Creative Writing Program

At the University of Wyoming, we consider prose a full-time commitment. In fact, we are one of the few universities you will find anywhere that devotes its fully funded MFA program entirely to prose. We teach a wide range of courses in fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid forms. We offer award-winning faculty who write novels and story collections, public dialogues and philosophical meditations. We prepare our graduates to release books with prominent commercial and small-press publishers, and to bring their prose passions to writing for scientific communities, for public radio, for political campaigns. We recognize that prose writers need, most of all, time to hone their purpose and cultivate their craft. Accordingly, we provide each student with free tuition, career-enhancing (but never schedule-filling) teaching opportunities, and a generous living stipend. Our flexible degree requirements allow students to tailor their pursuits to their personal interests and career goals, and encourage many students to pursue simultaneous joint degrees in a variety of fields: from American Indian Studies, to English Literature, to Gender and Women's studies, to Environmental and Natural Resources, to Geology.

Our incomparable location beside the Medicine Bow National Forest and the Snowy Mountains allows ample space for focused work, and endless potential to expand one's artistic range through exploration of the stunning wilderness, through structured engagements with nearby writing programs and residency programs, and through informal excursions to Denver. Our students take advantage of summer stipends and numerous travel scholarships to position themselves all around the world, on a wide array of research projects. Our ongoing collaborations with prominent literary agents, with Essay Press, and with the renowned Wyoming Public Radio station provide prose writers with constructive models, with useful contacts, and with practical know-how when it comes to taking your prose public.

In this excerpt from an MFA Conversation, University of Wyoming's David Romtvedt and MFA Candidate Bethann Garramon Merkle discuss what it means to be drawn toward and inspired by particular place and how writers' perspectives can be altered by proximity and time.