university of lincoln english and creative writing

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English and Creative Writing BA (Hons) University of Lincoln

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Bachelor of Arts (with Honours) - BA (Hons)

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University of lincoln: creative writing, doctor of philosophy - phd, full-time, 2 years.

The School of English and Journalism offers advanced research opportunities within the subject of Creative Writing.

As an MPhil/PhD student you will be supervised by published writers and be given the opportunity to develop skills so that you may produce work of a publishable standard and engage in creative practice at doctoral level.

Regular research seminars and postgraduate study groups aim to provide a stimulating environment in which to discuss and debate work being undertaken in the School and Creative Writing has strong links to English and Journalism as well as with the Schools of Film and Media, History and Heritage and Fine and Performing Arts.

The Lincoln School of Creative Arts offers advanced research opportunities within the subject of creative writing. This research programme aims to provide training for a career in writing, from fiction to screen and radio adaptation.

MPhil/PhD students have the opportunity to be supervised by published writers and to undertake research in areas including poetry, experimental fiction, the short story, the historical novel, television drama, film scriptwriting, and realism.

Regular research seminars and postgraduate study groups are designed to provide a stimulating environment in which to discuss and debate work. Creative Writing has strong links within the Creative Arts and with the Schools of Film, Media, and Journalism, and Humanities and Heritage.

Part-Time, 3 years

Full-time, 1 years starts sep 2024.

Our MA in Creative Writing is an innovative and exciting course that provides opportunities to work closely with practising creative writers and professionals from the publishing and creative industries. It is designed to encourage you to improve your craft as a writer, develop your philosophy of composition, and explore contemporary forms of literature and the creative industries. The course has a strong focus on employability and aims to prepare you for a professional writing or publishing career. There is an opportunity to gain hands-on experience working on The Lincoln Review, an international literary journal edited exclusively by postgraduate students.    You will have the opportunity to learn from an enthusiastic team of professional writers whose work has been widely published, broadcast, and staged. Our academic team includes poet, essayist, and literary translator Daniele Pantano; science fiction writer Chris Dows; novelists Sarah Stovell, Guy Mankowski, and Amy Lilwall; playwright and short story writer Sue Healy; YA author Robert Weston; and writer and podcaster Sherezade García Rangel.   Students may benefit from the experience of a range of writers, editors, dramaturges, producers, and directors who visit the University of Lincoln to deliver inspirational talks or masterclasses. Previous speakers include Patience Agbabi, Ann Cleeves, Andrew Graham-Dixon, Visiting Professor Chris Packham CBE, and the former Poet Laureate Dame Carol Ann Duffy, who became a Visiting Artist at the University in 2015. Robert Shearman is a Visiting Senior Fellow and regularly visits Lincoln to engage with students. 

Part-Time, 2 years starts Sep 2024

Master of philosophy - mphil, full-time, 1.5 years, part-time, 2 years.

The University of Lincoln is rated among the top 20 universities in the UK for student satisfaction in the Guardian University Guide 2022 and we are ranked in the top 30 overall in the WhatUni Student Choice Awards 2022. We are the highest placed multi-faculty modern university in The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2022, which describes Lincoln as going “from strength to strength”.

We are featured among the world's top young universities in Times Higher Education’s (THE) Young University Rankings 2022, which recognises the world's finest universities under 50 years old.

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• English Research

• College of Arts Social Sciences and Humanities
• Lincoln School of Humanities and Heritage

English and Creative Writing Research

English staff at Lincoln are currently undertaking a diverse range of research that spans the medieval to the contemporary. There are particular strengths in nineteenth century studies (including ageing), twenty-first century literature, gothic literature, women’s writing, gender studies and American literature. Creative Writing staff are highly productive as authors of forms including fiction, poetry, graphic novel, and plays, and in genres including dystopian literature, fantasy, and crime fiction.

English also hosts two vibrant and productive research groups -  21st Century Research Group and The Nineteenth-Century Research Group

Find out more about each academic's research specialisms below:

Professor lucie armitt.

Professor Lucie Armitt is Chair of Contemporary English Literature at the University of Lincoln. She is a specialist in the Gothic, contemporary women's writing, and all areas of the literary fantastic, including magic realism and the ghost story. She is an Advisory Board member of the award-winning journal  Contemporary Women's Writing  (OUP) and of Extrapolation (Liverpool University Press). She was a founding Executive Board member and Treasurer of the global research network the  Contemporary Women's Writing Association . Her most recent book is  Fantasy  (Routledge 2020). She is currently completing a co-authored book (with Scott Brewster) titled  Climates of Fear: Gothic Travel through Haunted Landscapes (2022). She supervises PhD students working in all these areas.

