Undergraduate majors and minors in Creative Writing are taught by a faculty of distinguished writers with award-winning publications in fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and young adult literature.
Students engage closely with their professors and collaboratively with each other in our limited-enrollment, workshop-style courses, receiving detailed feedback on their original stories, poems, and essays.
Students also read a diverse array of contemporary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, and are encouraged to explore multilingual writing in our courses, whether by incorporating languages other than English into their work or by deploying dialects and vernaculars from communities and geographic regions across the English-speaking world.
We welcome double majors and offer one-on-one advising to assist in accommodating complex class schedules.
In their senior year, Creative Writing majors are offered the opportunity to write an Honors Thesis. Students electing to enroll in this option work one-on-one in independent study with one of our core faculty members across the two semesters of their final year at UM. Honors theses can be comprised of a selection of poems or short stories, the beginnings of a novel, or a multi-genre collection of work.
Majors and minors in Creative Writing are invited to attend readings and lectures by internationally renowned visiting writers who we welcome to UM’s campus twice a year as part of our Ibis Reading Series.
Students are also encouraged to participate in regular open mic events on campus and to serve as editors on the staff of Mangrove, our nationally distributed undergraduate literary magazine.
Our recent graduates have been accepted into highly competitive MFA programs at universities including Cornell, Sarah Lawrence, the University of Texas at Austin, The New School, and Columbia, while others of our creative writers have gone on to pursue careers in editing, publishing, advertising, journalism, education, counseling, medicine, and law.
