Antioch University Los Angeles

Antioch University Los Angeles Antioch University Los Angeles is a place where individual spirit thrives, and collective community grows.

Antioch University’s Los Angeles is a diverse and dynamic campus of Antioch University, where students turn passion into practice through social justice-focused degrees in psychology, creative writing, sustainability, education, and more. With more than 8,000 distinguished alumni, AULA has been honored to serve the diverse communities of the greater Los Angeles area since 1972. Our core values of

social justice, service to community, and life long learning comprise the heart of our undergraduate degree completion programs in liberal studies, applied studies, applied arts and media, urban communities and justice, and technology and business leadership, and masters degree programs in nonprofit management, education and teacher credentialing, psychology, urban sustainability, and creative writing. Partnerships with community organizations provide our students with unique experiential learning opportunities. Our low-residency MFA in creative writing was named among the top five programs in the nation by The Atlantic, and our graduate clinical psychology specialization in lesbian gay bisexual transgender (LGBT) studies is the first of its kind. The MA in Urban Sustainability was developed in response to the growing awareness of the interconnections among environmental, economic and social issues. The unique, interdisciplinary program prepares well-trained, well-informed scholars, community leaders and activists to advocate for sustainable urban policy and social change in the face of the growing global environmental crisis.

For the fourth consecutive year, Antioch Los Angeles' MFA in Creative Writing program earned its spot on Moviemaker Maga...
08/25/2026

For the fourth consecutive year, Antioch Los Angeles' MFA in Creative Writing program earned its spot on Moviemaker Magazine’s annual 30 Best Film Schools in the US and Canada.

The recommendation mentions the program’s low-residency model, where students work off campus for five-month periods and gather for 10-day residencies in the Spring and Fall. The list also praises the Screenwriting concentration and its emphasis on one-on-one work with established screenwriters, TV writers and playwrights.

See the full list here: https://www.moviemaker.com/best-film-schools-us-and-canada-2026/

MFA in Creative Writing Affiliate Fiction Faculty Megan Kakimoto was awarded one of the 5 under 35 honorees by the Natio...
08/23/2026

MFA in Creative Writing Affiliate Fiction Faculty Megan Kakimoto was awarded one of the 5 under 35 honorees by the National Book Foundation for her story collection, Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare.

Every Drop Is a Man's Nightmare is a fierce love letter to Hawaii's myths and folklore, which centers on the inner lives of Native Hawaiian and Japanese women and girls.

Read more about the 2026 Honorees here:

The National Book Foundation announced its annual 5 Under 35 honorees, a selection of five fiction writers under the age of 35 whose debut work promises to leave a lasting impression on the literary landscape.

08/21/2026

✨ Join us for a virtual Info. Session about Antioch’s MFA Program, Wednesday, August 19th, at 5pm PT/8pm ET, with Alistair McCartney .mccartney. We are accepting applications for December!

📚 Learn about our hybrid residencies in Los Angeles and online, our social justice mission, scholarships, and our fiction, YA, creative nonfiction, poetry, screenwriting, playwriting, and translation genres.

🔗 Register at link in bio.

08/19/2026

The idea of “defamiliarization” says that we sometimes become so adjusted to our world, that we eventually grow numb to it. Art can help us revitalize our view of the world, sympathize with the human experience, and connect with community.

In this episode of The Seed Field podcast, we interview novelist and MFA in Creative Writing Acting Co-Chair Alistair McCartney, discussing the theory of defamiliarization and how this practice can be used in the world of literature and arts in order to create a more empathetic world.

“I would say what excites me about it is just when I first encountered the concept, the clarity of the concept. I was very immediately drawn into this notion that Shklovsky defines that the purpose of writing is to, as he says, to make the stone stony, is to impart the stone, the stoniness of the stone. And it felt like even though he clearly gets more complex about the concept of defamiliarization, or estrangement is a term people sometime- sometimes use in place of defamiliarization, I would say the simplicity and the clarity of the concept really struck me in terms of the function of writing.”

https://commonthread.antioch.edu/podcast/s3e6-stuck-on-autopilot-we-ignore-daily-injustices-can-art-shake-us-awake/

08/14/2026

✨ This week, our Faculty Friday Spotlight goes to one of our Fiction / Creative Nonfiction faculty members for the upcoming December Residency, Christine Hyung-Oak Lee!

