The M.F.A. at Vanderbilt is a two-year program involving four semesters of graduate work in writing workshops and seminars. Students enrolled will take a workshop and two seminars each semester, until their final semester, when work on the thesis will take the place of the seminars. The thesis will be a substantial piece of creative writing: a novel, a collection of short stories, or a collection of poems.
Application
The application deadline for Fall 2010 admission is January 15, 2010. In order to encourage candidates to use the online application system, Vanderbilt’s GraduateSchool will waive the application fee for electronic applications this year.
The electronic application form makes it possible to provide the following required materials:
Writing sample
College transcripts
Statement of purpose
Three letters of recommendation
GRE general test scores (5 years old or less) -- GRE Codes: Vanderbilt 1871 English Dept 2503
TOEFL scores are required for international applicants only -- code 1871
NOTE: The GRE Subject Test is no longer required by the English Department
The writing sample for M.F.A. candidates should be creative work. Fiction manuscripts may be made up of stories or a section of a novel, between 20 and 25 pages. Poetry manuscripts should be 10 to 15 pages.
The statement of purpose should be concise and no more than two pages.
All supporting materials should be sent electronically, or mailed to the following address:
Graduate Applications - College of Arts and Science
Attn: CreativeWriting VanderbiltUniversity
411 Kirkland Hall Nashville, TN37240
Funding
Full funding is offered to all students admitted.
For first year students, the University Fellowship includes:
A full tuition benefit
A $6,000 stipend
A $3,300 salary for assisting in the Writing Studio
And health insurance
FirstyearUniversity Fellowships may be enhanced by University Graduate Fellowships, topping up awards, which may be retained for the second year.
For second year students, the University Fellowship includes:
A full tuition benefit
A $6,000 stipend
A $3,300salary for teaching a beginning creative writing workshop for one semester
Health insurance
And retention of University Graduate Fellowship, if earned in the first year.
All students are admitted with University Fellowships. Those who make good progress toward their degree will retain their fellowships in the second year.
Schedule of Courses
The two year schedule of courses will look as follows.Some upper division undergraduate seminars may be taken for graduate credit, for 3 rather than 4 hours.All graduate seminars, including the graduate workshops, are worth 4 hours.Ultimately a student will graduate with between 42 and 48 hours.A graduate workshop in the student’s genre is required each semester.
First Year
Fall semester:
Graduate workshop (4 hours)
Graduate seminar (3 or 4 hours)
Graduate seminar (3 or 4 hours)
Spring semester:
Graduate workshop (4 hours)
Graduate seminar (3 or 4 hours)
Graduate seminar (3 or 4 hours)
Second Year
Fall semester:
Graduate workshop (4 hours)
Graduate seminar (3 or 4 hours)
Graduate seminar (3 or 4 hours)
Spring semester:
Graduate workshop (4 hours)
Thesis (1-8 hours)
Frequently Asked Questions
Questions about the Application:
Is there an application fee?
If you submit your application online there is no application fee. If you submit your application in hard copy form the application fee is $40.Vanderbilt encourages the use of the online application. If you are unable to apply online, send an email to the GraduateSchool office at vandygrad@vanderbilt.edu, and a PDF form will be sent to you.
If I have a technical question regarding my online application, whom do I contact?
For technical questions regarding your online application please email vandygrad@vanderbilt.edu .
If my recommender would like to send a letter of recommendation via the postal service, will I have to pay an application fee?
No.We understand that some of your recommenders might prefer to send a hard copy letter.
Can I use a dossier record service?
Since Vanderbilt has its own online form for Letters of Recommendation, there should be no need to use a record service.
I applied to the Vanderbilt MFA program last year.Do I need to submit another application?Must I resend my transcripts and my GRE scores?
If you have previously applied to the Vanderbilt MFA program through our online application, you may reapply for another term by using your existing record. To access your record you will need your User ID and password. If you have forgotten your User ID and password, contact the VanderbiltGraduateSchool at vandygrad@vanderbilt.edu.When you are ready to begin your reapplication, click on: https://graduateapplications.vanderbilt.edu/applicant/app_online.asp. The graduate school requires applicants to submit separate transcripts and letters of recommendation for every application, including reapplication.
My undergraduate grades (GPA) are not as high as I’d like them to be.How much emphasis is put on my GPA?
The most important component of your application is your Writing Sample.Your GPA is a confirmation of your ability to handle the academics.
If my letters of recommendation, transcripts, or GRE scores arrive at Vanderbilt after the deadline, will my application still be considered?
