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Overview
Summer residencies are integral to forming and maintaining our MFA community. The residency is held on the campus of Ashland University and features a rigorous schedule of workshops, seminars and readings.
Typical Daily Residency Schedule
- Morning workshop
- Lunch in the university's dining hall
- Afternoon craft seminar led by a faculty mentor or a visiting writer
- Late afternoon thesis defenses, class and individual meetings
- Catered dinner
- Evening reading by distinguished visiting writers and faculty mentors
- After-hours student open mics and social gatherings
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Writing Workshops
Summer workshops are split into two sessions. In each, three to five students spend several days working with one faculty mentor on short writing assignments and readings. During the sessions, you can expect to give and receive peer feedback and discuss assigned readings. In the second week, you will repeat this process with a different faculty member who is an expert in your chosen genre and will spend some time in professionalization workshops.
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2026 Visiting Writers & Editors
Each summer, we invite accomplished writers to give readings and craft seminars in addition to our core faculty. We also invite editors from literary journals and presses to hold panel discussions and meet with students individually.
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Amit Majmudar, the former first Poet Laureate of Ohio, is a diagnostic nuclear radiologist in Westerville, Ohio, where he lives with his wife and three children. Recent and forthcoming books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), Three Metamorphoses: Novellas in Prose and Verse (Orison Books, 2025), and Things my Grandmother Said: Poems (Knopf, 2026).
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Jane Clark Scharl is the author of Ponds (Poiema Poetry Series, 2024) and the verse plays Sonnez Les Matines (Wiseblood,2023) and The Death of Rabelais(Wiseblood, 2025). Jane is the associate director of operations at The Witherspoon Institute, poetry editor at Plough Quarterly, and executive editor of The Better Part Journal. is the author of Ponds (Poiema Poetry Series, 2024) and the verse plays Sonnez Les Matines (Wiseblood, 2023) and The Death of Rabelais (Wiseblood, 2025). Jane is the associate director of operations at The Witherspoon Institute, poetry editor at Plough Quarterly, and executive editor of The Better Part Journal.
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Frederic S. Durbin is a native of rural central Illinois. For over twenty years, he taught ESL and writing at Niigata University, Japan. Now he and his wife live in western Pennsylvania, where he is the Writer-in-Residence at the Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School in Midland, teaching creative writing to high schoolers. He is the author of four traditionally-published novels. His short fiction has appeared in Cricket, Cicada, Black Gate, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science-Fiction, and various anthologies. On the other side of the desk, he has co-edited the five-volume fiction and poetry anthology series Cold Hard Type from Loose Dog Press. His first novel, Dragonfly, was nominated for the International Horror Guild Award; Publishers Weekly named his novel A Green and Ancient Light a Best Fantasy of the Year, and it was named a Reading List Honor Book by the American Library Association. His latest novel, The Country Under Heaven (Melville House, 2025) is in its second printing. It was given starred reviews by Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist and honored by the Historical Novel Society.
Summer Residency Room and Board
Previous Visiting Writers & Editors
Visiting writers have included:
Creative Nonfiction
- Hanif Abdurraqib
- Gretel Ehrlich
- Ashley C. Ford
- Leslie Jamison
- Terry Tempest Williams
Fiction
- Dan Chaon
- Lolita Hernandez
- Rebecca Makkai
- Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Benjamin Percy
Poetry
- Jericho Brown
- John Keene
- Justin Phillip Reed
- J. Allyn Rosser
- Patricia Smith
Visiting editors have included:
- Ibrahim Ahmad, Viking
- Mary Biddinger, Akron University Press
- Dan Bourne, The Artful Dodge
- Kate Gale, Red Hen Press
- Johanna Ingalls, Akashic Books
- David Lynn and Kirsten Reach, Kenyon Review
- Eric Obenauf, Two Dollar Radio Press
- Jon Parrish Peede, Virginia Quarterly Review
- Hilary Plum, CSU Poetry Center
Supported by the Ohio Arts Council
The Ashland University MFA Program is grateful for the support of the Ohio Arts Council. Their support enables many events to be open and free to the public so that local writers and those interested in the literary arts can also benefit from the gifted authors and editors who are involved with this program.
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