Our selective and academically rigorous forty-eight credit, three-year program is designed to provide talented writers with the opportunity to work closely with both outstanding faculty and gifted peers to strengthen their craft, develop their literary aesthetics, enrich their understanding of existing traditions and compositional possibilities, and to participate actively in the life of the literary community at large.
The primary tracks are poetry and fiction, and admission is highly competitive. In addition to the poetry and fiction workshops, there are courses available that focus on writing drama, nonfiction, and screenplays, as well as courses that provide practical experience in editing.
The basic requirements to complete the MFA degree program are simple and straightforward, and include twelve semester hours of writing workshops, twelve hours graduate literature courses, and six to twelve hours of thesis work. Thesis hours enable students to produce a substantial creative writing thesis, a requirement of graduation.
Virginia Commonwealth University’s Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing is nearing its 35th anniversary!
And there is much to celebrate:
David Wojahn, Director of Creative Writing
Thom Didato, Graduate Programs Advisor
Blackbird journal logo: a stylized blackbird perched on the K of the word Blackbird overlaying the image of a photorealistic moon with a dark blue sky behind. The bird has a red berry in its beak the dot from the letter I in Blackbird. [View Image]
Learn more about Blackbird and internship opportunities for students
British Virginia is a VCU-hosted series of scholarly editions of documents touching on the colony. These texts range from the 16th and 17th-century literature of English exploration to the 19th-century writing of loyalists and other Virginians who continued to identify with Great Britain. Editions appear principally in digital form, freely downloadable. [View Image]