MA Creative Writing and Literature for Educators

Home Program MA Creative Writing and Literature for Educators

Our unique program — the first and only one in North America — is designed for middle- and high-school teachers who wish to pursue their own writing and enhance their own teaching of creative writing and literature.

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.

The annual residency, normally the last weekend in June, brings you to our gorgeous campus in Madison, New Jersey — a short train ride from New York City — for workshops, readings, and in-person previews of the online courses.

You’ll meet our faculty and fellow students from near and far, and spend time with a distinguished Visiting Writer. This year we had Simone White, recipient of a 2017 Whiting Award for poetry, Cave Canem Fellowships and former program director of The Poetry Project in New York City. Our residency gets rave reviews year after year, and you can come back as many times as you like.

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. We do NOT require GRE or any other standardized test scores.

When to apply

We accept applications on a rolling basis within the deadlines below. The residency must be taken within a year of enrollment. We run courses during two summer sessions as well as fall and spring. Take a look at the academic calendar session dates.

We recommend, if at all possible, beginning the program in the early summer session (late May) when we run the fundamental “Reading Like a Writer” course and then follow with the June Residency. To do this, apply by April 15.

To attend the June residency and begin courses in late summer (early July) or fall, apply by May 1.
To start courses in late summer (early July) and take the residency the following year, apply by June 1.
To start courses in fall and take the residency the following year, apply by August 1.
To start courses in spring (end of January to mid-May) and take the residency the following June, apply by December 1.

Honestly, you can apply at any time!

To Apply

Complete the Graduate Admissions form and upload the following documents:

A Personal Statement. In at least a couple 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 B.A. or B.S. 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

If possible, students begin with the Foundation Course — Reading Like a Writer — that introduces the practice of writerly exegesis and the focus on how meaning is created. 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
contemporary literary issues (non-linear narrative, theatrical re-writes).

To earn the MA degree, students must attend the three-day residency within their first year of enrollment (two 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

CWLT8201 Ethnic-American Literature
CWLT8202 Non-Linear Narrative
CWLT8204 Contemporary African Writers
CWLT8206 Contemporary World Literature
CWLT8209 International Short Story
CWLT8207 Young-Adult Literature
CWLT8210 Tropes of Reading: Reading Tropes
CWLT8211 Modern Poetry
CWLT8212 Shakespeare
CWLT8213 Post-Colonial Literature

Special Information

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

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.
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.
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.