English Major with a Creative Writing Concentration

What You’ll Study

Your experience as a creative writing student centers on class workshops. Here your writing is shaped and refined through class readings and critiques. Your classmates offer constructive criticism as a whole class and sometimes in small groups. If this process sounds intimidating to you, remember that class sizes are small – they are capped at 10. These workshops are safe spaces for sharing your work, where feedback is honest but always respectful. And here you’re free to explore topics and develop your work in a safe, non-judgmental environment.

The creative writing concentration requires 33 hours of coursework, including 18 hours from the English major curriculum. Concentration courses begin with foundational workshops in Poetry, Short Fiction or Creative Nonfiction. You may also explore other Topics in Creative Writing, like children’s lit, fantasy, worldbuilding and fairy tales. While these courses focus on reading and responding to original student work, representative pieces from contemporary writers are also studied. Each 2000-level course culminates in a portfolio. During your final two years you’ll create a large-scale project in an Advanced Creative Writing Workshop or Honors Research course. In your Senior Portfolio, you’ll be asked to take pieces from different courses to revise substantially for a professional-level portfolio of writing.