MA Creative Writing and Literature for Educators

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For Teachers with the Souls of Writers

The First (and only) MA in Creative Writing and Literature for Educators

Expressly designed for high school teachers – as well as aspiring teachers and professors – this advanced degree nurtures your writing while giving you practical tools for using creative writing in the classroom and for teaching literature from a writer’s point of view.

The program is fully online except for one three-day on-campus residency in late June. You’ll never have to compromise your day job! Working at your own pace, you can finish the program in two years or take up to five.

During this year’s online residency, you’ll meet our faculty and fellow students from near and far, and spend time with a distinguished Visiting Writer. Our residency is a program highlight. It’s where students make lasting, supportive relationships with one another and their professors.

Welcome to our community of writers and teachers at Fairleigh Dickinson University!

Program Goals

We’ll take your creative writing abilities to the next level, whatever your level. (We admit students from relative beginners to published authors with multiple books to their credit.) Our writing faculty are National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalists; no matter how much experience you have, they’ll be able to help you develop your writing, and market it professionally if you so choose. A basic assumption we make is that being a writer makes you a more effective reader and teacher of literature: you’ll combine your “writerly” insight into process with “readerly” critical approaches to form and content.
We’ll train you to be a confident, constructive, and versatile teacher of creative writing. We want you to be comfortable teaching all the four main genres of creative writing — fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, and drama — and responding helpfully to student work. This program is the perfect preparation if you want to start to teach creative writing, and is the natural next step in professional development if you already do.
We’ll train you to be a master interpreter of literature, who can use creative approaches and creative assignments to get their students fired up and thinking deeply about challenging texts. We’re sensitive to the demands of Common Core and your local curricula, and we’ll help you work within those constraints to get superior results.

Admission Requirements

Students holding undergraduate degrees from an accredited four-year institution in the U.S. or abroad may apply.

When to Apply

Applications are accepted on a rolling basis. Applicants can apply by the deadlines below to begin the program according to the timeframe that best meets their schedule. If you would like up-to-date information about the exact dates for the next residency or any session, please email gradwriting@fdu.edu.

Application Deadlines:

Apply by August 1 – Fall semester, begin the program in late August
Apply by December 1 – Spring semester, begin the program in late January
Apply by April 1 – First summer session, begin the program in mid-May
Apply by May 15 – Second summer session, begin in mid-June

Upcoming 2023 summer residency, dates TBA

How to Apply

Complete the Graduate Admissions form and upload the following documents:

A Personal Statement. In at least a couple of paragraphs, and at most a page or two, tell us about your professional background and why you think the program will be a good fit for you. Give us a sense of who you are, and what your goals are, as a teacher and a writer.
A Writing Sample. We also want a sense of how you write. One short story, one chapter of a novel, a few poems, one act of a play, or one article or course paper is a good length – but use a piece you have edited, not a first draft.
Your Transcript verifying your BA or BS degree.
Fill out a FAFSA online ASAP if you are interested in financial aid.
GRE and other test scores are NOT required.
Letters of recommendation (personal, professional, or academic) are welcome but are NOT required.
The program is housed on the Florham Campus in Madison, NJ.

Degree Plan

The first foundational course — Reading Like a Writer — introduces the practice of writerly exegesis and the focus on how meaning is created. Students tell us that the residency is the program’s highlight. It’s where students meet their professors and classmates, make long-term connections, and participate in insightful workshops that will give you tools to bring back to your classroom and use in your own writing. The subsequent writing courses are designed specifically to provide both a creative and writerly/analytical experience in each of the major genres the educators are likely to see in student work. The literature courses offer greater breadth and enriched understanding and connection to the advanced readerly aspects of the literature often taught in high school. Specifically, they address:

Areas of the traditional high school curriculum (Shakespeare, young adult literature),
Non-Western literature (African writers, world literature),
Cross/intercultural literature (ethnic American literature), and

To earn the MA degree, students must attend the three-day residency (2 credits) and complete the following seven courses (four credits each) for a total of 30 credits:

Foundation Course: Reading Like a Writer
Four Writing/Critiquing Courses (one from each genre below)
Two Literature Courses (on any topic of interest to you)

Residency and Foundation Course

CWLT8000 Residency
CWLT8001 Reading Like a Writer

Writing/Critiquing Courses

CWLT8101 Fiction
CWLT8102 Poetry
CWLT8103 Creative Non-Fiction
CWLT8104 Dramatic / Cinematic Writing

