Buffalo is now a city as well known for innovation in the arts, as it once was for its industrial heritage. The English Department at the University at Buffalo hopes to showcase that history with an exciting new graduate degree in creative writing: a MA in Innovative Writing. The new program is the brainchild of UB English Department writers—Myung Mi Kim, Judith Goldman, Nnedi Okorafor, Dimitri Anastasopoulos, and Christina Milletti—who are hoping to round out their internationally well-regarded department with a new workshop-based curriculum, and to make it a launch pad for young writers.
The goal of the new MA in Innovative Writing program is to create a collaborative environment for students, in which new forms of writing can flourish alongside familiar genres. Poetry. Fiction. Hybrid forms. Digital and electronic media. However innovation takes place.
Students in the program can expect to be immersed in a mentorship community activated by conversations about writing—above all, to be invited to view their work as an investigative, exploratory process: a mode of inquiry that, at its best, can articulate diverse experiences of 21st century culture, and unearth, perhaps even overturn, their most foundational thoughts, freeing them for profound imaginative work.
UB’s English Department is a haven for writing events of all kinds due to its two distinctive reading series—the Poetics Plus and Exhibit X Fiction Series—which regularly bring internationally renowned and award-winning writers to Buffalo. In Spring 2014, alone, their guests already include (among several others) Rodrigo Toscano (Feb 11), Jerome Rothenberg (April 17), Alice Notley (April 24), Amanda Michalopoulou (April 10) and Victor LaValle (March 6)
Graduate students who enroll in the writing program will earn an MA in English with a Certificate in Innovative Writing—a unique degree they can then position in a number of effective ways. It’s a particularly ideal degree for students who are interested in enhancing their writing portfolios and/or their critical and literary backgrounds before applying to writing-related jobs, or MFA and PhD programs.
The deadline for applications is Feb 1, though this year, the department intends to accept applications on a rolling admissions basis since it’s their first year in business.
For more details, contact Dimitri Anastasopoulos, Director of Creative Writing at danastas@buffalo.edu.
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