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Detailed Information

Program of Study

Ranked by U.S. News & World Report among the top programs of its kind, the Emerson College M.F.A. in creative writing program, one of the nation’s largest, gives students the breadth and depth of experience and instruction that smaller programs cannot. As part of a distinguished community of students and faculty members, M.F.A. candidates grow in sophistication as writers.

Students concentrate in one literary genre (fiction, nonfiction, or poetry), but may elect to take workshops in topics such as playwriting, screenwriting, memoir, and novel writing. With workshops capped at a dozen participants, students receive personal attention from the College’s accomplished faculty members. A graduate’s goal is to publish, and Emerson strives to expose students to writing as both an art form and professional pursuit.

For more information about Emerson’s M.F.A. in creative writing, interested students should visit http://admission.emerson.edu/admission/graduate/academics/cw.cfm.

Research Facilities

The Emerson College library has more than 200,000 volumes, 20,000 journals (paper and electronic), 8,000 e-books, 10,000 nonprint materials, and 10,000 microforms in its collection that focus on the communication studies and performing arts. Through membership in the Fenway Consortium, graduate students have access to more than 2 million volumes. Computer-assisted reference services provide bibliographic databases through Dialog, BRS, and other online services. The Online Computer Library Center is used for student research support.

M.F.A. candidates gain valuable hands-on experience in the Media Services Center, which provides students with access to approximately 2,400 films, videos, laser discs, and DVDs. The center is the home of audio, video, and multimedia production facilities; a video studio; and several nonlinear editing suites comparable to those of any television studio in a major U.S. city.

Financial Aid

Emerson College offers several financial assistance programs that make graduate education possible: merit-based awards (domestic and international applicants), low-interest federal loans (domestic applicants only), federal work-study (domestic applicants only), private loans (domestic and international applicants), student employment (domestic and international applicants), and alternative payment plans (domestic and international applicants). For detailed information, students should visit the Office of Student Financial Services Web site at http://www.emerson.edu/financial_services.

Cost of Study

Tuition for the 2008–09 academic year is $886 per credit hour. Other fees vary and may apply.

Living and Housing Costs

Though on-campus housing is not available for its graduate students, the Emerson College Office of Off-Campus Student Services offers assistance in finding housing, including: local apartment listings, realtor lists, temporary accommodations, search tips, pertinent neighborhood information, a roommate networking service, and more. Costs for housing are comparable to those of rental properties available in larger East Coast cities.

Student Group

More than 950 graduate students representing forty-five states and sixty countries are enrolled in Emerson programs.

Student Outcomes

Emerson’s creative writing graduates are award-winning writers who have published stories, plays, critical essays, and novels. Many teach in colleges and universities across the country and have had their work featured in literary and popular magazines. Recent employers of Emerson students include The Atlantic Monthly, Beacon Press, Boston Book Review, David R. Godine Publisher, Houghton Mifflin, Pearson Education, Ploughshares, Walking Magazine, and Yankee Publishing.

Location

Situated in the heart of downtown Boston, Emerson offers access to the vast resources of a city that is the home of the nation’s finest educational institutions and an international hub of culture, media production, writing, publishing, communication, commerce, and medical innovation. Boston is a career launching pad for Emerson’s students, many of whom intern or work at world-renowned organizations throughout the city. Emerson students from around the country and world absorb the city’s unique blend of local and global culture, and many find that Boston is an education in itself.

The College

Emerson College, founded in 1880 by Charles Wesley Emerson, has expanded upon its original mission of promoting the study of oratory and the performing arts by offering some of the nation’s most distinctive graduate programs in communication.

Applying

Emerson’s graduate programs welcome applicants from across the United States and around the world. Admission is competitive and selective. Emerson is looking for students whose academic and professional backgrounds, communication skills, and passion for the field meet the demands of their chosen program and promise a successful career.

The application deadline is January 5 for domestic and international applicants. Applications that are not complete by the final deadline are not reviewed by the admission committee. Applicants are responsible for ensuring the completion of their application. Application fees are nonrefundable; application forms and supporting materials become the property of the Office of Graduate Admission once they are sent to the office, and they will not be returned.

