Program Goals

We’ll take your creative writing abilities to the next level, whatever your level. (We admit students from relative beginners to published authors with multiple books to their credit.) Our writing faculty are National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalists; no matter how much experience you have, they’ll be able to help you develop your writing, and market it professionally if you so choose. A basic assumption we make is that being a writer makes you a more effective reader and teacher of literature: you’ll combine your “writerly” insight into process with “readerly” critical approaches to form and content.

We’ll train you to be a confident, constructive, and versatile teacher of creative writing. We want you to be comfortable teaching all the four main genres of creative writing — fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and drama — and responding helpfully to student work. This program is the perfect preparation if you want to start to teach creative writing, and is the natural next step in professional development if you already do.

We’ll train you to be a master interpreter of literature, who can use creative approaches and creative assignments to get their students fired up and thinking deeply about challenging texts. We’re sensitive to the demands of Common Core and your local curricula, and we’ll help you work within those constraints to get superior results.