Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction
About the Program
Goucher College's limited-residency MFA in Creative Nonfiction allows you to complete most of the requirements off campus while developing your talents as a nonfiction writer under the nurturing supervision of a faculty mentor. The program can be completed in four semesters of work, with residencies of two weeks every summer and a long weekend every spring.
Everything begins with the August residency on our scenic Baltimore campus. For two weeks, you will be immersed in small, intense writing workshops along with craft lectures, panel discussions, and faculty and student readings. Sometimes affectionately referred to as "summer camp for writers," it is a time both exhausting and exhilarating, when you will shut out the world and concentrate on becoming the writer you've always wanted to be.
Off campus, you will complete a minimum of 50 pages of creative writing each semester and participate in online discussions of six to eight books of exemplary creative nonfiction. You will work with a different mentor each semester, receiving feedback online, by mail, and by phone, gaining the perspective of four accomplished writers over the course of two years.
The spring semester begins with a weekend mini-residency in late January, when you will meet with your mentor and his or her other assigned students for three days of workshops and one-on-one conferences.
In your second year, you will broaden your experience and understanding of writing and publishing by completing an internship or one of our new elective courses: The Book Proposal, Research & Reporting, and The Reported Memoir. You will also have the opportunity to travel to New York to meet editors and agents at such places as The New Yorker, Harper's, Paris Review, the New York Times Book Review, Random House, Penguin USA, Houghton Mifflin, and the David Black and ICM literary agencies.
The end goal is a 150-page manuscript of publishable quality, many of which have become the basis for a book.
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MFA CNF News
| The MFA in Creative Nonfiction program announces three new courses The Book Proposal (CNF 633) provides students with the opportunity to draft a book proposal for their MFA manuscript under the one-on-one supervision of a writing professional with publishing experience. Research & Reporting (CNF 625) allows students to conduct in-depth research, reporting, and interviews under the one-on-one supervision of an MFA faculty member or another writing professional. The Reported Memoir (CNF 635) lets students conduct in-depth research and interviews under the one-on-one supervision of an MFA faculty member or another writing professional familiar with the various databases, documents, and resources that can provide material to both enrich a memoir and enable students to verify the accuracy of their material.
Joining the faculty to teach these new courses are Mark Rotella, a senior editor at Publishers Weekly; Mike Sager, a writer-in-large for Esquire; Joy Tutela, an agent with the David Black Literary Agency; Joanne Wyckoff, an agent with the Carol Mann Agency; and Webster Younce, who has been an editor at such publishing houses as Henry Holt, Houghton Mifflin, Random House, Alfred A. Knopf, and Picador USA. Members of the MFA program's Core faculty will also be teaching the new courses. For more information, visit our website: www.goucher.edu/mfa.
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| Master of Arts in Creative Nonfiction Academic Catalog Now Available Click to view the Master of Arts in Creative Nonfiction Academic Catalog (PDF). |
| Recent Publications from MFA Students Sue Resnick (2000)'s third book will be published next year by Globe Pequot Press. The memoir will be called You Saved Me, too. Last week, Sue was presented the Best Woman Writer award for her last book, Goodbye Wifes and Daughters, at the High Plains Book Awards ceremony. The awards, given in six categories, include writers from, and work about, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. She was also a finalist for a Western Writers of America Award and a Montana Book Award, both for nonfiction writing |