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Our MFA in Creative Writing

Our three-year MFA program provides students with graduate study and professional training in the writing of fiction and poetry with our distinguished graduate faculty.

Overview of our Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program

The Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Creative Writing is a terminal degree awarded by the University of Illinois. Our three-year program provides students with graduate study and professional training in the writing of fiction and poetry with our distinguished graduate faculty. 

The primary goal of the MFA in Creative Writing is to give literary artists time and space to work on perfecting their art. Students will teach creative writing and produce a book-length, publishable manuscript. Students will also gain extensive experience in literary editing and publishing while enrolled in the program.

An MFA student reading their work to an audience

The MFA program at the University of Illinois is fully funded. Students accepted into the program will receive full tuition waivers, guaranteed teaching assistantships, and partial-fee waivers for the duration of the program, as long as they remain in good standing and make reasonable progress toward their degree.

Stipends for MFA students are competitive and the low cost of living in the area is quite reasonable. In their first year, all entering MFA candidates will receive a 1/1 teaching assistantship (one class each semester). In their second year, students will receive a 2/1 assistantship, with opportunities for teaching-load reduction in the form of publishing-job-training graduate assistantships with our award-winning literary magazine, Ninth Letter. In their third year, students will again receive a 1/1 teaching assistantship.

Most semesters, teaching assignments will be in the undergraduate rhetoric program. MFA students will also teach at least one undergraduate creative-writing workshop, with an opportunity to teach additional undergraduate classes in creative writing. In recent semesters, MFA students have taught CW 104 Fiction Writing I, CW 106 Poetry Writing I, and CW 200 Reading for Writers, among other courses. 

For application requirements and instructions, please visit  Application Requirements for Prospective Students .

Life in Champaign-Urbana

downtown champaign

Life in C-U combines some of the best aspects of life in a city with the benefits of a small-town environment.

Accessibility :

  • Low cost of living, affordable housing, and green spaces within half a mile of every home
  • Free, award-winning mass transit for all U of I students
  • Proximity to major cities with Chicago, St. Louis, and Indianapolis only a few hours away

Arts & Culture:

  • Krannert Center for the Performing Arts and Krannert Art Museum
  • Vibrant local live music scene
  • Public art and murals throughout the area, seasonal fairs and festivals

Food & Drink:

  • A food scene reflecting the diversity of the country’s second-largest international population at a public university
  • A wide range of bars and local breweries to suit anyone’s taste

Current Students

Matthew Fash  (Poetry)

Justine Mercado  (Poetry)

David Miller  (Fiction)

Jason Pfister  (Fiction)

Erin Stoodley  (Poetry)

Hannah Thorpe  (Fiction)

Second Year

Isabella Escamilla  (Poetry)

David Foley  (Poetry)

Gabriella Hoggatt  (Fiction)

Callan Latham  (Poetry)

Tyler Moore  (Fiction)

Garrett Stack  (Fiction)

Steven Bergmark  (Fiction)

Andrea Giugni  (Poetry)

Malina Infante  (Poetry)

Mason McVeigh  (Fiction)

Nathan Metz  (Poetry)

Diana Towner  (Fiction)

More About Our MFA Program

mfa creative writing programs in chicago

MFA course requirements

Application requirements for prospective students, why creative writing, follow us on instagram.

@cwillinois on Instagram

Creative Writing Upcoming Events

Creative Writing, The University of Chicago

So, You Want an MFA?

Whether you are curious about or actively planning to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing, we welcome you to attend this virtual panel! Creative Writing faculty and recent MFA graduates will share their experiences completing graduate degrees in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translation. You'll get to ask about application tips, hot takes, whether the MFA path is right for you, and more! 

Poster

Daniel Raeburn  is the author of  Chris Ware,  a book of art criticism, and  Vessels :  A Memoir of What Wasn’t.  His essays have also appeared in  The New Yorker, The Baffler, Tin House,  and in  The Imp , his series of booklets about underground cartoonists. He’s been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Howard Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Chicago and received his MFA in Writing & Literature from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College, a 24-month low-residency program.

Stephanie Soileau's collection of short stories  LAST ONE OUT SHUT OFF THE LIGHTS is forthcoming from Little, Brown & Co. in Summer 2020. Her work has also appeared in  Glimmer Train, Oxford American, Ecotone, Tin House, New Stories from the South , and other journals and anthologies, and has been supported by fellowships from the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program at Stanford University, the Camargo Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She earned her BA in English at the University of Chicago and MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She teaches fiction at the University of Chicago.

Will Boast is the author of a story collection,  Power Ballads , a memoir,  Epilogue , and a novel,  Daphne.  His short fiction, reporting, and essays have appeared in  The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Guardian, Glimmer Train,  and the  Virginia Quarterly Review,  among other publications. His first attempt at an MFA was at Indiana University. He completed the task at the University of Virginia. He then did even more workshopping through a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford and a Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. He's also been a Literature Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He's taught fiction and non-fiction at Chicago since 2014. 

Lina M. Ferreira C.-V.  graduated with both a creative nonfiction writing and a literary translation MFA from the University of Iowa. She is the author of  Drown Sever Sing  from Anomalous press and  Don’t Come Back  the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology  The Great American Essay  and the editor and translator of the forthcoming  100 Refutations  from Mad Creek Books . She’s been the recipient of the Best of the Net award and the Iron Horse Review’s Discovered Voices award, has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and is a Rona Jaffe fellow. She moved from Colombia to China to Columbus to Chicago, where she works as an assistant professor for the University of Chicago.

Korey Williams earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University—a full-residency and fully-funded 2-year program that offers 1- to 2-year Lectureship Appointments post-graduation. Although his concentration was in poetry, he pursued a cross-genre project and, thus, his thesis committee included faculty in both poetry and fiction. In addition to Cornell, Williams has studied at Illinois Wesleyan University and the University of Oxford. He is currently a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, and his work appears or is forthcoming in The Offing, Narrative Magazine, Spoon River Poetry Review, Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, and elsewhere. 

Julie Iromuanya is the author of  Mr. and Mrs. Doctor  (Coffee House Press), a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the Etisalat Prize for Literature (now 9 Mobile Prize for Literature), and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Debut Fiction. Her scholarly-critical work most recently appears in  Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism,   Callaloo: A Journal of African American Arts and Letters,  and  Afropolitan Literature as World Literature ( Bloomsbury Publishing) .  She is a 2020 George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation fellow, and she was the inaugural Herbert W. Martin Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Dayton. Iromuanya earned her B.A. at the University of Central Florida and her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Up until 2019, she taught in the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Arizona. She is currently an assistant professor in the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago. 

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