Dr Scott Brewster

Dr Scott Brewster’s research interests lie in Gothic literature, the ghost story, Irish Studies and psychoanalysis. He is co-author (with Lucie Armitt) of Climates of Fear: Gothic Travel through Haunted Landscapes (2022), and is currently writing (with Jeffrey A. Weinstock) An Introduction to the American Ghost Story (Routledge 2022). He is co-editor (with Luke Thurston) of The Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story  (2017). Previous publications include Lyric  (Routledge, 2009),  Irish Literature Since 1990: Diverse Voices  (MUP, 2009),  Inhuman Reflections: Thinking the Limits of the Human  (MUP, 2000) and  Ireland in Proximity: History, Gender, Space (Routledge, 1999). He is an Editorial Board member of Gothic Nature , and is a member of the British Association for Irish Studies (BAIS) Advisory Council.

Dr Owen Clayton

Dr Owen Clayton is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Lincoln. His specialism is late nineteenth and early-twentieth century transatlantic literature, with particular research interests in the representation of vagrancy and homelessness, and the relationship between literature and photography. Owen is currently working on his second monograph, provisionally entitled Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos: the Literature and Culture of American Transiency . His first monograph,  Literature and Photography in Transition, 1850-1915 , came out with Palgrave MacMillan in 2015.

Dr Alice Crossley

Dr Alice Crossley's research interests lie in nineteenth century literature, with an emphasis on three main areas: ageing, gender (especially masculinity), and material culture (particularly printed ephemera). Her recent publications include the monograph  Male Adolescence in Mid-Victorian Fiction   (Routledge 2018), special issues on  ‘Age and Gender’  for  Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies  (2017) and – co-edited with Dr Amy Culley - on  ‘Narratives of Aging in the Nineteenth Century’  for  Age, Culture, Humanities  (2021), as well as numerous articles and book chapters on childhood, adolescence, old age, sexuality, and gender in the nineteenth century. She’s currently working on a new book,  Old Fashioning: Ageing Masculinity in Western Fiction, 1830-1930.  Alice also writes on Victorian valentines. She’s Secretary of the British Association for Victorian Studies ( BAVS ).

Dr Amy Culley

Dr Amy Culley's research interests lie in the literature and culture of the eighteenth century and Romantic period, particularly life writing, ageing studies, and women’s literary history. She is currently working on her second book (funded by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship 2020), ‘On Growing Old: Women’s Late Life Writing 1800-1850’ which recovers narratives of ageing in journals, correspondence, memoirs, and biographies by early nineteenth-century women in both manuscript and print. She is the author of British Women’s Life Writing, 1760-1840: Friendship, Community, and Collaboration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), co-editor (with Daniel Cook) of Women's Life Writing 1700-1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and co-editor (with Anna Fitzer) of Editing Women's Writing, 1670-1840 (Routledge, 2017).   

Dr Christopher Dows

Dr christopher dows .

Dr Christopher Dows's professional portfolio includes fifteen years as a comic book writer, leading to him being published worldwide across a wide range of genres and focusing his research on the writing of science fiction and fantasy. A contributor to  The Official Star Trek Magazine  for over fifteen years, he has also authored a YA fantasy novel,  Panthea , and the second world war drama  Lokomotive . Recently, Chris has been working for Games Workshop's 'Black Library Press'; in addition to over a dozen short stories and the novel  Kharn: The Red Path , he now specialises in audio dramas, including the  Elysia  trilogy and the critically-acclaimed  Titans' Bane.  2021 will see the publication of his first short story collection.

Dr Laura Gill

Dr Laura Gill's research interests lie in the literature and visual culture of the long nineteenth century, from Romanticism to the Victorian period. Her current projects focus on influence and interdisciplinarity in the long nineteenth century: she is working on a book on the influence of John Milton on Victorian literature and visual culture. She is also developing work on gender, passivity and resistance in literature, painting and photography of the long nineteenth century. 

Dr Ruth Hawthorn

Dr Ruth Hawthorn’s research lies in modern and contemporary American Literature; she has particular interests in detective fiction, post-WWII poetry (especially the Elegy), counter-cultures, and the literature of Los Angeles. She is currently completing a study of American detective fiction for the BAAS Paperbacks series with Edinburgh University Press, co-editing a collection on animals in detective fiction for Palgrave’s Animals and Literature series (with John Miller, University of Sheffield) and has published an article in the  Journal of American Studies:  ‘Delinquent Dogs and the Molise Malaise: Negotiating Suburbia in John Fante’s “My Dog Stupid”’. She is also a regular contributor to PN Review .

