Our Program

The Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing offers advanced poets and fiction writers three years of fully-funded support and community in the literary town of Oxford, Mississippi. We accept four poets and four fiction writers each year, boasting a 3:1 professor-student ratio. Admitted students work closely with our distinguished faculty in intimate and intensive workshops, courses that investigate form and influences, and a thesis year that culminates with a finished, polished manuscript.

We specialize in fiction and poetry, though our students may take courses in either genre as well as creative nonfiction, hybrid genres, speculative fiction, and eco-writing. Workshops are run by our core faculty: Beth Ann Fennelly, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Matt Bondurant, Tom Franklin, Sheila Sundar, Michael Wang, and Melissa Ginsburg. In addition, our yearly writer-in-residence program brings in authors who teach a graduate workshop–Jesmyn Ward, Garth Greenwell, Raven Leilani, Kiese Laymon, and Megan Abbot are just a few of the authors who have enriched our writing community.

The degree consists of twelve hours of writing workshops (four courses), three hours of Form, Craft & Influence (FCI), nine hours of literature seminars, six hours of thesis direction, and six hours for other electives and/or directed readings. Every student that is accepted into our program is fully-funded, with tuition remission, a stipend, and health insurance for all three years, and there are a variety of extra funding and scholarship opportunities available.

Our long-running reading series allow us to bring in a diverse array of internationally renowned poets and writers. In recent years, Ada Limon, Ha Jin, Claudia Rankine, Rita Dove, Kiki Petrosino, Shane McCrae, Jennifer Egan, Craig Santos Perez, Tyehimba Jess, and many others have visited our campus. In addition, our MFA student reading series, MissReads, gives all MFA students the chance to read to a robust audience of faculty, students, and Oxford’s literary community. Oxford is home to many conferences, such as the Oxford Conference For The Book, and our faculty serves on panels at the Mississippi Book Festival. Our literary magazine, The Yalobusha Review, offers opportunities for students interested in gaining editorial experience. The UM Longleaf Scholar program provides students access to The Longleaf Writing Conference in Seaside, Florida. Each year, we bring literary agents to campus for student consultations and pitch sessions, most recently Sonali Chanchani and Jeff Kleinman (Folio Literary Management) and Sarah Phair (Greenburger Associates).

We take great pride in our program, our writing community, and of course, our students.  They have gone on to publish numerous books.

Our application deadline is December 15th.