We understand that sometimes the delivery of your supporting documentation (GRE scores, transcripts, letters of recommendation) might be delayed. If your supporting materials are delayed and we need to see them, we will contact you to try to obtain them.
When will I hear if I am accepted?
We try to notify those who are accepted by mid-February, or no later than mid-March.
Questions about the GRE:
Is there a minimum GRE score?
There is no minimum GRE score, nor does Vanderbilt track the GRE scores of applicants or those accepted to the MFA program. GRE scores are a confirmation that the candidate would be able to manage the academics of the program, and are treated as such.
I took the GRE in 1997.Do I have to take it again?
GRE scores must be 5 years old or less.
I already have a Master’s Degree.Do I have to take the GRE test?
Yes, the GRE test is required.The GRE Subject Test is not required.However, if your GRE test scores are 5 years old or less, those scores will suffice.
Do I have to take the GRE Subject Test?
The GRE test is required.The GRE Subject test is not required.
How important is the quantitative portion of the GRE score?
The quantitative portion of the GRE has less impact on your application than the verbal portion.But your Writing Sample carries the most weight.
Questions about Genre:
Can I take classes outside my genre (fiction or poetry)?
Yes, MFA students enroll in workshops outside their genre, with the consent of the instructor.
How do you apply if you are applying for both fiction and poetry?
If you are applying for both fiction and poetry you must submit 2 applications.That way our review committee will evaluate each application separately.However, you would be required to send only one set of GRE scores and one set of transcripts.
Do you have a Creative Non-Fiction specialization?
At this time Vanderbilt’s areas of specialization are fiction and poetry.We offer one Creative Non-Fiction workshop each year in the spring.
Do you consider applications in genre-fiction (speculative, sci-fi, fantasy, mystery writing, children’s literature, etc.)?
No, we do not.
Questions about Interviews:
I would like to meet with a faculty member to discuss the MFA program.
Due to the large volume of applications received and the number of requests to meet with a member of the faculty, we are unable to arrange meetings. Our website is filled with information about the MFA program.If you have a question that is not addressed on our website, please email us at creativewriting@vanderbilt.edu.
Can I talk to one of the current MFA students?
All candidates accepted to the Vanderbilt MFA program are invited to campus in the spring to meet the current MFA students and faculty. Otherwise, due to the heavy workload of our MFA students (writing, attending classes, studying, and teaching), we are unable to arrange meetings with them.
Literary Life
Venues for creative writers to share their work at Vanderbilt include an annual, The Vanderbilt Review. Another yearly event is the competition for the
Academy of
American Poets Prize, given for the best poem submitted by a student enrolled at Vanderbilt. Each semester the Gertrude Vanderbilt and Harold S.Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Series brings writers to campus to read from their work and visit classes. In the spring, the literary symposium gathers writers around a theme for two days of readings and panel discussions. Every other year a distinguished writer in residence visits for a semester and teaches a workshop in his or her genre. Vanderbilt’s literary life is an ongoing resource for creative writers.
The Gertrude Vanderbilt and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Series
Robert Penn
Warren * Eudora Welty * Kingsley Amis * V.S. Pritchett * Elizabeth Spencer * Yusef Komunyakaa * Ruth Fainlight * Rose Tremain * Allan Sillitoe * Rita Dove * Agha Shahid Ali * Ellen Gilchrist * Marilyn Nelson * Garrett Hongo * Judith Ortiz Cofer * William Matthews * Diane Ackerman * Ellen Douglas * Margot Livesey * Jessica Hagedorn * Alan Shapiro * Julia Alvarez * Seamus Heaney * Charles Wright * Chase Twichell * J.M.Coetzee * Richard Ford * Maxine Kumin * Carol Frost * Ellen Bryant Voigt * Robert Lowell * Pauline Kael * David Lehman * Linda Gregerson * James Wood * Stanley Elkin * Lee Smith * Chang-rae Lee * Al Young * Wally Lamb * Donald Justice * Philip Levine * Peter Matthiessen * Andrew Hudgins * Medbh McGuckian * Erin McGraw * Jill McCorkle * Madison Smartt Bell * Sydney Lea * Marita Golden * Antonya Nelson * Gerald Stern * Eileen Simpson * Karen Yamashita * Richard Bausch * Elizabeth Spires * Richard Tillinghast * Anne Patchett * Martín Espada * Tony Hoagland * R. S. Gwynn * Mary Gordon * T. R. Hummer * Alison Lurie * Fred Chappell * Pam Durban * Edward Hirsch * and more have read in The Gertrude Vanderbilt and Harold S. Vanderbilt Visiting Writers Series.
