Boston University Creative Writing

st/306049/) The magazine might have been impressed by our two most celebrated workshops—one, in poetry, was led by Robert Lowell, who had scattered around him Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and George Starbuck; the other, much more recent, was led by Leslie Epstein, whose students included Ha Jin, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Peter Ho Davies. Our classes still meet in the same small room, which allows through its dusty windows a glimpse of the Charles. These days, the poetry workshops are led by Robert Pinsky, Dan Chiasson, and Jorie Graham; those in fiction are led by Leslie Epstein, Ha Jin himself, and Sigrid Nunez. As a capstone to the MFA, we offer the Leslie Epstein Global Fellowships in Fiction and the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowships in Poetry. Students travel for up to three months, anywhere on Earth, so that they might live and write abroad without financial worry, as Hemingway did in Paris. Our graduates have been to Patagonia, Iran, Cuba, Greenland–you can follow their adventures at http://blogs.bu.edu/world/

We also manage to provide enough financial aid to cover everyone’s tuition and sometimes a bit more. For more on our financial aid, please visit www.bu.edu/creativewriting/apply/financialaid/

Our graduates have won every major award in their genres, including the National Poetry Series, the Whiting Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Pen/Faulkner and Pen/Hemingway Awards and the National Book Award. Every few months one of our graduates brings out a book of poetry or fiction with a major publisher; some, like Sue Miller and Arthur Golden, have spent a good deal of time on bestseller lists. Over the last decade we have placed more than a score of our graduates in tenure-track positions at important universities (in recent years, three of our graduates, Peter Ho Davies, Carl Phillips, and Erin Belieu, have led the creative writing programs at, respectively, Michigan, Washington University in St. Louis, and Florida State). And two of our students, showing entrepreneurial spirit, founded the Gotham Writers Workshop in New York and Grub Street in Boston. For more information about the program, our visiting writers, financial aid, or the Global Fellowships, please visit www.bu.edu/creativewriting.