Dr Sue Healy

Dr Sue Healy holds a PhD from the University of Lincoln in modern theatre history (specialism: the Royal Court Theatre). She serves as Literary Manager at the Finborough Theatre, London, and is an award-winning writer; and a playwright whose work has been produced, broadcast, and staged.

Dr Amy Lilwall

Dr Amy Lilwall, lecturer in Creative Writing, is interested in dystopian fiction and is the author of  The Biggerers , a domestic dystopia published by Point Blank in 2018. Amy has written for  Lithub ,  The Literary Platform , the NAWE magazine,  Short Fiction in Theory & Practice  and  New Writing . Currently, Amy is a lead contributor to  On The Hill , an award-winning podcast about the history of Falmouth cemetery. 

Dr Guy Mankowski

Dr Guy Mankowski is the author of critically acclaimed novels (on subjects such as ballet and crime) and the forthcoming non-fiction collection  Albion's Secret History: Snapshots of England's Pop Rebels and Outsiders  which considers English musicians, films, artists, and television .  He has been invited to offer expert commentary on BBC Radio, for television, in university panel discussions, and at literary arts festivals on the research subjects of his novels. He has research interests in self-design (particularly in post-punk, Riot Grrrl and Kinderwhore), JG Ballard and psychoanalysis and he welcomes postgraduate students in those areas. 

Dr Christopher Marlow

Dr Christopher Marlow’s research deals primarily with Shakespeare and early modern literature. He also works on critical theory, science fiction, and contemporary culture. He is the author of Shakespeare and Cultural Materialist Theory (The Arden Shakespeare, 2017) and  Performing Masculinity in English University Drama 1598-1636 (Ashgate, 2013). He has published widely in journals including Shakespeare Studies , Critical Survey , Restoration , and The Journal of Popular Culture .

Daniele Pantano

Daniele Pantano is a poet, essayist, and literary translator. He is the author or translator of more than twenty books, including  Dogs in Untended Fields: Selected  Poems (Èditions d’en Bas, 2020),  Kindertotenlieder: Collected Early Essays & Letters & Confessions  (Hesterglock Press, 2019),  Robert Walser: Comedies  (Seagull Books, 2018),  ORAKL  (Black Lawrence Press, 2017), and  Robert Walser’s Fairy Tales: Dramolettes  (New Directions, 2015). His individual poems and essays appear widely and have been translated into a dozen languages. Pantano is interested in receiving proposals for postgraduate projects on any themes related to contemporary poetry and poetics, literary translation (practice and theory), and translingualism.  

Catherine Redpath

Catherine’s current areas of interest are principally in the field of literary trauma studies. She is also interested in post-apocalyptic literature, film and television, particularly the ways in which this genre reacts and responds to contemporary anxieties. As Director of Teaching and Learning for the School of English and Journalism, she is also very interested in pedagogies of teaching and learning and researches widely in this area. 

Dr Kristian Shaw

Dr Kristian Shaw specialises in contemporary British and American literature. His first monograph,  Cosmopolitanism in Twenty-First Century Fiction  (Palgrave, 2017) was funded by the AHRC. Shaw's second monograph is entitled  BrexLit  (Bloomsbury 2021) - a term he coined in 2016 to describe cultural responses to Brexit. He is currently editing three collections:  Kazuo Ishiguro  (MUP 2021),  Hari Kunzru  (MUP 2021), and  Contextualising the Contemporary  (Bloomsbury 2021). He serves as a reader for the  C21 Literature  journal and sits on the executive committee of BACLS (British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies). 

Dr Peter Sloane

Dr peter sloane .

Dr Peter Sloane’s research is predominantly in postmodernist fictions and beyond. His first monograph,  David Foster Wallace and the Body  (Routledge 2019), explores Wallace's career-long fascination with embodiment. His second monograph,  Kazuo Ishiguro's Gestural Poetics  (Bloomsbury 2021) places Ishiguro's writing in a continuum of experimental fictions, uncovering the radical nature of his seemingly conventional prose. Peter’s current book project is titled  Altruism and the Arts , exploring instances of kindness in literature, film, and theatre.