Distinguished Writers in Residence
Philip Levine, Spring 1995
James McConkey, Spring 1997
Marilyn Nelson, Spring 1999
Judith Ortiz Cofer, Spring 2001
Garrett Hongo, Fall 2002
Peter Guralnick, Spring 2005, Spring 2007
The central goal of this graduate fiction workshop is to help graduate writers further develop their art and refine their aesthetics. This is primarily a studio course; participants will also consider published works of fiction and discussions of craft. As workshop writers present fiction-in-progress, we’ll discuss artistic vision in relation to questions of form and structure, and the possibilities for invention and for reinvigorating tradition. Throughout the semester, we’ll discuss both short and longer forms of fiction, and we’ll consider varieties of perception, narrative stance, tension, dramatic and non-dramatic progression, voice, language, and other aspects of craft. What role does lyricism play? How do we represent various experiences of time? Conceptualize character? How might we consider conflicting and/or echoing movements within a given piece? Which ‘rules’ might be most interesting to explore the limits of, and which to break? Finally, how might we think about the relationships between fiction writing and other arts? Between and among our experiences of culture/cultural moments, the ways in which we tell stories, and the stories we tell? Throughout the semester, graduate writers will be required to produce and present new original fiction, and to read and respond to published writing in class discussion and written discussions.
ENGL 304-01 Graduate Poetry Workshop
Mark Jarman
(Mondays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)
The graduate poetry workshop will be focused on class discussion of poetry written by participants. Members should aim to complete 12 pages of their poetry for the course. Each class member will also choose a poet, in consultation with the workshop leader, for extensive study, resulting in a presentation to the class at the end of the semester. There will also be weekly discussion of reading assignments from our texts: Twentieth Century American Poetry, edited by Dana Gioia, David Mason, & Meg Schoerke and Twentieth Century American Poetics, edited by Dana Gioia, David Mason, & Meg Schoerke.
English 307.1 "Reading/Reading” Vanderbilt Writers
Kate Daniels
(Thursdays, 3:30 – 6:00 pm)
Creative Writing has been a vital part of Vanderbilt University’s English Department for nearly a century. Much of the discourse around the history of writers and writing at Vanderbilt has been dominated by the controversial text known as I’ll Take My Stand:Twelve Southerners on the South and the Agrarian Tradition – an anthology of manifesto-like essays published in 1929. We will begin this MFA seminar by reading this small book that has evoked so much interest and that has come to be so prominently identified with the institution. Then we’ll try to read with fresh eyes selected works by many of the writers who studied and wrote at Vanderbilt under the influence of this text as undergraduate and graduate students, and as faculty members. We will consider the idea of a Vanderbilt “tradition” of creative writing, and whether that term is still relevant in any meaningful way. We will also look at Vanderbilt writers as teachers of writing – an old and important practice at Vanderbilt that began with Ransom’s famous class which he called “a practical course in writing various types of prose, including the short story.”
Ransom’s most notable students included Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, and Peter Taylor. Other important writers who have studied at Vanderbilt include Roy Blount, Jr., James Dickey, Jesse Hill Ford, Ellen Gilchrist, Caroline Gordon, Madison Jones, Jim Wayne Miller, James Patterson, Elizabeth Spencer, Max Steele, and Jesse Stuart. Younger writers who were once students at Vanderbilt include Diann Blakely, Elaine Fowler Palencia, Kevin Wilson, and Greg Williamson. Our semester will end with a panel discussion with members of the current MFA faculty.
Texts:
I’ll Take My Stand:Twelve Southerners on the South and the Agrarian Tradition (1930)
Blount, Jr., Roy. Alphabet Juice (2008)
Dickey, James. Buckdancer’s Choice, Deliverance, selections from journals
Gilchrist, Ellen. Victory Over Japan (stories), selections from The Writing Life (essays)
Gordon, Caroline. The Women on the Porch
Jarrell, Randall. The Poet and the Age, and selected poems.
Patterson, James. Choose one…
Ransom, The World’s Body and selected poems.
Elizabeth Spencer. The Stories of ES (1981)
Tate, Allen. Selection of poems.
