Creative Writing
Overview
Creative writing is a vital component of the University of Richmond experience. The creative writing program, administered under the auspices of the Department of English, offers both classroom and extracurricular writing opportunities for English majors and nonmajors alike.
Students interested in creative writing may enroll in several classes devoted to the study and practice of creative writing, publish their poems and stories in the student literary magazine and interact with some of the era’s great writers who give readings and talks on campus. By discovering and developing their literary skills and talents, Richmond students enhance their career possibilities and enrich their lives.
Curriculum
Seven creative writing courses are regularly offered. Introduction to Creative Writing is offered every semester and introduces the student to principles and techniques across a range of genres. Subsequent courses allow for more concentrated work in particular genres; these are Fiction Writing, Poetry Writing, Creative Nonfiction Writing, Writing for the Stage and Selected Topics in Writing. Literary Magazine Editing offers a different sort of opportunity. In this course students earn credit while participating in the actual editing and production of Verse, a preeminent international poetry magazine, which is published at the University of Richmond. These courses are open to English majors (who thereby can fulfill up to two electives in the major) and to students in other majors.
English majors as well as other students also can complete a minor in creative writing. The minor requires six courses, four to five in writing and one to two in literature.
In each course, principles are discussed, techniques are introduced and examples are examined. Students turn in original work in broadly conceived assignments and receive extensive feedback—from peers as well as from the instructor. Students work to control effects, to sharpen their use of language and to give their acts of self-expression interest for a general audience.
Faculty
The English Department faculty includes two full-time instructors of creative writing. Brian Henry (M.F.A., University of Massachusetts) is a poet and the author of four collections of poetry and of many poems published in anthologies and journals around the country and around the world. He also is an essayist and frequent reviewer and is the editor of the poetry magazine Verse. David Stevens (M.F.A., University of Pennsylvania, and Ph.D., Emory University) is a fiction writer and the author of a collection of short fiction, Mexico Is Missing, and Other Stories, and of many stories published in journals and magazines such as The Paris Review, Harper’s and The Mid-American Review. He also is a literary scholar and author of a book on the frontier in American fiction. Other members of the English faculty contribute courses in creative writing as well.
Every other year, a Distinguished Visiting Writer in Residence joins the Department for a semester to teach. These have included poet and essayist Diane Ackerman, poet Angela Ball and the novelist Josephine Humphreys.
Beyond the Coursework
Creative writing occurs whenever writers create, and much creative writing goes on at Richmond outside these particular courses. For example, students staff and direct The Messenger, the campus literature and art magazine that solicits and selects from open submissions. Endowed cash prizes are awarded for each year’s best short story and poem. The student poetry symposium conducts biweekly workshops and schedules public readings in a variety of venues across campus.
The English department sponsors exciting campus visits by prominent writers. Recent visitors have included E.L. Doctorow, Ernest Gaines, Gary Snyder, Galway Kinnell, Patricia Cornwell, Lee Smith, Lorrie Moore, Sharon Olds, Robert Pinsky and J.M. Coetzee.
Richmond students, gaining and learning from these various events and activities, have gone on to graduate programs in creative writing, to prominent authorship and to a wide range of artistic endeavors and publication outlets.
Dr. Louis Tremaine, Chair
Department of English
(804) 289-8319
ltremain@richmond.edu
Office of Admission
(800) 700-1662
(804)289-8640