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

Iowa State University’s three-year program leading to the terminal MFA degree, emphasizes creative writing—poetry, fiction and nonfiction—about the environment. Our MFA program in Creative Writing and Environment offers an original and intensive opportunity for gifted students of nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and drama to document, meditate on, celebrate, and mourn the transformation of our world.

From the Sumerian and Homeric hymns to the Theogony and the Odyssey, from Noah to Moby Dick, from Black Elk to Black Boy, from Virginia Woolf to Tobias Wolff, the literary arts acknowledge an inherent connection between the human predicament and place. With more people sharing our planet’s finite space, and with our planet and its systems imperiled, an educated attention to place in the broadest sense of the term is vital. The human story finds its structure in geography, both natural and constructed, and in the complex landscape of cultural constructs.