📚 Christine Hyung-Oak Lee is the author of a memoir (Tell Me Everything You Don’t Remember), which was featured in Self magazine, Time, The New York Times, and NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. Their short fiction and essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Guernica, The Rumpus, The New York Times, BuzzFeed, and other publications.

🎓 Want to study with Christine Hyung-Oak Lee? We're accepting applications and granting scholarships!

📅 Priority Deadline: September 1. After that, rolling admissions.

🔗 Learn more at the link in our bio.

08/11/2026

📚 On this episode of Antioch MFA’s LitCit, host Jenna Ray chats with author, artist, teacher, and Antioch MFA alumna Lisa Freeman.

🎙️ They discuss her multifaceted career, her historical young adult novels Honey Girl and Riptide Summer, her newest story, “Snow People,” in the anthology The Gift Exchange, and writing about LGBTQIA+ experiences and women’s reproductive rights in a historical context.

This episode was produced by Hyelee Kim and mastered by Odin Rasco.

🔗 Listen at the link in bio.

MFA in Creative Writing alum Shonda Buchanan's book, The Lost Songs of Nina Simone, won the Black Caucus American Librar...
08/11/2026

MFA in Creative Writing alum Shonda Buchanan's book, The Lost Songs of Nina Simone, won the Black Caucus American Library Association's 2026 Best Poetry Award.

As the BCALA writes, "The Lost Songs Of Nina Simone is a powerful collection of poetry that captures Simone’s Civil Rights work, her personal and professional struggles and sacrifices, as well as the world’s adoration, condemnation, and worship. A touching love letter to all Black women in America on the life of one of the world’s preeminent Black artists and activists, Buchanan presents an ode to strength, an ode to song, and an ode to revolution."

Learn more about the book here:

The Lost Songs of Nina Simone Buy Now Nina Simone’s ghost lives in these poems by award-winning author, Shonda Buchanan. Like the icon’s life and art, The Lost Songs of […]

08/06/2026

✍️ Nurture your writing practice with our world-class faculty at Antioch University's Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing, the only MFA program with a core commitment to social justice.

📚 Our priority application deadline for the December Residency is September 1! After that, applications will be accepted on a rolling basis. Scholarships are available.

✨ Learn more at the link in our bio!

In April, Grant Chemidlin, an alum of the MFA in Creative Writing program, was interviewed about his poetry collection, ...
08/04/2026

In April, Grant Chemidlin, an alum of the MFA in Creative Writing program, was interviewed about his poetry collection, In the Middle of a Better World, in Frontier Poetry.

“The first poem I ever wrote opens with the line: 'Give up. You’ve lost, the darkness cries, flicking his tongue, and spewing his lies' and ends with an image of a door made of light. I wrote the poem at a time when I was feeling incredibly lost and depressed, but after writing it, felt myself become, at least for a moment, a little lighter. It was the beginning of my understanding of what a poem can do.”

Read the full interview here:

This month’s “In Retrospect” interview is with Grant Chemidlin, whose first collection was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. In this series, we ask renowned poets to look back over their poems and collections, mapping out…

07/31/2026

✨ This week, our Faculty Friday Spotlight goes to one of our visiting faculty members in Playwriting for the upcoming December Residency, Benjamin Benne!

🎭 Benjamin Benne (he/him) is Chance Theater’s 2025 Resident Playwright, a Playwrights’ Center ’23-26 Core Writer, and was named part of “LA Vanguardia: The Latino innovators, instigators and power players breaking through barriers” by the Los Angeles Times.

📚 His produced plays include Alma, In His Hands, Manning, and What / Washed Ashore / Astray. His work explores intimate, realistic relationships mixed with surreal, fantastic, and numinous elements that raise expansive questions about grief and loss, death and the afterlife, faith and the Divine.

✍️ Want to study with Benjamin Benne? We’re accepting applications! Learn more at the link in bio.

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5150 Goldleaf Circle
Ladera Heights, CA
90056

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