Our low-residency MFA community inspires and sustains a lifetime of creative work.
Work with Gail Brandeis, Pablo Cartaya, Traci Chee, Joe McGee, Isabel Quintero, & Jessica Rinker.
Work with authors Lidia Yuknavitch, Gayle Brandeis, Brian Turner, and Suzanne Roberts.
Work with authors Rebecca Makkai, Lidia Yuknavitch, Alan Heathcock, and Brendan Basham.
Work with authors Brian Turner, Faylita Hicks, John Murillo, and Lee Herrick.
Come lean toward our fire and tell us your stories, poems, essays. We’re listening.
Our program was built entirely by writers, to guide authors organically through the exploration of their craft and thorough preparation for a sustainable life of creation and publication. No other program nurtures a writer from line and sentence to essay, story, poetry collection or novel like ours does.
Our editing semester is a uniquely practical experience in crafting work which is both thrilling and publishable. Our gifted faculty are here because they want to launch unique, individual voices within a global dialogue; to see risks taken, new moves in language braved, and students grow into professional and artistic peers.
We’ve made this program so that people who are unable to walk away from jobs and families and service can still become masters of their craft . . . NOW.
Over five distance-learning semesters punctuated by five week-long residencies, students will focus on their chosen genre (be it fiction, poetry or creative nonfiction) while exploring new territories of artistic expression.
Faculty meet with their students one-on-one during each residency to set plans, then work with them intensively throughout the semester providing written critiques. With a student-to-mentor ratio never greater than 5:1, students receive creative, focused, individualized feedback.
Each residency is an eight-day intensive period of workshops, seminars, readings and more, in which we explore the wide landscape of the writing life from practical tricks-of-the-trade to subtleties of conceptual nuance. Residencies are in early January and early August.
Work a full semester one-on-one with an editor to make your manuscript polished – and publishable.
Approach your manuscript with greater objectivity, master the tools to shape its potential into a great reading experience on the page, and learn about the practical aspects of publishing from start to finish.
Writers in the Woods presents intimate readings and workshops, open to all, with acclaimed authors in all genres.
The program has hosted scores of poets and writers from all over the country, including Carmen Maria Machado, Kaveh Akbar, Kim Addonizio, Rebecca Makkai, Nick Flynn, Tim O’Brien, Patricia Smith and many others.
The Sierra Nevada Review is an annual literary magazine managed and edited by the MFA-CW students.
The magazine publishes poetry, short fiction, and literary nonfiction “that leans toward the unconventional, surprising, and risky. We appreciate experiments in form and content, and prefer works whose meanings deepen on repeated readings.”
We want artists who will write for the rest of their lives. If you are interested in adding your voice to this transformative conversation and intrigued by the possibility of working with teachers and peers who are passionate about the art they love, then please contact us — we look forward to meeting you.