Dr Sarah Stovell

Dr Sarah Stovell writes contemporary women's fiction. Her most recent novel,  Other Parents , is an examination of small-town British life, dealing with issues of class divisions, sexuality and parenthood. She has been compared to Liane Moriarty and Celeste Ng for pushing the boundaries of commercial women's fiction with narratives that veer away from the accepted tropes of the genre and are 'genuinely intelligent and full dark wit.' Sarah is published by HarperCollins.

Dr Rebecca Styler

Dr Rebecca Styler’s researches women’s writing and religion in the long nineteenth century. This includes religious feminism, women’s spiritual auto/biography, and the spiritual symbolism of childhood. Since her first monograph, Literary Theology by Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century , she has published on writers including Elizabeth Gaskell, Anna Jameson, Charlotte Brontë, and Josephine Butler. She recently edited volume 1: Traditions in Routledge’s 4-volume series Nineteenth-Century Religion, Literature and Society . She is currently writing a book The Maternal Divine Image in Victorian Literature , and is Editor of the Gaskell Journal.

Dr Renée Ward

Dr renée ward.

Dr Renée Ward's main research interests are medieval literature, and medievalism. Her medieval work focuses primarily on romance and outlaw narratives, with particular attention to monsters, representations of otherness, and Robin Hood. Her post-medieval work explores medievalism in children’s and young adult literature from the nineteenth century to the present. She has published on Middle English romances, and on the medievalism of Victorian children’s writer E. L. Hervey, and she co-edits the journal  The Year's Work in Medievalism . Her current projects include a monograph study on werewolves in medieval French, Latin, and Middle English romance; a co-edited volume on medieval and post-medieval Arthuriana; and studies of E. L. Hervey’s Arthurian text,  The Feasts of Camelot  (1863). She welcomes applications from potential postgraduate students wishing to pursue research in medieval literature (particularly late medieval) and modern medievalism.

Dr Robert Paul Weston

Dr robert paul weston .

Dr Robert Paul Weston is the author of several internationally award-winning novels for children and young adults, including  Dust City ,  Blues for Zoey ,  Zorgamazoo , and the multimedia novel  The Creature Department , written in collaboration with the special effects firm, Framestore ( Guardians of the Galaxy ,  Blade Runner 2049 ). His books have won the California Young Reader Medal, the Children’s Choice Award, German Audio Book of the Year and others, and been translated into multiple languages, including French, German, Portuguese, Chinese and Turkish. His works have also been optioned for film adaptation by 20th Century Fox and Vanguard Animation. His short fiction has appeared in literary journals on both sides of the Atlantic, including  The New Orleans Review ,  Postscripts ,  On Spec ,  Eastlit , and been nominated for the Journey Prize and the Fountain Award for Speculative Literature.

Professor Jason Whittaker

Dr jason whittaker .

Professor Jason Whittaker's main research interests are the reception of William Blake in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as developments in digital publishing and the impact of technology on journalism. He has published widely on these subjects, as well as on magazine journalism more generally.

Research Projects 

Here are just a few examples of research our academic staff are currently involved in:

A [Socially Isolated] Room of One’s Own: Women Writing Lockdown

Principal Investigator: Professor Lucie Armitt

Co-Investigators: Professor Krista Cowman (University of Leicester)

                          Professor Sarah Pedersen (Robert Gordon University)

Project Partner:   Liv Tor, artist practitioner

A [Socially Isolated] Room of One’s Own: Women Writing Lockdown is an AHRC-funded multi-disciplinary project, running for 18 months from 1 January 2022- 30 th  June 2023. It seeks to investigate women’s articulation of their experience of the first phase of lockdown expressed through four key varieties of auto/biographical writings:  Published work  by professional women writers, including fiction, poetry and writing for children; newly deposited  archival testimonies  in collections such as Mass Observation and the British Library Sound Archive;  Online narratives  by bloggers and influencers;  Creative work  produced as part of our project partner’s live workshops (in-person and via Zoom).

The project’s major collective output will be an online, free-to-access exhibition,  Rooms of Our Own: The Lockdown House.  It will be formulated as a ‘House and Garden’ virtual space that will offer visitors an accessible visual presentation of our main findings. Each room will represent a key aspect of women’s experience of lockdown (the home schoolroom; the home office, the ‘new domesticity’ space of the kitchen; the lockdown garden). The exhibition will be hosted via our purpose-designed project website. In addition to visual representation, the ‘rooms’ will contain summaries of research findings with links to pages showcasing the fuller work where possible. They will also house the co-production outputs produced as part of the project workshops undertaken by the project partner.

