NOTE ABOUT THE NEW M.F.A. DEGREE: Plans are underway to switch our M.A. degree in Creative Writing to an M.F.A. beginning in the fall of 2010. It will be a two-year, 36-credit program. At this time, we are awaiting official approval from the university, but all indications are that things will progress smoothly: there is much support for the M.F.A. program at all levels of the university. However, we will not receive final confirmation until the summer of 2010, when the board of trustees will meet. We will do our best to update the status of the proposed M.F.A. as we go through the approval process. In regards to curriculum, the M.F.A. will be very similar to the existing M.A., with added credit hours for special topics/craft classes and theses.

—

Current M.A. Program: Temple University offers a 30-credit Master of Arts degree in English/Creative Writing. The writing component of this Master’s degree features a combination of small, intensive workshops in poetry and fiction, supplemented by one-on-one tutorials with faculty. At the same time, the student can engage with the historical and formal study of the genres of poetry and fiction by choosing from a selection of graduate courses in English and American literatures, as well as courses that feature critical theory.

Temple's M.A. program combines creative and critical practices in a rigorous and generative way. This combination provides creative writers with an opportunity to concentrate on the genre of their choice and at the same time to prepare themselves for further graduate study.

Temple’s full-time Creative Writing faculty includes Samuel Delany, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Don Lee, Joan Mellen, Jena Osman, and Alan Singer--nationally recognized writers in poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.

A special feature of the program is its Poets & Writers reading series and its week-long residency for distinguished writers.

The Poets & Writers series is a well-respected institution on the Philadelphia cultural scene, consistently inviting some of the most exciting and innovative contemporary writers to present their work. Recent readers have included Jonathan Ames, David Antin, Donald Antrim, Amiri Baraka, Paul Beatty, Caroline Bergvall, Brian Evenson, Carla Harryman, Susan Howe, Erica Hunt, Ann Lauterbach, Harry Mathews, Joseph McElroy, Rick Moody, Eileen Myles, Joan Retallack, George Saunders, Leslie Scalapino, Sarah Schulman, Edwin Torres, Chris Tysh, Cecilia Vicuna, and Rosmarie Waldrop. Aside from giving a reading, these writers often make themselves available to students in our program either by visiting the classroom or during informal gatherings.

In addition, the Creative Writing Program invites a distinguished novelist and poet for one week each in the fall and spring semesters. These guests read student manuscripts in their genre, give both a public lecture on their poetics and a reading, attend the relevant graduate workshops, and mingle socially with the students. R.M. Berry, Robin Blaser, Robert Creeley, Anita Desai, Mary Gordon, Nathaniel Mackey, Carole Maso, Alice Notley, C.D. Wright have been week-long visitors in the past few years. Other visiting writers have included Kathy Acker, Paul Auster, Robert Olin Butler, Robert Coover, Charles Johnson, Mary Kinzie, Harryette Mullen, Susan Sontag, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, and many others. Over the two years of the Master’s program, students will have the opportunity to engage with four of these visitors and have conferences on their work with two of them (in their specific genre).