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MFA in Creative Writing

Low Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing

Program Brochure  

The mission of the low-residency MFA program at Murray State University is to provide quality advanced instruction to creative writers while allowing them to live and work where they choose. We are looking for candidates who show strong promise as creative writers and who also demonstrate a commitment to the serious reading of literature. Additionally, we seek students who are self-motivated, able to work independently, and capable of making positive use of criticism to improve their writing. Our foremost goal is to facilitate the creative and professional growth of writers, but the degree also offers the necessary academic credentials for a writer to teach creative writing at the college or university level. It also provides a foundation for careers in other writing-related fields. 

Of the 49 hours required for the degree, 13 hours must be completed on campus in January and July residencies.  The remaining 36 can be completed via distance learning.  These 36 hours comprise three semester-long Graduate Tutorials (6 hours each), a Creative Thesis (6 hours), the New Madrid Field Study (3 hours) and three graduate literature courses (3 hours each).   The graduate literature courses may also be completed on campus at Murray State.  (While students may transfer up to nine semester hours—“B” or higher—of graduate-level literature courses from another accredited graduate institution, they must complete all residencies, tutorials and the field study within the MFA program at Murray State).

Mark Doty

Visiting Writer 2012

Mark Doty, the only American poet to have won Great Britain's T. S. Eliot Prize, is the author of seven books of poems. 

The first, Turtle, Swan, appeared in 1987. His collection, My Alexandria (1993), received both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Since then he has published Atlantis (1995); Sweet Machine (1998); Source (2001); and the critically acclaimed volume of poems, School of the Arts (HarperCollins, 2005). Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems was published, and won the National Book Award for 2008.

Doty is the author of three memoirs: Heaven's Coast (1996), Firebird (1999), and Dog Years (2007), as well as The Art of Description: World Into Word, a volume in the popular "Art of" series, a line of books intended to reinvigorate the practice of craft and criticism. His interest in the visual arts is evident not only in his poems but also in his book-length essay Still Life with Oysters and Lemon (2001).

In addition to the National Book Award, Doty has also received two NEA fellowships, Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, a Lila Wallace/Readers Digest Award, and the Witter Byner Prize. As the award citation for the last of these noted, "Mark Doty's poems extend the range of the American lyric." Doty was recently elected as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

For more information:  http://www.blueflowerarts.com/booking/mark-doty    



 

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