On Growing Old: Women’s Late Life Writing 1800-1850  

Principal Investigator: Dr Amy Culley

Dr Amy Culley received a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2020) and BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant (2015-) in support of her research project, ‘On Growing Old: Women’s Late Life Writing 1800-1850’. The research recovers narratives of ageing in journals, correspondence, memoirs, and biographies by early nineteenth-century women in both manuscript and print. These sources provide rare insights into women’s ageing in a period in which gender and old age is currently under-researched and that has important legacies for contemporary conceptions of late life. As part of this research, Culley co-convened two international conferences: a British Academy Conference, ‘Narratives of Old Age and Gender’ (London, 2019) and ‘Narratives of Ageing in the Nineteenth Century’ (Lincoln, 2019), both of which have resulted in journal special issues (for  Age, Culture, Humanities  (2021) and  Journal of the British Academy  (2023)). The research has generated impact through participation in the AHRC’s Being Human: A Festival of the Humanities (2016) and the Lincoln Book Festival (2018), a public workshop funded by the British Academy drawing on archival research (2018), and collaborations with Age UK and National Pensioners Convention.

Representing Homelessness

Principal Investigator: Dr Owen Clayton

Dr Owen Clayton received a British Academy Conference Grant to hold a conference on  Representing Homelessness , which took place at the University of Lincoln in the summer of 2019. The event was distinctive in featuring both scholars and people with experience of homelessness as providing different types of expertise. The conference emphasised the importance of bringing in the voices of homeless people into academic research, including as co-producers of that research. Attendee feedback indicates that the event provided an important platform for speakers with experience of homelessness, and also that it changed the minds of several people with responsibility for homelessness services about needing to take the agency of their clients more into account. The event has also been cited in national media coverage regarding the ongoing campaign to repeal the 1824 Vagrancy Act. The conference led to the publication in 2020 of an edited collection, also called  Representing Homelessness , published by Oxford University Press.

Creative Writing Program Marks Three Decades of Growth, Diversity

By Luisa A. Igloria

2024: a milestone year which marks the 30 th  anniversary of Old Dominion University’s MFA Creative Writing Program. Its origins can be said to go back to April 1978, when the English Department’s (now Professor Emeritus, retired) Phil Raisor organized the first “Poetry Jam,” in collaboration with Pulitzer prize-winning poet W.D. Snodgrass (then a visiting poet at ODU). Raisor describes this period as “ a heady time .” Not many realize that from 1978 to 1994, ODU was also the home of AWP (the Association of Writers and Writing Programs) until it moved to George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

The two-day celebration that was “Poetry Jam” has evolved into the annual ODU Literary Festival, a week-long affair at the beginning of October bringing writers of local, national, and international reputation to campus. The ODU Literary Festival is among the longest continuously running literary festivals nationwide. It has featured Rita Dove, Maxine Hong Kingston, Susan Sontag, Edward Albee, John McPhee, Tim O’Brien, Joy Harjo, Dorothy Allison, Billy Collins, Naomi Shihab Nye, Sabina Murray, Jane Hirshfield, Brian Turner, S.A. Cosby, Nicole Sealey, Franny Choi, Ross Gay, Adrian Matejka, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Ilya Kaminsky, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Jose Olivarez, and Ocean Vuong, among a roster of other luminaries. MFA alumni who have gone on to publish books have also regularly been invited to read.

From an initial cohort of 12 students and three creative writing professors, ODU’s MFA Creative Writing Program has grown to anywhere between 25 to 33 talented students per year. Currently they work with a five-member core faculty (Kent Wascom, John McManus, and Jane Alberdeston in fiction; and Luisa A. Igloria and Marianne L. Chan in poetry). Award-winning writers who made up part of original teaching faculty along with Raisor (but are now also either retired or relocated) are legends in their own right—Toi Derricotte, Tony Ardizzone, Janet Peery, Scott Cairns, Sheri Reynolds, Tim Seibles, and Michael Pearson. Other faculty that ODU’s MFA Creative Writing Program was privileged to briefly have in its ranks include Molly McCully Brown and Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley.