All application materials, with the exception of GRE test scores, must be submitted together in one package to ensure timely review. A complete application includes the application, either online or printed (PDF download); the application fee ($60 for domestic applicants, $75 for international applicants); official transcripts from all colleges/universities previously attended; three letters of recommendation (by persons best able to assess academic and professional qualifications, including motivation and goals); the essay; official GRE scores; a 15-page writing sample; and a professional resume.

Applicants whose native language is not English must provide evidence of English proficiency by submitting official TOEFL or IELTS test results. (Applicants from India and the Philippines are considered nonnative English speakers and are required to take the TOEFL.) Emerson College’s school code for the TOEFL is 3367; no department code is needed. For more information about these tests, prospective student can visit http://www.toefl.org or http://www.ielts.org. Minimum TOEFL scores are 550 paper-based, 213 computer-based, and 80 Internet-based. The minimum IELTS score is 6.5. Applicants who do not meet this requirement are not reviewed for admission.

Decisions are made on complete applications within six to eight weeks.

Deadlines for merit-based and federal aid applications for fall are January 5 and April 1, respectively. Students seeking additional information about financing their graduate education should visit http://www.emerson.edu/financial_services/info-grad.cfm/.

The Faculty

• Daniel Tobin, Professor and Chair; M.T.S., Harvard; M.F.A., Warren Wilson; Ph.D., Virginia. Dr. Tobin is the author of many volumes of poetry. He has received The Discovery/The Nation Award, the Robert Penn Warren Award, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other prizes for his poetry.
• Lisa Diercks, Assistant Professor and Graduate Program Director, M.A. Program; M.S., Boston University. Ms. Diercks is a publishing industry veteran, working primarily in book design. She began her career at Houghton Mifflin/Trade and later established her own design studio. Her publishing clients have included The Atlantic Monthly; Beacon Press; Boston Common Press; Candlewick Press; HarperCollins; Little, Brown; and the Museum of Fine Arts. She began teaching as an adjunct in 1996, joining the full-time faculty in 2001. Both she and her students have received multiple awards for design work.
• Douglas Whynott, Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director, M.F.A. Program; M.F.A., Massachusetts Amherst. Mr. Whynott is the author of A Country Practice–Scenes from the Veterinary Life,Following the Bloom–Across America with the Migratory Beekeepers,Giant Bluefin, and A Unit of Water, A Unit of Time–Joel White’s Last Boat. He has written extensively for many magazines and journals.
• Jonathan Aaron, Associate Professor; Ph.D., Yale. Dr. Aaron is the author of 3 books of poems: Second Sight,Corridor, and Journey to the Lost City. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation. Aaron has published poetry and criticism in Paris Review,Partisan Review, the London Review of Books, and others.
• Bill Beuttler, Instructor; M.S., Columbia. Mr. Beuttler is a Boston Globe correspondent whose writing has appeared recently in The Atlantic Online,Best Life,Boston magazine, and Chicago magazine, among others. He has worked as an editor for The Discovery Channel,Men’s Journal,Boston,Down Beat, and American Way magazines.
• Ben Brooks, Writer-in-Residence; M.F.A., Iowa. Ben Brooks is the author of the novel, The Icebox and over seventy-five published short stories. His stories have won an O. Henry Prize and a Nelson Algren Award and have been published in many journals and magazines. In addition, he is the author of numerous published essays on art, history, building design, and travel. He has received awards and fellowships for his fiction from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and elsewhere.
• Christine Casson, Scholar/Writer-in-Residence; M.F.A., Warren Wilson. Ms. Casson’s scholarly interests include environmental literature, Native American literature, and modern and contemporary poetry in English. She has published recent essays on the work of Linda Hogan and Leslie Marmon Silko. Her poetry has appeared many journals and anthologies.
