Welcome

The primary objective of the Program in Creative Writing is to give students who have the talent and the ambition for a writing career the opportunity to develop that talent significantly and to make it the focus of a program of university study. Two major assumptions inform this program: first, that the capabilities of talent can be increased through training; and second, that the necessary curriculum for aspiring writers consists of the study of the language and the writing idioms of past and contemporary writers.

The program therefore aims in its earlier years to acquaint students with the various ways of writing that the writers of our time have made possible. Students begin to write in an expanding environment of literary and linguistic knowledge. In the later years the program aims to expose students to the history of formal experimentation and growth in particular genres, and to encourage specialization and/or experimentation in more than one genre.

The Creative Writing Program is not a direct entry program. Application to the program is made after two years of university level study, with a minimum of 54 credits completed

The program emphasizes literary writing.

About the Creative Writing Program +/-

Since its inception in 1975, York's Creative Writing Program has brought together established and apprentice writers in the study and practice of the literary arts. Many of Canada's most significant literary figures have taught in the Program, such as Eli Mandel, Irving Layton, Don Coles, Frank Davey, Miriam Waddington, Clark Blaise, Matt Cohen, and bp nichol. The work of its graduates has appeared in many prominent Canadian and international journals.

The Program's faculty and former students have been finalists for or winners of many major awards: the Governor General's Prize, the Scotia Bank Giller Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the W.H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Emily Dickinson Prize for Poetry, the Chalmers Award, the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize, the Commonwealth Prize, the CBC Canadian Literary Awards, the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and many others.

Through an annual reading series, the Program's has brought many poets and fiction writers to campus, among them, Mavis Gallant, Rohinton Mistry, Marie Claire Blais, Dionne Brand, Anne Carson, Barbara Gowdy, A.F. Moritz, Ken Babstock, Karen Solie, and Jen Bervin. The series also invites graduates of the program to read from their published work.

With the office of York's President, the Program offers and administers its own annual awards, open to York undergraduates. The President's Prizes recognize excellence in the categories of short fiction, poetry, screenplay, and stage play.

Creative Writing students are also eligible for the Judith Gewurtz Memorial Poetry Award; the bp nichol Award for the graduating major who demonstrated the most promising development in Creative Writing studies at York; the Sorbara Award for achievement among third year majors; the Stanley Fefferman Prize for the best portfolio in an introductory creative writing course; and the Sylvia Ellen Hersch Memorial Award, which offers financial assistance to a fourth-year student majoring in Creative Writing who has demonstrated talent, commitment, and achievement.

News & Events

Poet, critic and novelist, Patricia Keeney recently won two awards for critical writing –The Nathan Cohen Award for Excellence in Theatre Criticism, 2011/12 and an award for her critical writing on poetry in Arc Poetry Magazine. On March 5, she was the featured reader in the Canadian Writers in Person series at York University which featured her two new poetry books, First Woman (Inanna Press) and You Bring Me Wings (Antares Publishing House of Spanish Culture). In April and May, Keeney will give guest lectures and readings at Ain Shams University in Cairo to initiate an exchange program with that university and York, followed by her participation as a theatre critic in the international theatre festival in Jankoping, Sweden.

B.W. Powe will be Writer/Scholar/Researcher in Residence at IN3, the Digital Humanities Lab at the University of Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain, this spring and summer (2013). He will be working on an e-book, called Opening Time: on the Energy Threshold, in collaboration with colleagues there.

David B. Goldstein’s poems appeared this year in filling Station, CV2, and the Malahat Review. His first poetry book, Laws of Rest, will be published in October.

Michael Helm's essay, "In a Stone Country," has been published in the spring issue of Tin House magazine.

In January, Michael Helm's Cities of Refuge received a starred review in Publisher's Weekly. It was published in the U.S. in March. He'll be reading in New York on April 21st.