Founded in 1947, the Writing Seminars is the second-oldest creative writing program in the United States and has always been ranked highly in the field. The department is celebrated for the quality of its faculty and its small classes. No course is lecture-sized; all are seminars.
For the BA, students work primarily in fiction and poetry but may take courses in nonfiction prose, editorial writing, screenwriting, playwriting, and science writing. A broad and diverse liberal arts curriculum, including philosophy, history, and foreign language, is a hallmark of our major. More than 30 sections of our “Introduction to Fiction and Poetry” course are offered each semester, with approximately 20 additional reading seminars and writing workshops for majors and non-majors. Students may also take for-credit courses within the school year that involve them with Baltimore and its other writers. An array of internships offers wider opportunities.
For the two-year MFA, students concentrate in either fiction or poetry. Tuition is fully funded, and all students receive a generous teaching fellowship, currently set at $39,000 per year. With the guidance of a faculty advisor, all students produce both a first year portfolio and, in the second year, a thesis of fiction or poetry. Many students publish books shortly after graduation, and they often win major prizes.
All students, undergraduate and graduate, benefit from a visiting writers’ reading series and other lectures and events which bring writers of international importance to campus.