Taylor, Peter. A Long Fourth & Other Stories (1948), A Summons to Memphis(1985)
Warren: All the King’s Men, Audubon: A Vision, Brother to Dragons, Who Speaks for the Negro? Warren & Cleanth Brooks: Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction
Younger contemporaries: Kevin Wilson & Leah Stewart
Spring 2010 Seminars and Workshops
ENGL 303-01 Graduate Fiction Workshop
Tony Earley
(Wednesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)
Description Forthcoming
ENGL 304-01 Graduate Poetry Workshop
Kate Daniels
(Mondays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)
This is an intensive workshop in poetry writing. Students are expected to complete 10-12 new poems (or the equivalent) over the course of the semester. We will use the Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Third Edition, as a base text for the class. In addition, we’ll read individual volumes of poetry by the poets who will visit campus as part of the Visiting Writers Series. Extensive revision and regular conferencing with the instructor are expected.
ENGL 305-01 Graduate Nonfiction Workshop
Peter Guralnick
(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)
This is a graduate workshop in Creative Nonfiction with a particular emphasis on the profile and long-form narrative piece. Three major pieces will be required, along with some brief additional exercises. Every student in the course will critique each of the papers in writing, and the class will consist primarily of constructive discussion of the work. In addition there will be readings of work by such writers as Gay Talese, Gary Smith, Janet Malcolm, Jonathan Lethem, Joseph Mitchell, Jack Kerouac, W.C. Heinz, Louis Menand, and Alice Munro. Much of the focus of discussion will be on issues of characterization, narrative technique, selectivity of detail, and angle of perception -- in other words, how to make a real-life story or profile come alive in much the same way that fictional narrative can. The implicit bond between reader, writer, and subject will also provide a jumping-off point, along with the proverbial Rashomon-like nature of truth. Most of all, the workshop should be seen as a kind of shared enterprise in which a mutual enthusiasm for writing should lead to discussion that is as wide-ranging as it is lively and engaging.
ENGL 307-01 Literature and Craft of Writing
Topic: Frost and Stevens, Their Craft and Influence
Mark Jarman
(Thursdays, 2:10-5:00 p.m.)
Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens are two of America’s greatest and most original poets and tower over their contemporaries in the 20th century.As individuals and artists they could not appear more different.Frost presented himself to the world as a New England farmer, while Stevens was an executive with a major insurance agency in Hartford, Connecticut.Frost held various posts in universities and gave frequent readings of his work, barding around, as he called it.Stevens’ interaction with the American public was mainly as an insurance adjustor, one of his era’s best investigators of claims.Their poetry differed markedly as well.Frost’s poems reflect his persona as a Yankee agrarian, recording the voices and lives of country people in New Hampshire and Vermont.In his poetry, Stevens departed entirely from the drab world of business to celebrate the wildly imaginative and exotic in his unique verses, often about fantastic characters.Not only do they provide a contrast in their poetry, but in their professional careers. Yet both poets had much more in common than is apparent.Both encountered the thought of William James and George Santayana at HarvardUniversity in the 1890's.Both spent a long apprenticeship as poets before publishing their first books.Both were masters of traditional English verse, especially the blank verse line, but Stevens was one of the great innovators in American free verse, a course Frost never followed.Both were engaged by the modern dilemma of alienation.Both saw poetry as an answer to the modern problem of religious belief.
Our course will examine the work of these two poets side by side, with a special emphasis on their craft and innovations by both poets.We will also consider poets who benefited from the example of one or the other.In the case of Robert Frost, Robert Lowell and Seamus Heaney.And Elizabeth Bishop and John Ashbery, in the case of Wallace Stevens. You will be required to give a presentation to the class and to write a paper.Our texts will be the Library of America Editions of Robert Frost’s Poetry and Prose and Wallace Stevens’ Poetry and Prose.There will also be supplemental readings of more contemporary poets.
ENGL 307-02 Literature and Craft of Writing
Topic: Where the Girls Are: (Some) Contemporary Women Short Story Writers and their Influences
Nancy Reisman
(Tuesdays, 12:30-3:00 p.m.)
This course will explore of the work of a range of late 20th and 21st century women story writers, their aesthetics, voices, and literary techniques; their generational and cultural moments; the sense of relationship, desire, and place within their work; their visions of the short story form; and their literary and non-literary influences. We’ll read work by Grace Paley, Alice Munro, Edna O’Brien, Angela Carter, Lorrie Moore, Edwidge Danticat, Deborah Eisenberg, and Jhumpa Lahiri, among others. Course projects will offer opportunities to engage with the art-making process are well as with various analytical considerations of these writers’ works.
For More Information
Department of English
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY
VU Station B # 351654
2301 Vanderbilt Place
Nashville, TN
37235 creativewriting@vanderbilt.edu
(615) 322-2276
(615) 343-8028 Fax
