Requirements
The following account is not an official description of the degree requirements, which can be found on The Graduate School’s website, but an outline of study. All students admitted to the MFA+MA program are, without exception, guaranteed full funding (stipend plus tuition) for three academic years and two summers. Years one and two are spent primarily on creative writing workshops and literature courses (both those designed for scholarly study and those intended to help the writer establish a stance toward literature itself, past and present), and year three primarily on the MFA thesis. The Graduate School allows students five years in which to complete their degree, but we strongly encourage students to finish within the term of their funding.
Writing Workshops
Over the first two years of the program, MFA+MA students will take six genre-specific writing workshops, each focusing on technique, stances, artistic goals, and literary contexts that are particular to each genre. Because we admit between four and six students each year, some of these workshops may, from time to time, combine genres and focus on elements of writing that are common to genres, including style, structure, and mode of discourse (lyric, narrative, research-based, etc.).
Coursework
The MFA+MA course schedule is a sequencing of studies and workshops in preparation for writing the two main new works each student will create: the critical MA Capstone essay and the MFA thesis manuscript. The MFA+MA program requires six graduate-level seminars in English, beginning with English 410: Introduction to Graduate Study. In order to gain some expertise in the full range of English and American literature and culture, two of remaining courses must be focused on literature before 1800 and two must be focused on literature after 1800. The last of the coursework may be taken outside the English Department. In addition, students will learn to read and interpret literature from a writer’s perspective in three required seminars under the rubric of English 403: Writers’ Studies in Literature.
Graduate Assistantships
In the first year, funding is provided in the form of a Fellowship, allowing students to focus solely on their studies. Throughout the second year, funding is provided to MFA+MA students in the form of Graduate Assistantships, through which students are assigned duties (as teaching or research assistants and instructors) relevant to their work and training. All students will take English 571: Teaching Creative Writing in their first year to prepare to teach their own introductory creative writing courses in the second and sometimes third year of the program.
Editorial Practicum
During their two funded summers in the program, MFA-MA students will serve as part-time Editorial Assistants for the prestigious online literary journal TriQuarterly, gaining editorial experience that will help shape their own projects in the MFA+MA program and beyond, will enrich their sense of what is being written contemporaneously, and will give them working knowledge of producing an online literary journal/website.
First-Year Review
As is common practice in graduate programs, at the end of the first year, the MFA+MA Policy Committee evaluates students’ performance to determine whether they should continue into the second year or leave the program. This decision is based on satisfactory performance in coursework and demonstrated ability to develop significant artistic and critical/scholarly projects to carry them to degree completion.
MA Capstone
All MFA+MA students will complete an article-length critical essay in the late spring of the second year. This essay will normally be an expanded version of an essay written for an English Department graduate seminar, revised in response to comments from, and, as appropriate, in consultation with, the seminar instructor.
MFA Thesis
At the end of the third year, students will complete their MFA Thesis: a full draft of a book-length manuscript.