Boston University Creative Writing

Boston University Creative Writing The BU MFA, one of the oldest and most selective in the country, includes full-tuition funding, teaching stipends, and the Global Fellowships program.

Our program is one of the oldest, most prestigious, and selective in the country. It is also unique: Our students spend only a year earning their MFA and perhaps for that reason come from all over the world and from many diverse professions. The Atlantic has ranked us among the top ten creative writing programs in the country. (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/08/the-best-of-the-be

st/306049/) The magazine might have been impressed by our two most celebrated workshops—one, in poetry, was led by Robert Lowell, who had scattered around him Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and George Starbuck; the other, much more recent, was led by Leslie Epstein, whose students included Ha Jin, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Peter Ho Davies. Our classes still meet in the same small room, which allows through its dusty windows a glimpse of the Charles. These days, the poetry workshops are led by Robert Pinsky, Dan Chiasson, and Jorie Graham; those in fiction are led by Leslie Epstein, Ha Jin himself, and Sigrid Nunez. As a capstone to the MFA, we offer the Leslie Epstein Global Fellowships in Fiction and the Robert Pinsky Global Fellowships in Poetry. Students travel for up to three months, anywhere on Earth, so that they might live and write abroad without financial worry, as Hemingway did in Paris. Our graduates have been to Patagonia, Iran, Cuba, Greenland–you can follow their adventures at http://blogs.bu.edu/world/

We also manage to provide enough financial aid to cover everyone’s tuition and sometimes a bit more. For more on our financial aid, please visit www.bu.edu/creativewriting/apply/financialaid/

Our graduates have won every major award in their genres, including the National Poetry Series, the Whiting Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Pen/Faulkner and Pen/Hemingway Awards and the National Book Award. Every few months one of our graduates brings out a book of poetry or fiction with a major publisher; some, like Sue Miller and Arthur Golden, have spent a good deal of time on bestseller lists. Over the last decade we have placed more than a score of our graduates in tenure-track positions at important universities (in recent years, three of our graduates, Peter Ho Davies, Carl Phillips, and Erin Belieu, have led the creative writing programs at, respectively, Michigan, Washington University in St. Louis, and Florida State). And two of our students, showing entrepreneurial spirit, founded the Gotham Writers Workshop in New York and Grub Street in Boston. For more information about the program, our visiting writers, financial aid, or the Global Fellowships, please visit www.bu.edu/creativewriting.

It’s Administrative Professionals Day — and we’ve got one of those!Read the graphic to learn a little more about poet an...
04/22/2026

It’s Administrative Professionals Day — and we’ve got one of those!

Read the graphic to learn a little more about poet and program administrator Annaka Saari!

Mark your calendars — alum Maggie Dietz is reading at the Blacksmith House!
04/17/2026

Mark your calendars — alum Maggie Dietz is reading at the Blacksmith House!

Thank you to those who gave to our program during Giving Day — we’re so grateful for your support.
04/09/2026

Thank you to those who gave to our program during Giving Day — we’re so grateful for your support.

BU Poets reading this month!Catch Rachel Dillon (Poetry ‘23) and Christian Wessels (Poetry ‘17) reading alongside Talin ...
04/06/2026

BU Poets reading this month!

Catch Rachel Dillon (Poetry ‘23) and Christian Wessels (Poetry ‘17) reading alongside Talin Tahajian at the Blacksmith House Reading Series, directed by visiting professor Andrea Cohen!

Want to celebrate with a new poem?Give this prompt a shot!
04/03/2026

Want to celebrate with a new poem?

Give this prompt a shot!

Giving Day is next week — if you’re able, consider supporting the Creative Writing Program!
04/02/2026

Giving Day is next week — if you’re able, consider supporting the Creative Writing Program!

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