English Creative Writing

Students who complete an MFA degree should be able to show complexity and flexibility of thought, as demonstrated through their choices about form and content.

Students should show a sophisticated, theoretically informed awareness of the extent to which form gives rise to content and/or content inflects form.

Students should show command of genre and disciplinary conventions, including the ability to work across generic and/or disciplinary boundaries.

Students' work should demonstrate innovation in form and content.

Students should show a capacity for synthesis, as demonstrated through engagement with diverse materials drawn from literary studies and other fields of inquiry.

Students should show the initiative to explore alternative, potentially contradictory perspectives and divergent aesthetics as demonstrated through experimentation with form and multiple representational media.

Students should show a willingness to take risks, as demonstrated, once again, through adventurous treatment of form and subject matter.