Learning Objectives

MFA Program Learning Objectives

• Develop creative work through a process that encourages exploration and discovery.
• Identify and activate poetics issues—why we write how we write—in relationship to your own writing and the larger field of creative writing and creative arts.
• Engage creative writing and creative arts as ethical, political, and aesthetic endeavors.
• Explore how new media changes the possibilities and environment for the production, reception, and dissemination of creative works.
• Inquire into the different forms that creative writing and creative arts might take in an interconnected, transnational society, especially in relationship to a diversity of cultures, languages, and peoples.
• Understand cultures and societies as dynamic constructs that enforce unevenly allotted orders of agency as well as enable differential vectors of power, as defined through gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, age, abilities, and others.
• Become familiar with exemplary literary and art works and practices that center on the lived experience, creative and critical work of multiple peoples.
• Create an accomplished and integrated creative thesis and artist (or poetics) statement.