Creative Writing Program ranks 12th in the nation

After years of fostering creativity, IU’s Creative Writing Program was ranked among the top 20 in the nation.

The program was ranked No. 12 in the country in the Poets and Writers Magazine, which based its rankings on a survey of more than 500 MFA applicants, for its November/December issue.

The MFA applicants were asked which schools they would be applying to or had already applied to, as well as which schools they considered the best.
Samrat Upadhyay, director of the Creative Writing Program, attributed some of the program’s quality to its selection of faculty.

“One of the things I’ve observed is that, in many programs, they might have a star faculty member, someone who has won a Pulitzer or some other big award, but the students barely get to interact with him,” he said.

Upadhyay said IU’s creative writing faculty are uniformly qualified and renowned, with students having many opportunities to meet with professors. He said the program was also extremely selective. Out of more than 400 applicants, only 12 students are accepted each year into the three-year-long program.

Jonathan Elmer, chair of the English department, said that the diversity is a major component of the program’s success.

“The MFA faculty have made it a priority over the last 10 years to retain a diverse faculty and student body,” he said. “There is increased activity among the students, as well as a greater sense of camaraderie.”

Andres Sanabria, a third-year MFA student, had firsthand experience with the program’s diversity. Sanabria went on a fully funded trip to Nepal for two weeks with Upadhyay and one other student.

“It was a real cultural exchange,” he said. “We went to both private and public schools to have discussions with students. We also did tech workshops with the students who wrote in English.”

Sanabria said the trip also included a reading from Upadhyay, who is known as the first fiction writer born in Nepal and writing in English to be published in the West.

The Creative Writing Program also owes some of its success to its focus on individuals.

Tony Ardizzone, an IU English professor and former director of the Creative Writing Program, said that creative writing differs from other disciplines by focusing on the individual, rather than on a science or topic that must be learned.

He supported his point with the words of the late Richard Hugo, a poet and teacher of creative writing: “A creative writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters.”