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The Master of Fine Arts Degree at Vanderbilt
Creative Writing has been a vital part of the Vanderbilt English Department for nearly a century, since the poet and critic John Crowe Ransom’s famous class which he called “a practical course in writing various types of prose, including the short story.” Notable students who studied with Ransom at Vanderbilt include Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, and Peter Taylor. Vanderbilt’s writing tradition continues today with the English Department’s new Master of Fine Arts Program.
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
Fall 2009 Courses
ENGL 303-01 Graduate Fiction Workshop
Nancy Reisman
(Tuesdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)
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.
ENGL 307-01 Literature and the Craft of Writing
Topic: Modern and Contemporary First Books
Rick Hilles
(Thursdays, 3:30-6:00 p.m.)
This graduate seminar is designed for all MFA students who are or will be putting together a first book; to this end, we will focus on seminal first books, including (in poetry): the 1855 Edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; Frost’s A Boy’s Will; Gwendolyn Brook’s A Street in Bronzeville; Wallace Steven’s Harmonium; E. Bishop’s North and South; Robert Hayden’s A Ballade of Remembrance; S. Old’s Satan Says; Frank Bidart’s Golden State; Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony, and God; guests lecturers in prose (confirmed thus far) include: Tony Earley (who will speak on Ernest Hewingway’s In Our Time and J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories), Nancy Reisman (who will discuss Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping) and Jaya Kasibhatla (on Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies); each seminar participant will also give a presentation on a first book. Grading: 1/3 each for class participation; seminar presentation; writing project.
The application deadline for Fall 2009 admission is January 15, 2009. In order to encourage candidates to use the online application system, Vanderbilt’s Graduate School will waive the application fee for electronic applications this year.
Online Application
The electronic application form makes it possible to provide the following required materials:
- Writing sample.
- College transcript
- Statement of purpose.
- Three letters of recommendation.
- GRE scores.
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.
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)
Funding
Full funding is offered to all students admitted.
For first year students, the University Fellowship includes:
A full tuition benefit (valued at $34,400)
A $6,000 stipend
A $3,250 salary for assisting in the Writing Studio
And health insurance ($1,938)
First year University Fellowships may be enhanced by University Graduate Fellowships, topping up awards given by the Graduate School, which may be retained for the second year.
For second year students, the University Fellowship includes:
A full tuition benefit (valued at $34,400)
A $6,000 stipend
A $3,250 salary for teaching a beginning creative writing workshop for one semester
Health insurance ($1,938)
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.
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 *
Michelle Boisseau * 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 * Lorna Goodison *
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
Kate Daniels, interim director of creative writing, 2008-2009, author of three volumes of poetry, including The Niobe Poems and her most recent work, Four Testimonies: Poems. Her first volume, The White Wave was awarded the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize for Poetry. She has her M.F.A. from
Columbia
University . She has won the James Dickey Prize for Poetry from Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art and the Louisiana Literature Prize for Poetry from
Southeastern
Louisiana
University . Her poems have been anthologized in a number of publications and have appeared in journals such as American Poetry Review, Critical Quarterly, and the Southern Review. She has also edited a volume of poems by Muriel Rukeyser and co-edited the book Of Solitude and Silence: Writings on Robert Bly. Her fourth collection of poetry, A Walk in Victoria's Secret, is forthcoming from LSU Press.
Tony Earley, author of four books: Here We Are in Paradise, Somehow Form a Family, and the novels Jim the Boy and The Blue Star. He received his M.F.A. from The University of Alabama. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire and The Oxford American, and has been anthologized multiple times in The Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South. He was named by Granta as one of the twenty best young American novelists, and The New Yorker named him one of twenty writers to watch in the twenty-first century. He won a National Magazine Award for his short story "The Prophet from Jupiter." He is the Samuel Milton Fleming Professor of English.
Peter Guralnick, author of a celebrated trilogy on America’s roots music—Feel Like Goin’Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock ’n’ Roll, Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals ofAmerican Musicians, and Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm & Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom—and a definitive, two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love, each volume of which won a Ralph Gleason Music Book Award. His most recent book is Dream Boogie: the Triumph of Sam Cooke.
Rick Hilles, author of Brother Salvage, winner of the 2005 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. He received his M.F.A. from Columbia University. He was the 2002-03 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholar and has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, the Ruth and Jay C. Halls Fellow at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and was awarded the Larry Levis Editors' Prize from The Missouri Review. His work has appeared in Harper's, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, Salmagundi, Field and Witness. He is a recipient of a Whiting Award for 2008.
Mark Jarman, author of eight collections of poetry, including Iris (a book-length poem), Questions for Ecclesiastes, and Unholy Sonnets. His most recent volumes are To the Green Man and Epistles. He received his M.F.A. from the
University of
Iowa . His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lenore Marshall/Nation Prize of the
Academy of
American Poets, and The Poets’ Prize. His poems have appeared in journals such as the American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic Monthly. In addition, he is the author of two collections of essays: The Secret of Poetry and Body and Soul: Essays on Poetry. He is Centennial Professor of English. On leave 2008-2009.
Lorraine López, author of Soy la
Avon Lady and Other Stories and a novel,The Gifted Gabaldón Sisters, has a doctoral degree in English through the Creative Writing Program at the
University of
Georgia . Her first book was selected by Sandra Cisneros to win the inaugural Miguel Marmól Prize for Fiction. It also garnered the Independent Publishers Book Award for Multicultural Fiction and the Latino Book Award for Short Stories, awarded by the Latino Literary Hall of Fame. Call Me Henri, a young adult novel, has jbeen published by Curbstone Press. She has co-edited a collection of critical articles on the work of Judith Ortiz Cofer.
Nancy Reisman, author of House Fires and The First Desire, received her M.F.A. from the
University of
Massachusetts ,
Amherst . Her short story collection House Fires won the 1999 Iowa Short Fiction Award. Her novel The First Desire won the Samuel Goldberg & Sons Foundation Prize for Jewish Fiction. She has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in
Provincetown , and has won an O.Henry Award and the Raymond Carver Short Story Award. Her stories have been included in numerous anthologies, including Best American Short Stories, O.Henry Award Stories, and Jewish in America.
For More Information
Director, M.F.A. Program
Department of English
Vanderbilt
University
Nashville, TN
37235
(615) 322-2276
(615) 343-8028 Fax
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