Diploma in Creative Writing

The Graduate Program in English is proud to introduce its unique Graduate Diploma in Creative Writing. Focused on developing students’ writing skills, our program trains new scholars in a wide scope of genres, from poetry and prose narrative to literary essays, personal memoirs, and historical biography. 

All of our new Creative courses are open to all students, which means, not that all those who take a creative or literary writing course will go on to complete the diploma, but that all graduate students in English Literature have the opportunity to develop mastery in the writing of distinct literary forms, whether poetic, fictional or those of literary prose, as well as in the critical interpretation of such forms. Our diploma program places future writers in the line of writer-critics that extends in English from Coleridge and Henry James to Maggie Nelson and Billy Ray Belcourt.

Through the writing of fiction and the informed consideration of ideas, students have a chance to think in ways especially of value in our moment, with its transformative technologies, its incursions of the implausible into the real—and its eternal verities. Creative writing allows students to think laterally and vertically, not only absorbing ideas but sounding the self; not just producing shaped arguments but making artifacts that, while containing ideas, aren't contained by them.