Program Information

Director's Note:

Ashland University offers the only two-genre low-residency MFA Program in the country, with a cross-genre option and separate degree tracks in poetry and creative nonfiction. The program is characterized both by an insistence on high aesthetic standards for the creation of new literature and by an emphasis on a supportive community of writers.

The Ashland MFA Program embraces a Whitmanesque sense of the writer's radical good cheer and the skeptic's insistence to confront realities. While accepting no easy assumptions--not even assuming the ability of language to embody the full range and richness of the most simple, human moment--we are interested in what poets and nonfiction writers can learn from one another.

What, for example, does it mean to write within an orientation to "the truth," as poets often do and nonfiction writers must? What might it mean for a nonfiction writer to emphasize the imagination as fully as a poet? How might an associational movement of thought, imagery, emotion, and sound offer an entry into the multi-layered nature of the radically real?

We invite accomplished poets and nonfiction writers who are drawn by the interplay between poetry and nonfiction to apply to our program. Come join the celebration!

- Stephen Haven

Click here to view our MFA open house video.

The Director Responds: Frequently Asked Questions