A Message from the Director
Sharon Oard Warner

Joy Harjo joins the Creative Writing faculty
as the inaugural Joseph M. Russo Professor

Making the Cut - tips on applying for MFA programs
originally published in The Writer, January, 2005

• Background on Creative Writing at UNM
• Degree Requirements

Background on Creative Writing at UNM

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.

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Masters in Fine Arts:
Degree Requirements: 49 hours of coursework + 6 hours of dissertation

• 12 credits Engl 521, 522, 523. Creative Writing Workshops in Fiction, Poetry, and Creative Nonfiction. At least nine hours must be taken in the dissertation genre. At least three hours must be in a second genre.
• 3 credits Engl 501 Introduction to the Profession for Writers
• 6 credits Engl 587 Genre Studies, three in the area of concentration
• 4 credits Literature/Theory Seminar (610, 640, 650, 660)
• 9 credits Graduate Literature Courses Must be from at least two of the designated distribution groups, A-E (see UNM Catalog, p. 179)
• 6 credits Professional preparation electives from the list of courses
  • Engl. 513-20 Writing Courses in Science, Environmental, Medical Writing, Documentation, Publishing, Editing, Biography/Autobiography, Proposal and Grant Writing, Visual Rhetoric, and Other Topics
  • Engl 535 Creative Writing Pedagogy
  • Engl 537 Teaching Composition
  • Engl 538 Writing Theory for Teachers
  • Engl 539 Teaching Professional Writing
  • Engl 540 Topics in Language or Rhetoric
  • Engl 592 Teaching Literature and Literature Studies
• 9 credits Electives (six of these credits may be taken outside the English department)
• 6 credits Engl 699 Creative Dissertation

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