"What we’ve also found to be consistently true is how collegial this program is — with a lively and supportive cohort, and friendships that last beyond time spent here." — Luisa A. Igloria, Louis I. Jaffe Endowed Professor & University Professor of English and Creative Writing at Old Dominion University

Our student body is diverse — from all over the country as well as from closer by. Over the last ten years, we’ve also seen an increase in the number of international students who are drawn to what our program has to offer: an exciting three-year curriculum of workshops, literature, literary publishing, and critical studies; as well as opportunities to teach in the classroom, tutor in the University’s Writing Center, coordinate the student reading series and the Writers in Community outreach program, and produce the student-led literary journal  Barely South Review . The third year gives our students more time to immerse themselves in the completion of a book-ready creative thesis. And our students’ successes have been nothing but amazing. They’ve published with some of the best (many while still in the program), won important prizes, moved into tenured academic positions, and been published in global languages. What we’ve also found to be consistently true is how collegial this program is — with a lively and supportive cohort, and friendships that last beyond time spent here.

Our themed studio workshops are now offered as hybrid/cross genre experiences. My colleagues teach workshops in horror, speculative and experimental fiction, poetry of place, poetry and the archive — these give our students so many more options for honing their skills. And we continue to explore ways to collaborate with other programs and units of the university. One of my cornerstone projects during my term as 20 th  Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth was the creation of a Virginia Poets Database, which is not only supported by the University through the Perry Library’s Digital Commons, but also by the MFA Program in the form of an assistantship for one of our students. With the awareness of ODU’s new integration with Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) and its impact on other programs, I was inspired to design and pilot a new 700-level seminar on “Writing the Body Fantastic: Exploring Metaphors of Human Corporeality.” In the fall of 2024, I look forward to a themed graduate workshop on “Writing (in) the Anthropocene,” where my students and I will explore the subject of climate precarity and how we can respond in our own work.

Even as the University and wider community go through shifts and change through time, the MFA program has grown with resilience and grace. Once, during the six years (2009-15) that I directed the MFA Program, a State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) university-wide review amended the guidelines for what kind of graduate student would be allowed to teach classes (only those who had  already  earned 18 or more graduate credits). Thus, two of our first-year MFA students at that time had to be given another assignment for their Teaching Assistantships. I thought of  AWP’s hallmarks of an effective MFA program , which lists the provision of editorial and publishing experience to its students through an affiliated magazine or press — and immediately sought department and upper administration support for creating a literary journal. This is what led to the creation of our biannual  Barely South Review  in 2009.

In 2010,  HuffPost  and  Poets & Writers  listed us among “ The Top 25 Underrated Creative Writing MFA Programs ” (better underrated than overrated, right?) — and while our MFA Creative Writing Program might be smaller than others, we do grow good writers here. When I joined the faculty in 1998, I was excited by the high caliber of both faculty and students. Twenty-five years later, I remain just as if not more excited, and look forward to all the that awaits us in our continued growth.

This essay was originally published in the Spring 2024 edition of Barely South Review , ODU’s student-led literary journal. The University’s growing MFA in Creative Writing program connects students with a seven-member creative writing faculty in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction.

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Undergraduate creative writing.

Within the English major, you can identify Creative Writing as a concentration , helping you to structure your college experience, define your professional goals, and focus on your writing skills. The Department of English offers a variety of internships, events, and other professional development that engage you with careers in writing, editing, author representation, journalism, arts management, public relations, archives, digital research, social networks, grant-writing, and many other communication/research/publishing-based opportunities.

The Creative Writing Program is for any student interested in...

• reading literature from around the world
• developing editorial skills
• discussing creativity, craft, and the particulars of genre and form
• examining the ethical/theoretical functions of literature in culture
• gaining greater expertise writing poetry and prose
• learning more about the business of publishing creative work

Courses and workshops

In creative writing workshops …

• you read the work of your peers and the work of the world’s most influential and inspiring authors
• you consider the impact and power of your stories on the world around you
• you study with critically acclaimed poets, novelists, and essayists
• you develop professional skills and personal connections

Creative Writing at UNL invites you to consider areas of specialization within the Department of English's programs (Literary and Culture Studies; Composition and Rhetoric; Film Studies; Place Studies) and/or areas of study within the Institute of Ethnic Studies, the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, Digital Humanities, the 19th Century Studies Program, and Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Our faculty not only write and publish creative work, but have also done scholarship/research in a number of areas: African poetics, disabilities studies, LGBTQ studies, film, music, digital humanities, Modernism, 18th-century British literature, and Latina/o and Latin American studies, among others.

Opportunities for Creative Writing Students

Prairie Schooner

Slam Poetry

Readings & Events

Internships

Writing Lincoln Initiative

Writing Center

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