Spirit of the Program |
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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!
The 2009 Summer Residency will be held July 26 through August 8. Congratulations to our MFA students who have won awards or have had pieces selected for publication recently! The Ashland University MFA Program announces its 2009 visiting writers: Patricia Hampl, M.L. Liebler, Scott Russell Sanders, and C.K. Williams. 2008-2009 Program Handbook is available to download. (PDF)
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Where the horseshoe meets the highway... |
| Dates & Deadlines | |
Fall Reminders: Fall First Day of Class - August 25 Cross-Genre Applications Due - October 15 2nd Year Students: Thesis Advisor Preference Forms Due - October 15 1st Year Students: Registration Opens - November 1 Application Deadlines: |
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"This was an enjoyable, exhausting, excellent whirlwind of a two-week residency. The visiting authors covered a wonderful range of style, technique, and wit. Both the readings and craft seminars were stimulating and enlightening: Marilyn Chin’s energy and stage presence, Kittredge’s lyricism and accumulated understanding of the work of writing, Debra Marquart’s wit and joy, Michael Salinger’s incredible way of teaching another level of understanding overall structure, line, and word through examining the work as an oral performance, Kevin Young giving us another way to see our own worlds as worthy of reproduction in art, Eric and Jennifer passing on years’ worth of knowledge so graciously in just an hour and a half’s time, Floyd Skloot – I am a writer and words fail me – I am awed by this man, Robert Fogarty who I could have listened to for hours! And I haven’t even mentioned the superb faculty, Sarah Wells (thank you!), and Steve Haven… at this point, I should probably write an ode to the summer residency." - Maureen Flora, Second-Year Student, Summer 2008