• Yu-Jin Chang, Assistant Professor; Ph.D., Yale. Yu-Jin Chang is a specialist in European comparative literature and philosophy and has recently completed a study of Walter Benjamin and Maurice Blanchot titled Disaster and Hope. This study examines the closely related aesthetic conceptions of time and history by these two writers, arguably the two most influential literary theorists of the last century, down to their philosophical origins in, respectively, Leibniz’s monadology and Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return. A former professor of French and German, Dr. Chang has also studied Korean and classical Chinese.
• William Donoghue, Associate Professor; Ph.D., Stanford. Dr. Donoghue is a specialist in the novel and the author of Enlightenment Fiction in England, France and America. He has published articles and book reviews on British and French eighteenth-century fiction, written and directed a short film with the National Film Board of Canada, translated a volume of French poetry entitled Lead Blues, and published his own short fiction in TriQuarterly,Grain, and elsewhere. His interests are in philosophy and literature and the theory of the novel.
• David Emblidge, Associate Professor; Ph.D., Minnesota. Dr. Emblidge has nearly two decades of experience as a book editor, publisher, and author. His articles and essays have appeared in many journals, magazines, newspapers, and other periodicals. He won a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, and a grant from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy.
• Robin Riley Fast, Associate Professor; Ph.D., Minnesota. Dr. Fast’s interests include nineteenth-century American literature, American poetry, women writers, and Native American literature. She has published a book titled The Heart as a Drum: Continuance and Resistance in American Indian Poetry and articles on poetry and coedited Approaches to Teaching Dickinson’s Poetry.
• Maria Flook, Writer-in-Residence; M.F.A., Iowa. Ms. Flook is the author of nonfiction books, fiction, (which received a PEN American/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Special Citation), and a collection of stories. She has also published two collections of poetry, (winner of the Houghton Mifflin New Poetry Series and the G.L.C.A. New Writers Award). Her work has appeared in many periodicals.
• Flora M. González, Professor; Ph.D., Yale. Dr. Gonzalez received her Ph.D. in Hispanic literature and has taught at Dartmouth, Middlebury, and the University of Chicago. Her teaching interests include Latin American fiction and nonfiction, the literatures of the Caribbean, and feminist writing. She has published widely on the topic of the Latin American novel since the 1960s and coedited and translated selected poetry of Excilia Saldana. She has published nonfiction in several journals and reviews. In 1997 and 1998, she was a Fellow at the W. E. B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University and is presently an affiliate of the David Rockefeller Center of Latin American Studies at Harvard.
• Lise Haines, Writer-in-Residence; M.F.A., Bennington. Lise Haines is the author of the novels In My Sister’s Country and Small Acts of Sex and Electricity. Her work has appeared in journals, including Ploughshares, Agni, Crosscurrents, Third Rail, and Post Road. She was a finalist for the 2003 Paterson Fiction Prize and the PEN Nelson Algren Fiction Award. Her teaching credits include UCLA, UCSB, and Stonecoast. The Boston Globe called In My Sister’s Country “an authoritative fictional debut.”
• DeWitt Henry, Professor; Ph.D., Harvard. Dr. Henry is cofounder and executive director of Ploughshares, for which he received a 1993 Commonwealth Award. He has edited four anthologies (one a winner of the Editors’ Book Award) and recently published a novel titled The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts. He has won the Peter Taylor Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Boulevard Fiction Award, and a St. Botolph Foundation Award.
• Richard Hoffman, Writer-in-Residence; M.F.A., Goddard. Mr. Hoffman is the author of Half the House: a Memoir and a collection of poems, Without Paradise. His work has been published in magazines such as Agni,Ascent, the Boston Globe,Harvard Review,Hudson Review,The Literary Review,Poetry,Shenandoah,The Marlboro Review,Witness, and others, as well as in several anthologies.
