such as “Creative Writing and the Professions” and “Internship for Community Outreach” encourage students to envision life beyond graduation, providing training that will lead to mainstream publishing and performance, moving students from the classroom to the New York stage, and from theory to first book.

Creative Writing, with deep historic roots at ASU, has been a part of the English Department since the 1930s. With the inception of the MFA degree in 1985, Creative Writing became a professionally ascendant unit, ranked within the top twenty MFA programs in the nation by US News and World Report.

In the past seven years, ASU Creative Writing faculty members have produced twelve books of fiction, four collections of short stories, twelve volumes of poetry, a memoir, and forty-four plays. During this period, they have garnered multiple awards including Pushcart Prizes, two Howard Foundation Fellowships from Brown University, an H. D. Fellowship, a Cleveland State Poetry Prize, the Gettysburg Review Annual Poetry Prize, the University of Akron Press Poetry Prize, a National Hispanic Playwriting Award, a Lannan Foundation Literary Selection, lifetime achievement awards from the Western Literature Association and the Arizona Historical Museum, the Pen USA Literary Award for Poetry, and a Poetry Finalist for the National Book Award.

Over these last seven years, the faculty has appeared in all major American literary anthologies and in prestigious journals from The Atlantic to The New York Times. Creative Writing faculty members have developed an increasingly international reputation, having works performed in varied and celebrated venues including off-Broadway theater, the London stage, and Garrison Keillor’s “The Writers’ Almanac.”

Public art grants have funded projects such as the “Arizona Poetry Model for Alzheimer Residential Communities,” The Museum Heart” a twelve-foot steel poetry installation at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and $60,000 for a 603-tile granite installation “Words Over Water” around the Tempe Town Lake.

Faculty and administrative staff have mentored graduate students in 119 community-outreach efforts in an informed ethic, a campus mall stretching from the “ASU Community Writers’ Workshop” to Phoenix and nearby Native American communities, and to the farthest corners of the state and the world. Through Creative Writing’s Virginia G. Piper Center, students recently have been supported in outreach programs to China and India.

The ASU Creative Writing is and has always been an unswervingly student-first program. It remains a place of shelter for graduate students where the centuries-old apprenticeship model thrives within a New American University.

Program Manager

Karla Elling
Office: LL 315C
Phone: (480) 965-3528
Fax: (480) 965-3451
Email: elling@asu.edu