Hone Your Craft in the Capital City
For more than 30 years, writers have come to American University to develop their work and exchange ideas in the District’s only creative writing MFA program. Our graduate workshops provide a rigorous yet supportive environment where students explore a range of approaches to the art and craft of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
As an MFA student at American, you are free to pursue a single genre or explore several. You will acquire a deeper understanding of your own work and hone your skills in a collaborative setting.
A Program of Study That Gets Results
This two-year, 36-credit-hour MFA program integrates writing, literary journalism, translation, and the study of literature to prepare students for a range of career possibilities. Write, give feedback, and receive guidance from a close-knit community of respectful peers and faculty. In the MFA program, you'll find lawyers, military veterans, musicians, teachers, and business executives who are passionate about the written word.
Connect with accomplished professors and the resources you need to reach your goal. Our faculty members have been featured in a variety of media and publications including the New Yorker, the New York Times, National Public Radio, Bill Moyers & Co., and the Washington Post.
Prominent Authors Dedicated to Your Success
Our faculty of award-winning poets, novelists, translators, and nonfiction writers will help you help you hone your craft and pursue your career as a writer. You will receive instruction and guidance from successful authors published by university presses and major publishers, including Houghton Mifflin, Scribner, Vintage Books, Viking Press, and WW Norton. Our active and engaged faculty members are regularly featured in top media outlets such as The New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and New Republic; in literary journals like Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Shenandoah; and on television and radio.
A City For Writers
Living and learning in the nation's capital provides numerous benefits for MFA students. We partner with organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts, Library of Congress, 826DC, Writopia Labs, and Folger Shakespeare Library to facilitate opportunities for our students.
Our students have recently published books with WW Norton, Copper Canyon, University of Wisconsin Press, and MIT Press. They have been featured on This American Life, Poets & Writers, in Creative Nonfiction, Psychology Today, and more.
We Know Success
97% of graduates are employed, in grad school, or both 6 months after graduation.
Our alumni have gone on to work for organizations including:
- Amplify
- Catalogue for Philanthropy: Greater Washington
- Clutch
- EEO ClassIn
- Fulbright Association
- Goodwin University
- KIPP DC
- Macmillan
- PEN/Faulkner Foundation
- RH-ISAC
- Shout Mouse Press
- Street Sense Media
- The Building People
- W. W. Norton & Company, Inc
Publications
Folio is a nationally recognized literary journal sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences at American University in Washington, DC. Since 1984, we have published original creative work by both new and established authors. Past issues have included work by Michael Reid Busk, Billy Collins, William Stafford, and Bruce Weigl, and interviews with Michael Cunningham, Charles Baxter, Amy Bloom, Ann Beattie, and Walter Kirn. We look for well-crafted poetry and prose that is bold and memorable.
News & Notes
Accolades
Recent award-winning publications by our MFA alumni:
- Valzhyna Mort won the 2021 International Griffin Prize for her third poetry collection, Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG, 2020), which was named one of the best poetry books of 2020 by The New York Times.
- Field Study by Chet’la Sebree won the 2020 Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Award; Mistress won the 2018 New Issues Poetry Prize.
- "The Niece" by Yohanca Delgado was selected for the Distinguished Stories list in Best American Short Stories 2020.
- Trouble Sleeping by Abdul Ali won the 2014 New Issues Poetry Prize.
- Daydreamers by Jonathan Harper was named a Kirkus Indie Books of the Month Selection.
Bulletins
Rachel Louise Snyder recounts how her mother’s death left her unmoored and untoward in her new memoir.
Kyle Dargan served as editor for The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer with Janelle Monáe.
Dolen Perkins-Valdez (Literature) won the 2023 NAACP Image Award for fiction for her most recent novel, Take My Hand.
Spotlight
Ralvell RogersMFA, Creative Writing
More about Ralvell
MFA Creative Writing candidate Ralvell Rogers is making his mark on the literary world.
My time at AU has been brilliant in the fact that I've already learned much about what it means to be a Writer with a capital "W" and more importantly, a literary scholar. Though there is an obvious focus on our course work, it's been made clear to me that our work isn't exactly all that matters in the classroom. We are continuously connecting our work in class to the lives that we live on a daily basis and the world that we all live in, and I think that is very important for writers and entrepreneurs in the publishing sector because we are essentially the historians of our respective generations.
He is the author of The Kansas City Boys Choir: Providing Hope for Tomorrow, which has been endorsed by luminaries Kevin Powell, G.S. Griffin, and Congressman Emanual Cleaver II. Ralvell has also established his own publishing company, Ambitious Stories, LLC, out of Kansas City, MO. He founded it earlier this year to focus on "often unheard, yet riveting and inspiring stories from the heart."
Valzhyna Mort MFA Creative Writing
More about Valzhyna
Alumna Valzhyna Mort has gained international acclaim for her third poetry collection, Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG, 2020), which won the 2021 International Griffin Prize and was named one of the best poetry books of 2020 by the New York Times. Publishers Weekly called this work in their starred review, "poems of reclamation and resurrection; to live in them is to confront the hard work of witness." The New Yorker wrote in its review, "Memory, metaphor, and myth intermingle to sometimes nightmarish effect in this collection by a Belarus-born poet. Mort excavates the individual and communal traumas wrought by a violent and repressive national history, and calls herself 'a test-child exposed to the burning reactor of my grandmother’s memory.'" Mort teaches poetry, literature, and translation at Cornell University.
Look inside the Creative Writing MFA
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For more than 40 years, writers have come to American University to develop their work and exchange ideas in the District’s only creative writing MFA program.