The Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing is a graduate program in creative writing based at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, Maine. It enrolls approximately 100 students in four major genres: creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and popular fiction. Other areas of student interest, including literary translation, performance, writing for stage and screen, and cross-genre writing, are pursued as elective options. Students also choose one track that focuses an intensive research project in their third semester from among these categories: craft, creative collaboration, literary theory, publishing, social justice/community service, and teaching. Stonecoast is one of only two graduate creative writing programs in the country offering a degree in popular fiction. It is accredited through the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC).
Stonecoast MFA program is a low-residency program founded on the model pioneered by the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers and other low-residency programs of the 1970s and 1980s. Ten-day residencies for students, faculty, and visiting writers are held each January and June at the Stone House in Wolfe's Neck Wood State Park on the coast near Freeport, Maine. Each semester, a group of ten students also goes to Ireland for a smaller residency. Residencies involve an intensive schedule of workshops, classes, readings, and gatherings. The rest of a student's academic work during the two-year program is pursued on a one-on-one basis under the leadership of a faculty mentor.
Founded in 2002 by Barbara Lee Hope, Ken Rosen, and Dianne Benedict,[1] Stonecoast is one of the oldest and best-known of the second wave of low-residency graduate programs in creative writing, following on the earlier Warren Wilson, Goddard, and Bennington MFA programs. The program has received coverage in The Atlantic Monthly feature on MFA programs because of its Ireland residency and popular fiction component.[2] Other innovative curricular features include the range of possibilities for third-semester projects and student-initiated elective workshops on special topics in writing.
Stonecoast was included in the nation's "Top Ten Low-Residency Programs" in Poets and Writers Magazine 2011 survey. It ranked #8 in the nation.
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History:
The Stonecoast MFA faculty has won numerous awards including Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts grants, Astraea, Hugo, Lambda, and Hurston/Wright Legacy awards, a Lannan Foundation Grant, the American Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Whiting Writer’s Award. Visiting and past faculty have included publishers Jonathan Galassi, Kate Gale, and April Ossmann, novelists Jeffrey Ford, Ray Gonzalez, Tayari Jones, Kelly Link, and Leslea Newman, literary scholars Christopher Ricks and Marie Borroff, social critic James Howard Kunstler, storyteller Gioia Timpanelli, and poets Maxine Kumin, Marilyn Nelson, Ted Kooser, Joan Retallack, Alicia Ostriker, and Reginald Shepherd. Current faculty include Kazim Ali, Jeanne Marie Beaumont, Sarah Braunstein, Jaed Muncharoen Coffin, Ted Deppe, Boman Desai, David Anthony Durham, Annie Finch, Aaron Hamburger, Nancy Holder, Barbara Hurd, James Patrick Kelly, Michael Kimball, David Mura, Elizabeth Searle, Tim Seibles, Suzanne Strempek Shea, Patricia Smith, Quincy Troupe, Joy Harjo, Charles Martin and Scott Wolven.[5]
Stonecoast students and alumni include creative nonfiction writers Kim Dana Kupperman and Penelope Schwartz Robinson, winner of the first Stonecoast Book Prize judged by Katha Pollitt; novelists Michaela Roessner-Herman, Colin Sargent and Alexs Pate; poets Roger Bonair-Agard, Beth Gylys, Jeanette Lynes, Indigo Moor and National Book Award Finalist Patricia Smith; and popular fiction writers Patrick Bagley and Laura Williams.
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