Poetry

The MFA is a creative writing low residency program that combines 10-day residencies with on-line coursework.

Creative Writing and Literature for educators, Fairleigh Dickinson, Creative Writing,Teaneck, New Jersey, Master of Fine Arts in Writing,

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Poetry

Our faculty brings diverse styles of writing together through workshops and lectures, and students are exposed to many different voices. Students may choose their mentors, and the program focuses on an individualized curriculum and instruction. To help our students with the publishing process, we invite editors, literary agents, and other publishing professionals to the residencies. Most of our students publish in literary magazines while still enrolled in the program, and many of our alumni have published books.

Recent Visiting Writers: Major Jackson, Jean Valentine, Tracy K. Smith, Frank Bidart, Tom Sleigh.

Students work closely with their mentors, who are not only award-winning, acclaimed poets, but also skilled and devoted teachers.

Students are invited to apply for tuition awards (up to $7,000.00), scholarships, and graduate assistantships, to offset tuition costs.

“The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself—as a vocation and an elevation almost.”

— Seamus Heaney

For More Information

René Steinke, Director

MFA in Creative Writing Fairleigh Dickinson University

email: writingmfa@fdu.edu

Apply here

Faculty

Harvey Hix

H. L. Hix’s recent books include a poetry collection, American Anger; a translation, made with Jüri Talvet, of Estonian peasant poet Juhan Liiv’s poetry, called Snow Drifts, I Sing; an essay collection, Lines of Inquiry; and an art/poetry anthology, Ley Lines. Other recent poetry collections include First Fire, Then Birds; Incident Light; and Chromatic (a finalist for the National Book Award). His books of criticism and theory include As Easy As Lying, Spirits Hovering Over the Ashes: Legacies of Postmodern Theory, and Morte d’Author: An Autopsy. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Texas, and taught for fifteen years at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Renée Ashley

Renée Ashley is the author of six volumes of poetry: The View from the Body; Because I Am the Shore I Want to Be the Sea; Basic Heart, which won the X.J.Kennedy Poetry Prize; The Revisionist’s Dream; The Various Reasons of Light; and Salt, which won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, as well as a novel, Someplace Like This, and two chapbooks, The Museum of Lost Wings and The Verbs of Desiring. She has received fellowships in both poetry and prose from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment of the Arts. A portion of her poem, “First Book of the Moon,” is included in a permanent installation by the artist Larry Kirkland in Penn Station, NYC. She has served as Assistant Poetry Coordinator for the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and as Poetry Editor of The Literary Review.

David Daniel

David Daniel’s collections of poems include Seven Star Bird, for which he won the Levis Reading Prize; and his chapbook, The Quick and the Dead. Daniel’s new collection, Ornaments and Other Assorted Love Songs is forthcoming as part of the Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Press. He is a regular contributor to The American Poetry Review, and poems, essays and reviews have appeared in numerous other journals, including the Harvard Review, AGNI, Post Road, Witness, Boston Review, and Ploughshares, where he served as the Poetry editor from 1992 to 2007. Daniel holds degrees from Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Virginia. He is the Director of the undergraduate creative writing program at Fairleigh Dickinson University, where he created WAMFEST (The Words and Music Festival), which has featured such artists as Bruce Springsteen, Robert Pinsky, Rosanne Cash, and many others. He lives in Boston, with his wife and three sons. Daniel teaches poetry in the low-residency MFA program.