History

Edward Abbey, Paula Gunn Allen, Rudolfo Anaya, Denise Chavez, Sandra Cisneros, Robert Creeley, Gene Frumkin, Joy Harjo, Tony Hillerman, Antonio Mares, N. Scott Momaday, Simon Orti z, Louis Owens, Leslie Marmon Silko, Patricia Clark Smith, and Luci Tapahonso – a partial list offered in alphabetical order—of celebrated authors who’ve been either student or instructors (or both) in the English Department at UNM.

Among them, these writers have won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Medal for the Arts, the Before Columbus Book Award, the Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature, the William Carlos Williams Award, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and the Academy of American Poets Prize, to cite only some of the more noteworthy awards. No other university in the Southwest and no more than a handful of institutions in the nation have such an illustrious gathering of artists associated with their program in creative writing.

We now offer an MFA degree that replaces the old MA degree in creative writing that was established more than three decades ago, when it was one of a relatively few Master's level programs in creative writing.