2024-2025 Undergraduate Catalog 
    
    Oct 13, 2024  
2024-2025 Undergraduate Catalog

Creative Writing, B.F.A.


Return to {$returnto_text} Return to: Schools & Departments

The undergraduate faculty of Writing, Literature, and Publishing is committed to the following learning objectives for the BFA in Creative Writing program.

Students will:

  • Develop close reading skills and the ability to think and communicate critically.

  • Recognize literary forms and the ways context deepens an understanding of literary texts.

  • Demonstrate research skills and actively engage with a variety of sources.

  • Articulate how writing creates meaning and conveys values and ideas, and may also reflect, contribute to, or critique social, cultural, economic, and political perspectives and biases. 

  • Acquire creative writing skills, recognize the significance of revision, and practice craft techniques in one or more literary genres.

  • Demonstrate knowledge of and more advanced practice of craft technique in the student’s primary literary genre.

  • Learn how to generate and shape a creative manuscript by completing a thesis in poetry, fiction, or nonfiction.

Students take introductory, intermediate, and advanced workshops in the above genres, and in literature that ground them in the English-language tradition and introduce them to other traditions.

Required Courses


Students admitted to the Bachelor of Fine Arts program complete 56 credits in departmental offerings for the degree. In addition to workshops at the 200, 300, and 400 levels, BFA students interested in concentrating in a specific genre take a substantial number of literature and writing courses in that genre. Therefore, it is strongly advised that fiction students take LI 308 - The Art of Fiction , as well as a choice of LI fiction-based courses. Nonfiction students should take LI 303 - The Art of Nonfiction , as well as a choice of LI nonfiction-based courses. Poetry students should take LI 307 - The Art of Poetry , as well as a choice of poetry-based courses.

One course from the following (in the genre of the concentration) (4 credits):


Two Literature courses at the 400 level (8 credits)


One WR 490 - Senior Creative Thesis (All Genres) (4 credit)


One course in Literature, Publishing, or Writing at the 200 level or above (4 credits)


Return to {$returnto_text} Return to: Schools & Departments