Program description: The MA Program in Creative Writing at EMU promotes innovation, experimentation, and collaboration across artistic fields and cultural practices. Distinguished as one of the only interdisciplinary programs for creative writing in the country, we provide a rich space for exploring the relationships between poetry and poetics, experimental prose, cultural translation, community service, pedagogy, and contemporary arts. Locating the writer’s work along the frontiers of social imaginaries and civic possibilities, our program nourishes opportunities to develop a conceptually rigorous and imaginatively engaged writing. The MA emphasizes the importance of aesthetic risk and social application, while offering opportunities for writers to explore multiple arts and mixed genres, sound and performance, digital technologies and new media, as well as community-based and collaborative projects, innovative curating, and alternative publishing.

The program is small, with a diverse group of ten to twenty students. We offer our students a welcoming community in which they can experiment, while pursuing a critical examination of language and its various places in culture and the arts. In addition, the BathHouse Event Series sponsored by the EMU Creative Writing Program provides opportunities for graduate students to interact and learn with some of the most compelling interdisciplinary writers working today.