Rutgers Camden MFA in Creative Writing

The Writers House is a beautiful space full of nooks and crannies, desks, and comfy chairs... and fellow writers, of course! Bring a project you’re working on and write in community in our historic space this summer. Free, with registration encouraged.

🤣 WRITING HUMOR IN CREATIVE NONFICTION with : Invariably, writing creative nonfiction requires dredging up former lovers and pi***ng off your mother. But a bit of self-deprecating humor can do wonders for your sanity and your writing. In this generative workshop, we’ll discuss the role of humor in personal essays and memoir, and how to write serious work that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Participants will read work by Elif Batuman, Brooke Champagne, and Sloane Crosley, and engage with writing prompts designed to help infuse their own life stories with some comic relief.
June 10, 12-1pm. $20 general / $5 for RUC students & Camden residents.

When you give to the Rutgers–Camden Writers House, you’re supporting youth in Camden as they explore their creativity and begin to identify as writers in our Growing Great Writers after-school program. This year, we have a goal of reaching $720, which would cover one semester’s worth of snacks, supplies, and personalized literary magazines for students in Growing Great Writers. We’re so grateful for your support! Find the link to support us in our bio.

It’s 90° in Camden and we’ve got summer on the brain: announcing our lineup of Summer Cooper Street Workshops! We have lunchtime and evening options, all virtual, so you can tune in wherever the summer takes you. $20 general; $5 for Camden residents and RUC students. See you there!

🤣 WRITING HUMOR IN CREATIVE NONFICTION with Kat Echevarría Richter: Invariably, writing creative nonfiction requires dredging up former lovers and pi***ng off your mother. But a bit of self-deprecating humor can do wonders for your sanity and your writing. In this generative workshop, we’ll discuss the role of humor in personal essays and memoir, and how to write serious work that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Participants will read work by Elif Batuman, Brooke Champagne, and Sloane Crosley, and engage with writing prompts designed to help infuse their own life stories with some comic relief.

💼 WRITING WORK with Bronwen Everill: The daily grind of work emails, long commutes, and at-times frustrating colleagues might be exactly what you hope to escape when you open your computer to start writing. Yet readers love to read about work! Those same details that can make it such a slog are, strangely, the thing that can give your fiction texture, grounding, and stakes. In this workshop, we’ll talk about how to translate your own job into prose, how to write about jobs you’ve never had, and look at great examples of work on the page.

🗂️ MINING THE PERSONAL ARCHIVES with Leah Pellegrini: In order to write memoir and other forms of creative nonfiction, we’re often tasked with revisiting the past, so we can reflect our personal and collective histories in truthful ways on the page. What to do, then, when memory is spotty? This workshop will offer specific techniques for recovering the details of our prior lives—both the practical, tactical specificities, and the emotional, thematic ones—so we can express them in our writing, with attention to nuance, accuracy, and care. This class will also offer creative modes for contextualizing these memories through present-day perspectives.

We are thrilled for MFA Professor Patrick Rosal, who was named 2026 Poet-in-Residence at the Guggenheim!

Now in its fifth year, the residency continues the institution’s tradition of exploring abstraction in the visual arts and nurturing a vibrant history of poetry programming.

Rosal’s work investigates how poetry can reconnect us—to the earth, to one another, and to attentiveness in times that challenge both. Throughout his residency, programming under The Water Listeners will honor water as a living presence, sensory element, and sacred resource, a conduit for gathering, reflection, and exchange.

Congratulations, Pat!

Percival Everett at Rutgers Camden

Rutgers–Camden Welcomes Pulitzer Prize–Winning Author Percival Everett | Rutgers University-Camden Acclaimed novelist and scholar Percival Everett brought an evening of insight, humor, and storytelling to Rutgers University–Camden on March 26. Speaking as part of the Chancellor’s Centennial Lecture series, Everett engaged a packed audience of students, faculty, and community members by shar...

Join us on campus or livestream on 4/23 for a reading from authors published in this year’s Outside the Wire Literary Magazine! We’ll also have an open mic for veterans and family members. Refreshments provided!

With support from a .dice Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Advocacy (IDEA) Innovation Grant, the Writers House and welcome poet, writer, and artist David Mura for a reading and discussion moderated by Patrick Rosal.

David Mura’s most recent book is the acclaimed The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself: Racial Myths and Our American Narratives. His previous book was on creative writing and race, A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity & Narrative Craft in Writing. With essayist Carolyn Holbrook, Mura co-edited the 2021 anthology of Minnesota BIPOC writers, We Are Meant to Rise: Voices for Justice from Minneapolis to the World. He has just finished a book of essays on Asian American issues and his own personal journey, Exit: Miss Saigon, which will appear in Sept. 2026.

Mura is a poet, creative nonfiction writer, fiction writer, critic, playwright and performance artist. A Sansei or third generation Japanese American, Mura has written two memoirs: Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei , which won a 1991 Josephine Miles Book Award from the Oakland PEN and was listed in the New York Times Notable Books of Year, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality and Identity. His novel Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award, the John Gardner Fiction Prize and Virginia Commonwealth University Cabell First Novelist Award.

Mura has written four books of poetry, including Angels for the Burning and The Last Incantations. His second, The Colors of Desire, won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award from the Friends of the Chicago Public Library, and his first After We Lost Our Way was a National Poetry Contest winner.

Mura co-produced, wrote and narrated the Emmy winning documentary by Twin Cities Public Television, Armed With Language, about the Japanese American Military Intelligence Service linguists who served in WWII. In 2024, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship in General Nonfiction.

Registration is required at go.rutgers.edu/davidmura

Join us at Wildfether Distilling on April 15 from 7-9pm for a relaxed, creative evening celebrating the Rutgers University-Camden Writers House. Meet faculty and staff, connect with fellow supporters, and enjoy a playful writing activity led by acclaimed authors—no experience needed. Enjoy Wildfether’s creative cocktails, with snacks provided. Come mix, mingle, and discover the vibrant community behind the Writers House. Space is limited; tickets are just $25. Register now!

💥 Apr 11, 10am-1pm, in person: CRAFTING STRUCTURE IN FLASH FICTION with Avitus B. Carle. Telling a story in 1,000 words or less may seem like a daunting task. This workshop will explore the ways in which flash writers bend structure to grip their audiences. From monologues and breathless paragraphs to borrowed forms (receipts, lists, recipes), playing with structure can reveal the story on the page. In this supportive workshop, participants will consider example texts and write to generative prompts.