Revised Program | Fall 2019
Distinguished as one of the few interdisciplinary creative writing programs in the country, Creative Writing at EMU provides a rich space for exploring aesthetic risk and social application. The program emphasizes state of the art contemporary writing practices through a creative, critical, practical, and research-based curriculum, preparing writers to participate in contemporary literary culture and for a range of language and media-centered careers.
Learn
The Creative Writing Major (36 hours) and Minor (24 hours) emphasize interdisciplinarity and experimentation through the exploration of poetry, fiction, hybrid genres, and multimedia literature. The curriculum incorporates a comprehensive approach to creative writing and critical reading, as well as experience with new media. Students learn to draw from a range of contemporary artistic practices to explore the relationship between language and aesthetic structures. We offer a sequence of workshops introducing students to a wide variety of writing styles, methods, and forms while enabling students to focus on selected areas of interest. The major in Creative Writing concludes with a Capstone Project and student performance of original work.
The Creative Writing Program promotes community engagement while guiding students’ exploration of the personal and social roles of language and literature. By reading and critiquing their peers’ works, students engage in a culture of collaboration and review. In addition, through classroom visits, specialized workshops, and our BathHouse Events series, students enter into dialogue with authors, publishers, translators, editors, performers, and new media artists.
Elective courses broaden students’ interaction in a larger arena of the literary arts while providing the expertise required for interdisciplinary approaches to writing.
Opportunities
Students who pursue this major have the opportunity to further develop and explore their creative writing skills through the Undergraduate Research Symposium, course work that provides opportunities for service learning and community-based projects, and through public readings and presentations.
In foregrounding intermedia and interdisciplinary approaches to creative writing as well as traditional genres, the program prepares undergraduate students for a variety of careers in writing. Authorship, education, nonprofit arts, editorial and publishing work, marketing, advertising, freelance writing, writing for digital media and interdisciplinary fields are among the career opportunities open to people with creative writing degrees. Many students in our program have also found a degree in creative writing to be excellent preparation for advanced studies in creative writing, literature, library science, and other fields in the arts and humanities.
