Northeast Ohio
Master of Fine Arts

IN CREATIVE WRITING

NEXT EVENT: READING + Q&A

Remote Reading & Q&A with Author & Journalist
Omar El Akkad

Friday September 17th, 2021
7:00 PM, over Zoom
Free & open to the public!
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FEATURED STUDENTS

2021 Graduates

Give it up for the class of 2021! Although we can’t celebrate our graduates’ many accomplishments in person, we want to give them each the spotlight they deserve.

Celebrate our graduates

Current Students

Questions about courses, registration, requirements, internships, or your thesis? Find out everything you need to know on our Current Students page.

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Prospective Students

Are you ready to join Ohio’s most beloved MFA writing consortium? Well you’re in luck—we’d love to have you. It’s time to broaden your horizons.

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FALL 2021

Upcoming Courses

CREATIVE NONFICTION

The Lyric Essay

Few structures in nonfiction are quite as intricate and exacting as the lyric essay. One must combine the poet’s precision with the memoirist’s dedication to truth and exploration, which is no easy task. Throughout the semester, we will explore the components that make a lyric essay tick. How do the masters of the form build narratives that feel so tightly packaged? How do they use white space and juxtaposition to create meaning? And how do we, as writers, find the structures that work best for our material? Students in the course will examine a wide range of texts from authors like Maggie Nelson, Anne Boyer and Claudia Rankine. They will also produce a body of critical and creative work with the ultimate goal of honing their skills as essayists.

LITERATURE

Working Class Literature

It almost seems as though the election of Donald J. Trump marked America’s rediscovery of the working class, a subject position so often represented in the popular imagination as synonymous with the white working class male, the displaced industrial worker, the “forgotten man” of populist political rhetoric. But, of course, writers, poets, playwrights, essayists, and journalists have been capturing working-class life—in all of its complexity—for generations, and this course is an exploration of this literature in all of its breadth. We’ll map working class culture across genres, time periods, and subject positions from stories of rural agrarian life, to chronicles of the service and tourist industries, and of course, tales of deindustrialization as well. Our approach will be intersectional, as we explore the ways in which race, gender, sexuality, ability, and other contingencies shape the experiences of the working class.

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