Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction
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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 a 45-contact-hour internship at a literary journal, a commercial magazine, a recognized publishing house or literary agency, or with a published writer. 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, Esquire, Penguin USA, Houghton Mifflin, and the Creative Culture 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.
MFA CNF News
| New Book Contracts Three recent MFA graduates haved signed book contracts. Sheri Booker's (2007) MFA manuscript Nine Years Under has been bought by Gotham Penguin. Terry Greene Sterling (2004) has a contract with Globe Pequot Press to write a book on the changing face of immigration. And Dale Brown (2005) signed with Ohio University Press to do a book tentatively titled Literary Cincinnati: From Stowe and Twain to Frost and Hearn. Sterling was recently honored by Sigma Delta Chi in Arizona with a Silver Key award for more than 25 years of notable journalism. |