• Roy Kamada, Assistant Professor; M.F.A., Virginia; Ph.D., California, Davis. Dr. Kamada’s work has appeared in several journals. Dr. Kamada is a specialist in British and multiethnic American literatures whose interests include poetry, contemporary poetics, and postcolonial and diasporic studies. He has received grants from the James Irvine Foundation, Poets and Writers, the Vermont Studio Center, and Bread Loaf. He has received the Celeste Turner Wright award from the Academy of American Poets and has been the recipient of the David Noel Miller Fellowship at the University of California, Davis, and a Henry Hoyns Fellowship at the University of Virginia
• Bill Knott, Associate Professor; M.F.A., Norwich. Mr. Knott is the author of numerous books of poetry and has been featured in most major journals and poetry magazines. His book, Selected and Collected Poems, was the 1979 winner of the Elliston Prize. His publications include Poems 1963–1988,Outremer,The Quicken Tree,Laugh at the End of the World: Collected Comic Poems 1969–1999, and, most recently, The Unsubscriber.
• Maria Koundoura, Associate Professor; Ph.D., Stanford. Dr. Koundoura is a specialist in contemporary literary theory, in particular, postcolonial and transnational culture studies. Among her recent publications are articles on nationalism, multiculturalism, and globality. She is one of the founding editors of the Stanford Humanities Review. Currently she is at work on a book on global cities.
• Margot Livesey, Writer-in-Residence; B.A., York (UK). Ms. Livesey is the author of Banishing Verona,Eva Moves the Furniture,The Missing World,Criminals,Homework,Writing About Literature, and Learning By Heart. She has written extensively for journals, magazines, and newspapers.
• Gian Lombardo, Publisher-in-Residence and Coordinator, Certificate in Publishing program; M.A., Boston University. Mr. Lombardo has had more than twenty-five years of experience in a wide range of publishing environments–trade, association, and literary and consumer magazines as well as professional, literary, and textbook publishing. He is also the author of Between Islands, a collection of poems and verse translations and three collections of prose poetry: Standing Room,Sky Open Again, and Of All the Corners to Forget. He also directs Quale Press.
• Megan Marshall, Assistant Professor; A.B., Harvard. Marshall is the author of The Peabody Sisters, a landmark biography of three women who made American intellectual history. The Peabody Sisters was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the recipient of the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, and the Mark Lynton History Prize. She has written for The New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, and the New York Times Book Review.
• Gail Mazur, Writer-in-Residence; M.A., Lesley. Ms. Mazur is the author of five books of poetry: Nightfire,The Pose of Happiness,The Common,They Can’t Take That Away from Me (a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001), and Zeppo’s First Wife: New & Selected Poems (finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize). She has published reviews and essays in the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe,Salmagundi, the Mississippi Review,Field, the Atlantic, and other publications.
• Kim McLarin, Writer-In-Residence; B.A., Duke. Ms. McLarin is the author of the novels Jump At the Sun,Meeting of the Waters, and Taming It Down and coauthor of the memoir Growing Up X, with Ilyasah Shabazz. She is a former staff writer for several newspapers, publications, and the Associated Press.
• Pamela Painter, Professor; M.A., Illinois at Chicago. Professor Painter is the author of two collections of short fiction, Getting to Know the Weather and The Long and Short of It. She is the coauthor, with Anne Bernays, of WHAT IF? Fiction Exercises for Fiction Writers. Her work has appeared in numerous literary journals and magazines. She is a founding editor of StoryQuarterly and has received grants from the Massachusetts’ Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
• Frederick Reiken, Associate Professor; M.F.A., California, Irvine. Mr. Reiken is the author of two novels. The Odd Sea is a winner of the Hackney Literary Award for a first novel and is listed as one of the “20 best first novels of 1998” by Booklist. His second book, The Lost Legends of New Jersey, was published in 2000.
• Murray Schwartz, Professor; Ph.D., Berkeley. Dr. Schwartz is a specialist in Shakespeare. His interests include literary theory, psychoanalysis, and Holocaust studies as editor, coeditor, and author, as well as many essays on Shakespeare, theoretical and applied psychoanalysis, and poets such as Sylvia Plath. “Morning and Its Vicissitudes: The Shakespearean Community and Shakespearean Romance,” appeared in Psyart, an online journal. He is currently at work on a psychoanalytic study of the Holocaust and an essay on theories of trauma.
