Pacific University Master of Fine Arts in Writing

04/09/2026

We're happy to announce our next Body Chronicles weekend workshop, “The Craft of Caregiving,” Friday-Sunday, May 1-3, featuring five truly remarkable facilitators, including three alumni and two special guests.

Since the early days of The Body Chronicles, we’ve often been talking and teaching and writing around the dramatic and necessary lives and work of caregivers. In this three-day online workshop, we bring a focus to the art and craft, labor and sacrifice, and the great gift of care. The weekend will feature facilitation from MFA alumni poets Georgina Marie Guardado, Melissa McKinstry, and NL Shompole, plus guest teachers Laura Mauldin (In Sickness and In Health) and Brian Trapp (Range of Motion). You can expect talks and workshops, time to write, and readings and conversations that bring lessons of craft to the topic of caregiving and the receiving of care.

Writers across all genres, of all identities, are welcome to register.
You can register here: https://tinyurl.com/mvuvbamv
Details: Friday, May 1 - Sunday, May 3, 2026 (on Zoom)
9am-5pm Pacific Time (with midday breaks)
Workshop Cost:
General Registration: $350 for the three-day course
Pacific University Community*: $175 for the three-day course

*MFA students and alumni and any other participants from within the University. To get the discount, please select “Pacific University Community” in the category section of the registration form and the discount will be applied to check out.

This programming has been made possible, in part, through contributions to the Amy Paterson ’18 Fund for Medical Narratives.

01/30/2026

Some photos from our recent January residency in Seaside, Oregon!

04/29/2025

Portland area friends! Pacific MFA Alum Trinity Toft (Fiction, 2025) will be reading at Bishop & Wilde at Tin House on Saturday, May 24 with Leni Zumas and Jaydra Johnson.

04/29/2025

Last night Pacific MFA faculty Kimberly King Parsons won The Oregon Book Award in the fiction category for her novel WERE THE UNIVERSE. Faculty W***y Vlautin was also nominated for his novel THE HORSE. Many congratulations to all!

04/29/2025

It was an exciting night at the Oregon Book Awards last night, where the Pacific MFA alumni and faculty and were well-represented. Faculty Omar El Akkad hosted the event. Pacific MFA alum Jaclyn Moyer won in the nonfiction category with her memoir ON GOLD HILL. Congratulations!

04/11/2025

Pacific MFA graduate Diane Pendola (Poetry, 2025) will be presenting at the Sierra Poetry Festival, tomorrow, Saturday, April 12.

Sierra Poetry Festival is a project of Nevada County Arts Council. We will host our 9th Annual SIERRA POETRY FESTIVAL on April 12, 2025 at The Center for the Arts, in Grass Valley, CA, attended by some of our most exciting local, national and international poets and performers, and preceded by a mon

03/20/2025

Join us April 29, at 5pm Pacific, for the next edition of the Mapmakers Alumni Institute, organized and hosted by Njelle (Njara) Hamilton (MFA ‘24), and featuring Dawn Walton and Marcia Douglas.

Njelle will lead a conversation about what prose writers might learn and borrow from music and musicians. What is the secret of using the written word to capture the sonorous and embodied experience of listening to, composing, and performing music? Dawnie Walton and Marcia Douglas read from novels inspired by and infused with rock, blues, and reggae, and share their tips for crafting immersive and realistic music scenes and fictional musicians. You can register here: https://tinyurl.com/3z3v68hj

03/17/2025

Our next STRATA series is coming up! Over the weekend of April 11-13, 2025, we welcome writers across genres to join MFA faculty Cecily Wong and Tyree Daye for a three-day online writing course: “Drawing from Real Life on the Margins.” In poetry and prose, writers will explore the images and phrases they’ve been drawn to over a life, exploring lives we all live at the margins of dominant culture and power, considering how those details of a life might be connected to how individuals are thought to be in the world. Through craft talks, generative writing sessions, and workshops, participants will also be encouraged to explore ways to translate the slippery, nuanced, often overlooked details of real life to the page, and also how to uncouple real life truths from challenging real-life circumstances—in other words, how to write truthfully about ourselves and the people in our lives without hewing to the literal. Writers will be asked to mine images from the past to break them open and look inside of them, to find a language to speak about them that is fresh and full of discovery, that will allow them to locate the emotional truth of a literal experience and develop craft techniques to give our truths a new and more meaningful shape. You can register here: https://tinyurl.com/mr259a9s

For more information, write MFA director Scott Korb: [email protected]

01/03/2025

It's almost time for the MFA January residency in Seaside! We welcome you to attend our winter residency faculty reading series, each evening January 10-17, 2025, from 7:30-9:00pm.

The Pacific University MFA in Writing program welcomes you to attend our winter residency faculty reading series, each evening January 10-17, 2025, from 7:30-9:00pm .

12/19/2024

We're happy to share that Mothers in Arms, a nonfiction book by Pacific MFA graduate Susan Berardi (Nonfiction/Fiction, 2020), was selected as the winner of Book Pipeline's 2024 Unpublished Book Contest for nonfiction. The book is based on Berardi's 4,000-word feature article, “Police killed their sons…,” published in The Guardian in Aug. 2021 and nominated for the 2022 International Online Journalism Awards.

Comics & Graphic Novels | General Fiction | Literary | Middle Grade | Mystery/Thriller Nonfiction | Picture Books | Romance | Sci-fi & Fantasy | YA COMIC BOOKS & GRAPHIC NOVELS Winner Memory Maker by Anna Abrashina Anna has gotten to know the “screenplays are like blueprints” comparison quite li...

10/31/2024

Friends in the Portland area, please find us at the Portland Book Festival this weekend at Booth #64: Friday, 11/1, from 5:30-7:30 pm, and Saturday, 11/2, 9 am-6 pm. MFA faculty members W***y Vlautin, Cecily Wong, and recent guest Kimberly King Parsons, are among the featured writers at the festival. Poet and MFA graduate Nancy Miller Gomez also has two events: A reception and reading on Friday at 6:30 pm with YesYes Books and a pop-up reading on Saturday at the Portland Art Museum.
https://pdxbookfest.org/event/pop-up-nancy-miller-gomez/