The Creative Writing Program

Creative writing has long been an area of marked distinction at the University of New Mexico. Writers associated with our program as students, instructors, or in both roles, 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 can point to such an illustrious gathering of artists associated with their program in creative writing.

Currently, the Creative Writing faculty consists of six tenured and tenure-track fulltime faculty with multiple publications in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Two full time lecturers holding an MFA and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing also teach in the program. The Joseph M. Russo Endowed Chair in Creative Writing provides for one to three year appointments of nationally recognized authors.