• Jeffrey Seglin, Associate Professor; M.T.S., Harvard. Mr. Seglin has extensive experience in magazine and book publishing. He is the author of The Right Thing: Conscience, Profit and Personal Responsibility in Today’s Business;The Good, The Bad, And Your Business: Choosing Right When Ethical Dilemmas Pull You Apart; and other books. He has written extensively for magazines, newspapers, and other publications.
• John Skoyles, Professor; M.F.A., Iowa. Professor Skoyles is the author of three books of poems: A Little Faith,Permanent Change, and Definition of the Soul. He has also published a book of nonfiction, Generous Strangers; a memoir, Secret Frequencies: A New York Education; and reviews of books for the Associated Press. He has been awarded two individual fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as grants from the New York State and North Carolina Arts Councils.
• Tracy L. Strauss, Lecturer of Expository Writing; M.F.A., Boston University. Ms. Strauss was the 2005 recipient of the Somerville Arts Council Literary Fellowship Award for poetry and the 2003 recipient of the International Radio and Television Society (IRTS) Foundation Faculty Award. Her short fiction has been published in Solas Literary Journal, and she has written obituaries and on-air promotions for American Movie Classics. Her writing appears in many publications.
• Jessica Treadway, Associate Professor; M.A., Boston University. Ms. Treadway is the author of the novel And Give You Peace. Her collection Absent Without Leave and Other Stories won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award in 1993. A former fellow at Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute and recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, she also reviews fiction for the Boston Globe and the Chicago Tribune.
• John Trimbur, Professor; Ph.D., Buffalo, SUNY. Dr. Trimbur is a specialist in rhetoric and writing studies, with interests in cultural studies of literacy and the politics of language in the United States and South Africa. He received the Richard Braddock Award for Outstanding Article (2003) for English Only and U.S. College Composition, the James L. Kinneavy Award (2001) for Agency and the Death of the Author: A Partial Defense of Modernism, and the College Composition and Communication Outstanding Book Award (1993) for The Politics of Writing Instruction: Postsecondary. He has also published three textbooks.
• Wendy Walters, Associate Professor; Ph.D., California, San Diego. Dr. Walters teaches courses in literatures of the African diaspora, as well as multicultural American literatures. In 2001–02 she was a nonresident fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University, where she finished her manuscript on black international writing. She has published articles in the journals African American Review,Novel,Critical Arts, and MELUS (Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S.), and she has published a chapter in the book Borders, Exiles, Diasporas. Her contributor credits include several publications. She is the author of At Home in Diaspora: Black International Writing.
• Daniel Weaver, Editor-in-Residence; B.A., Earlham. Most recently he was editor in chief and director of Faber & Faber, Inc. and editor in chief of Nation Books, affiliated with The Nation magazine. He has been a senior editor at McGraw-Hill and Viking Penguin in New York City. He has edited and published works by Vincent Bugliosi, Gore Vidal, Ved Mehta, Phyllis Chesler, John Sayles, Garry Marshall, Julian Barnes, Alan Lelchuk, Norman Lewis, and Carolyn See, among others.
• Mako Yoshkawa, Assistant Professor; M.A., Oxford. Ms. Yoshikawa is the author of two novels: One Hundred and One Ways, a national bestseller published in 1999 and translated into six languages, and Once Removed. Among her awards for writing are fellowships from the Bunting Institute at Harvard University and from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She holds a master’s in Shakespeare and renaissance drama from Lincoln College, Oxford, and is currently finishing a Ph.D. in incest and miscegenation in twentieth-century American literature at the University of Michigan. Her publications also include scholarly articles on incest and race in American literature.

Correspondence and Information

Emerson College
Office of Graduate Admission
120 Boylston Street
Boston, Massachusetts 02116-4624
Telephone: 617-824-8610
Fax: 617-824-8614
Email: gradapp@emerson.edu