Literature Courses

CWLT8121 Comedy, Satire, and Parody
CWLT8201 Ethnic-American Literature
CWLT8202 Non-Linear Narrative
CWLT8203 Chaucer in Our Time
CWLT8204 Reading Contemporary African Writers
CWLT8205 Theatrical Re-Writes Or Why We
CWLT8206 Contemporary World Literature
CWLT8207 Young-Adult Literature
CWLT8209 International Short Story
CWLT8210 Tropes of Reading: Reading Tropes
CWLT8211 Modern Poetry
CWLT8212 Shakespeare
CWLT8213 Post-Colonial Literature
CWLT8214 Jane Austen: Fiction & Film
CWLT8215 Contemporary Literary Magazines
CWLT8216 Contemporary American Drama
CWLT8217 Irish Literature
CWLT8218 Graphic Novels
CWLT8219 Stand English & the Common Core
CWLT8220 Contemporary American Poetry
CWLT8221 Fantasy, Myth and the Medieval
CWLT8222 Contemporary/European Drama
CWLT8224 The Art of Adaptation

Special Information

Our tuition is at a deeply discounted rate to accommodate educators.

Program Faculty

Rebecca Chace, Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MA Program in Creative Writing and Literature
Renée Ashley, Adjunct
Peter Benson, Professor of English
Matthieu Boyd, Chair of the Department of Literature, Writing, Language, and Philosophy
Walter Cummins, Emeritus Professor of English and Editor-in-Chief of The Literary Review
Kathleen Graber, Adjunct
Sara Lautman, Adjunct
April Patrick, Assistant Professor of Literature and University Director of Honors
Lia Romeo, Adjunct

