Rutgers Camden MFA in Creative Writing

🗂️ 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.

Join the Writers House for a weekend retreat in Cape May, NJ where you can relax, participate in generative workshops, and explore your ideas in an unhurried, supportive setting. The retreat offers guidance and insight from featured guests Lauren Grodstein, Tom McAllister, Ellen Malenas Ledoux, and Laurie Frankel. Your registration price includes your room at the Inn of Cape May, instructional workshops, Saturday dinner, and breakfast and lunch Sunday. Spaces are filling up fast, and we’d love to see you there!

💼 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.
July 8, 6-7pm. $20 general / $5 for RUC students & Camden residents.

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!