Poetry & Fiction
Over 25 years of guiding writers to unexpected heights
Apply to the MFA now!
The Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing is for students with advanced abilities in the writing of fiction and poetry. The nationally ranked program offers a balance of intimate and intensive writing workshops with courses in literature, form and technique, and related electives. CSU also offers a Master of English in Creative Nonfiction, and our MFA students regularly enroll in Creative Nonfiction Courses. Course work culminates in a thesis—a collection of poetry, short stories or a novel—and the completion of a comprehensive Portfolio.
Applicants to the program should request application information from our Graduate Programs Assistant; contact information is available on the M.F.A. application page. Though GPA is considered, we pay the closest attention to your writing sample: 12-20 pages of poems for poets, or two short stories or a chapter or two of a novel in-progress for fiction writers. For full consideration for a Graduate Teaching Assistantship, and for any University fellowships, we must receive all of your application documents by January 1st.
Teaching Assistantships are available on a competitive basis, as are assistantships for the position of Administrative Assistant to the Director of Creative Writing. Students with Teaching Assistantships or Colorado Fellowships usually complete the M.F.A. in three years; those who don't need financial aid can finish in two.
If you're applying for a graduate teaching assistantship (GTA), make sure to provide a written statement that speaks to your qualifications and enthusiasm for college teaching. Remember, most GTAs will be teaching freshman composition. In your application, emphasize anything that speaks to your formal teaching experience (paid or volunteer), such as tutoring, writing center counseling, or even coaching or outdoor recreation. In addition, remind those who are writing your letters of recommendation to speak to your potential for college teaching.
We offer a variety of for-credit internships (some paid) in such areas as college teaching, public education, arts administration in literature, and literary editing (including the Center for Literary Publishing, the Colorado Review, and the Freestone, the Department's alumni magazine. A paid internship as editor of Garden Level, a literary magazine staffed by CSU undergraduates, is also available.
M.F.A. candidates can also take a course in Teaching College Creative Writing, which allows them to teach Introduction to Creative Writing.
“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.”
~ Toni Morrison
It is fall in Fort Collins, which means we wake up to crisp, cool mornings and by mid-afternoon, we are heading to the river to enjoy a respite from the Colorado sun. Our town, located alongside the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, boasts the oldest MFA program in the state. Our earlier MA in Creative [...]
Bitsui, Sherwin. Shapeshift. Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2003. Print. I came back to Shapeshift in an elementally coincidental kind of way; I first had a copy bought for me by a professor of (post)colonial lit, Vermonja Alston, at a reading Bitsui gave, when I was a poor undergrad. Somewhere I gave it away or [...]
Enigma and Light, by David Mutschlecner Ahsahta Press, 2012 reviewed by Timothy David Orme If a poet’s work is words—the words that call forth the sun, that cause the sun—the poet’s work must be a site of divination, a place where the poem both creates and causes the world. “I divine from what’s under the [...]
Rehm, Pam. “A Charm for Sleep.” Small Works. Chicago: Flood Editions, 2005. What I admire in this poem (which pertains, really, to Small Works as a whole, as well as to The Larger Nature) is the poet’s sense of surety, her feeling of calm, a tone or bearing carefully measured out to ultimately form a [...]
Accept an offer to join an M.F.A program and you will inevitably be asked: why? Your parents will smile and laugh about their “special” little girl (“We don’t know where she gets it!”), strangers will regret asking why you are going to graduate school, grandparents will suggest that you should start using more rhyming [...]
AWP 2013 is upon us, and we’ve all got big plans. Check out what the CSU folks will be up to: FACULTY: Dan Beachy-Quick: Friday, March 8: 2:00: Ahsahta Book Signing; 3:30: The Arcadia Project Panel w/ Jennifer Moxley, Josh Corey, Jonathan Skinner, and Brenda Ijima; The Arcadia Project: Writing the Postmodern Pastoral; Location: Room 109, [...]
Dan Beachy-Quick
Leslee Becker
John Calderazzo
SueEllen Campbell
Matthew Cooperman
Judy Doenges
Stephanie G'Schwind
EJ Levy
Todd Mitchell
Steven Schwartz
Sasha Steensen