CWLT8101 In this course, students will create and revise a short work of fiction. The emphasis is not on the completed product but rather on the strategies of critiquing and revision that are developed through common readings and discussions. To that end, students and instructor will comment on both the writing and the critiques in on-line workshops. Critiques of the writing use close reading to focus on writerly issues of structure, point of view, style, tone, diction, etc. Commentary on the critiques will focus on usefulness to the writer and to work.
CWLT8102 In this course, students will create and revise two poems. The emphasis is not on the completed product but rather on the strategies of critiquing and revision that are developed through common readings and discussions. To that end, students and instructor will comment on both the writing and the critiques in on-line workshops. Critiques of the writing use close reading to focus on writerly issues of structure, prosody, line, style, tone diction, etc. Commentary on the critiques will focus on usefulness to the writer and to the work.
CWLT8103 Students create and revise a short work of non-fiction. The emphasis is not on the completed product but rather on the strategies of critiquing and revision that are developed through common readings, discussions and critiques in on-line workshops. Critiques of the writing use close reading to focus on writerly issues of structure, point of view, style, tone, diction, etc.
CWLT8104 Students create and revise a short screenplay or stage play. The emphasis is not on the completed product but rather on the strategies of critiquing and revision that are developed through common readings, discussions and critiques in on-line workshops. Critiques of the writing use close reading to focus on writerly issues of dramatic structure, point of view visual storytelling, dialog, style, etc.
CWLT8121 An approach to a range of comic genres, from the perspective of the writer and performer: everything from American standup, comic skits, and situation comedy to classic literary satire, parody, and farce from around the world. We'll look at joke structure, creation of comic personae, and the evolution of comic technique, trying our hand from time to time at writing within the various comic genres ourselves.
CWLT8201 This course focuses on the latter half of the twentieth century and examines different racial and ethnically hyphenated groups through fiction, autobiography, poetry, and film. Discussion of texts by Jewish-Americans, African-Americans, Indian-Americans, Native-Americans, Mexican-Americans and others will combine close textual analysis with attendant theories of identity and multiculturalism.
CWLT8202 This course focuses on selected 20th century narratives that present particular challenges due to their non-linear presentation. Close readings will show how these texts establish complex relationships with objective reality and standard ways of representing reality. The predominance of subjective versions of history, with an individual sense of time and space, will inform our reading strategies so as to derive meaning in unconventional ways.
CWLT8204 This course focuses on how contemporary African writers challenge or redefine their societies? conventional values, usages, and beliefs. On-line discussions, through a close reading of poems, stories, plays, novels, and memoirs, explore the ways language both carries and subverts cultural assumptions. Interpretations of primary texts focus on the aesthetic choices African writers make in response to very different social realities.
CWLT8205 This course examines the reasons why playwrights often rely on well-known myths and stories to convey their messages. Considerations include establishing the historical, literary, cultural, and political circumstances that make a known story feel fresh, new, and relevant to one?s culture even centuries later. The theoretical issues raised, provide a solid range of analytical tasks relevant to many literary discussions.
CWLT8206 This course examines changing literary conceptions of the world from perspectives influenced by race, class, gender, and sexuality, through contemporary post colonial fiction from perspectives influenced by race, class, gender, and sexuality, through contemporary postcolonial fiction from India, Indonesia, Jamaica, and Zimbabwe. The course also analyzes how the narrative techniques employed in these novels fuse the political with the aesthetic in constructing national identities.
CWLT8207 Survey of young adult literature of the mid to late 20th century. Examines how this relatively new genre reflects growing changes within culture and society. We will read classics and novels that are standard in high school curricula and consider issues including transition to adulthood, sexuality, conflicts between youth and parents, fantasy, responsibility, and authority.
CWLT8209 Focusing on short stories written in the last few decades, we will emphasize unique features of the form, along with elements of craft that it shares with other narrative genres. We will study works from a variety of national traditions, in English and translation, asking how cultural identity effects setting, character, conflict, and theme.
CWLT8210 The most commonly read secondary school tests often seem to have inscribed or enforced readings suggested by the history of our connections to the texts as well as elements of the texts themselves. Such readings, can become narrative and foreclose other possible interpretations and connections. In this course we will try to identify the inscribed/enforced readings and the causes and the manner in which such readings might foreclose others. Additionally, we will explore some of the alternative interpretations.
CWLT8211 We will focus on recent work by living American poets, mostly written within the last fifteen or twenty years, with one exception, the poems of Anne Sexton (which we?ll look at to establish a base for comparison). We?ll primarily read complete volumes by individual poets, rather than scattered single poems in anthologies, focusing on how poets create identifiable voices, a unique poetic language, and poetic landscape that is undeniably their own. We will focus particularly on the craft and form of the featured poets. Poets studied will include, among others (in addition to Sexton), C.K. Williams, Kim Addonizio, Paul Muldoon, Rita Dove, and Billy Collins.
CWLT8212 What are some of the Bard?s models for his comedies? Which plays have left a mark in other national literatures through the centuries? This course aims at analyzing some of the most often read Shakespeare plays, defining their historical context and their political agenda, while also looking at which sources helped to inspire them and which other plays, in turn, they molded in centuries to come. Particular attention will be given to comedies and to the role of servants in them, with an eye to how plays could be taught in the classroom going beyond the text and looking at performance history and practice.
CWLT8216 This course focuses on American drama from the 1960?s through the first decade of the new millennium, both as literary texts and in performance. Students read plays by a variety of playwrights, focusing on what makes them uniquely American, uniquely contemporary, and uniquely dramatic in their structure, stagecraft, and means of conveying character, conflict, and theme.
CWLT8218 We will focus on recent work by comic book writers and graphic book novelists, merely written within the last thirty years, with two exceptions, the early work of Rodolphe Topffer (the 19th century parent of this medium) and the first work by Siegel and Schuster (1938). These two works will be used as a basis for understanding the evolution of this medium and its genres. We'll primarily read complete comic compendia and graphic novels, rather than scattered single issues or anthologies, focusing on how graphic novelists and comic writers craft both plot and dialogue while operating within a framework which assumes that the test will be indivisibly completed with images. The writers studied will include, among others, Alan Moore, Brian Michael Bendis, Allison Bechdel, Marlene Sattrapi, Marguerite Abouet, Gene Luen Yang and Art Spiegelman.
CWLT8219 This course is oriented to the many outcomes in the Common Core State Standards that involve declarative knowledge of grammar. It covers about three dozen discrete skills in linguistics and grammatical analysis, including everything required by Common Core, a historical survey on English and the development as a global language, an implications for teaching (including basic ESL practice), and literacy texts in different kinds of nonstandard English.
CWLT8220 Study of work written with the last twenty years by seven living American poets, focusing on how they create an identifiable voice, a unique poetic language, and a poetic universe undeniably their own. We will read a volume of poetry by each of the featured poets, concentrating particularly on how craft and form generate meaning.
CWLT8221 This course looks at modern and contemporary fantasy along with older stories: myth, folklore, and medieval literature. Sometimes this old material is an immediate source - as in Tolkien or CS Lewis, who were both professional medievalists - and sometimes the relationship is more diffuse, but still instructive. We will trace the emergence of the fantasy genre, and look at major fantasy phenomena (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Games of Thrones, D&D and its derivatives - some familiarity with these will be expected) as well as lesser-known works that present a particular interest. We will also discuss relevant issues in theory. The goal is to develop practices for teaching the new through the lens of the old, and vice versa, and to equip you more richly to craft your own works of fantasy.
CWLT8222 This course analyses European plays from the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, with particular emphasis on politics and on the increasing importance of the director. Texts range from classically conceived plays to monologues and one-acts. Some of the questions the course raises are: what is the role of theatre in a world increasingly more dominated by other media? Can it be an important political tool and vehicle for counter-information? How has it changed in the 70 years after World War II?