M.F.A. in Creative Writing
Creative Writing
Creative Writing
Creative Writing
Creative Writing
Creative Writing
Creative Writing
Creative Writing
Creative Writing
Creative Writing
Creative Writing
Program in Creative Writing & Translation
One of the nation’s oldest MFA programs, and one of the “Top Five Most Innovative”
(The Atlantic Monthly), we offer degree tracks in Fiction, Poetry, and Literary Translation.
Recent graduates have won the Stegner Fellowship, the £15,000 BBC International Short
Story Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, and Fulbright Fellowships, among others. Learn more...
About
For over fifty years, the University of Arkansas Program in Creative Writing and Translation has served as a preeminent training ground for some of the nation’s best writers.
Established in 1966, ours is one of the oldest MFA programs in the nation and one of the most innovative, offering degree tracks in poetry, fiction, and literary translation.
Our 60-hour curriculum enhances the typical workshop experience with coursework in craft and literary studies so that students develop their own creative voices alongside a deep understanding of the great writers and works that have come before them. Our small class sizes and dedicated faculty—award-winning writers themselves—guarantee that students receive hands-on attention through their four years of study.
Our MFA is designed to be a true terminal degree. Graduates leave our program prepared for all aspects of the writing life.
Admission to our program is highly selective. From the hundreds of applications we receive each year, we admit up to five students in each genre. While students pursue a single degree track in poetry, fiction, or translation, our four-year curriculum enables them to explore outside of their own concentration, with workshops and craft courses in other genres.
Each semester, our Walton Reading Series brings in established authors who offer a public reading and hold one-on-one conferences with students. Past visitors have included Colum McCann, A. E. Stallings, Khaled Mattawa, Franz Wright, Marian Schwartz, and William Gay. In addition, our Distinguished Readers Series lures true literary luminaries to campus for a public reading and private MFA events: W. S. Merwin, Shahrnush Parsipur, Robert Hass, Joyce Carol Oates, Zadie Smith, and Claudia Rankine to name a few.
Thank you for visiting our website. We invite you to explore the information herein—from our distinguished alumni to our current events—and become part of the rich tradition of creative writing at the U of A.
PROFILES
A 2023 graduate of theUniversity of Arkansas MFA Program in Creative Writing andTranslation, Vasantha Sambamurti is now a writer, editor, translator and PhD student in English
at Tufts University. Her research interests include 20th and 21st cent. Global Anglophone and
Francophone literatures and cinema, translation theory, comparative ethnic literatures, and
contemporary poetics. She is the Senior Editor for Transition Magazine, founded in Uganda in
1961 by Rajat Neogy, now based at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African
American Research. As a recipient of 2022 Sturgis International Fellowship, she conducted
literary research on Indian Ocean writers onsite in La Réunion and Mauritius. She recently
finished work on a poetry manuscript, For the Blood of Me. A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net
nominee, her poetry, prose, and literary translations from French are featured in: The Commuter
by Electric Literature, Waxwing, Northwest Review, Portland Review, Exchanges: A Journal of
Literary Translation & elsewhere.
Jen Jabaily-Blackburn graduated from the University of Arkansas MFA Program in CreativeWriting and Translation in 2011 with an MFA in poetry. She is the author of the full-length
collection Girl in a Bear Suit (Elixir Press, 2024) and the e-chapbook Disambiguation
(Salamander/Suffolk University, 2024). She is the winner of the Louisa Solano Memorial
Emerging Poet Award from Salamander, selected by Stephanie Burt. Her work has appeared in
The Common, On the Seawall, Southern Indiana Review, The Massachusetts Review, Indiana
Review, and Palette Poetry, among others, and her poems were twice selected for Best New
Poets. She is at work on a series of mixed-media blackout poems, hem, drawn from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses. Originally from the Boston area, she now lives in Western Massachusetts
with her family. In 2024, she joined the advisory board of Perugia Press, and she is an
associate editor of Nine Syllables Press, housed at Smith College, where she is the Program &
Outreach coordinator for the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center. More at jenjabailyblackburn.com.
Originally from coal country, Pennsylvania, Jackie Chicalese graduated with an MFA
in
Poetry at the Program of Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas.
In her creative work, she attends to coal mining’s impacts on landscapes and
communities. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the New England
Review, Gulf Coast, Salt Hill Journal, the Florida Review, and elsewhere. She is a
recipient of the John Hollander Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
Jackie is currently pursuing her PhD in Composition and Rhetoric at the University
of
Nebraska-Lincoln, where she studies writing pedagogy. Her scholarly work has been
published or is forthcoming in Writers: Craft & Context and Peitho.