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California Institute of the Arts

MFA: Creative Writing

School of Critical Studies

A person at a microphone addresses a small group of people seated in a cozy room lined with bookshelves.

Next Words Reading Series. Photo by Angel Origgi.

Experimental Practice

The two-year Creative Writing MFA at CalArts was designed to be rigorous and wild, erasing the division between “creative” and “critical.” Here, writing is understood as an art form best practiced alongside the other arts, and students benefit from having access to the CalArts community of artists as their peers and fellow travelers.

A person stands at a podium on a darkened stage with a black-and-white image on a screen behind her.

Writers Showcase at REDCAT. Photo by Angel Origgi.

  • #1 Student Fulbright producer
  • 4:1 Student to faculty ratio

    in the Creative Writing MFA program (fall 2023)

  • 20% International students

    in the School of Critical Studies

Pursue your imaginative impulses

MFA Creative Writing

The CalArts MFA in Creative Writing combines a dedication to experimental practice with a resolutely non-genre tracking curriculum. These commitments are intertwined: Our MFA program uniquely allows our students to channel ideas through whichever genre the work takes you—including into hybrid genre forms of your own.

Let’s connect

Our dedication to a resolutely non-genre-tracking curriculum emerges from CalArts’ foundational commitment to experimentation and interdisciplinarity. Students who come to our program regularly engage in substantial projects in multiple genres across their coursework and beyond. As a Creative Writing MFA student, you’ll design your own path through our curriculum, invoking questions of genre and practice to inform your work as it develops. This structure gives special import to the work you create, with guidance and support from your faculty mentor, other faculty, and peers throughout your time in the program. Meeting with your mentor multiple times each semester, you’ll discuss your plan of study, creative work, and larger questions related to a life in writing and the interconnectedness of writing, other art forms, and intellectual endeavors. Our commitment to the mentor relationship is foundational to the pedagogy of CalArts.

Graduate students in the Creative Writing MFA are encouraged to situate their creative practice in a critical context—to engage with the history, theory, and politics of contemporary writing, and to deeply contemplate what and why they write. The program offers the chance to further develop both your craft and your knowledge base, and to attend workshops combining attentive critique of student work with discussion of readings on and in the various genres—or on special topics particularly relevant to writing today.

Our program proudly grounds its dedication to experimentation in traditions beyond purely formalist and Eurocentric models of the avant-garde, embracing speculative, performative, theoretical, divinatory, shamanistic, and other decolonizing modes of practice. At CalArts, realist literary fiction hangs out with speculative fiction and horror, lyric poetry meets documentary modes, and the essay mingles with memoir, performance, auto-theory, and hybrid forms.

Our core courses attend closely to questions of form and aesthetics, as well as to the historical and critical contexts of literary work. Most classes combine workshopping of student-generated work with discussion of assigned texts. While not all classes are offered every year, students choose from a wide selection of courses throughout the two-year program, honing individual visions and practices while experimenting with new forms and subjects. Creative Writing students also benefit from being able to take courses for elective credit in the MA Aesthetics and Politics program, as well as other MFA-level courses throughout the Institute.

Admission requirements

To be considered for the MFA Creative Writing program, you must complete the application process and all program-specific requirements, including a portfolio of representative work, an artist statement, and two letters of recommendation. Before applying, be sure to familiarize yourself with the detailed application requirements and resources available to assist you in this important process.

Application requirements

Degree requirements

The CalArts MFA Creative Writing is unique in the field for the way it combines a dedication to experimental practice and a resolutely non-genre tracking curriculum. Students in Creative Writing design their own path through our curriculum, in consultation with their faculty mentor, engaging with what questions of genre and practice inform their work as it develops.

MFA Creative Writing academic requirements

While our program is non-tracking we do offer four optional emphases that help guide our students through our curriculum and the course offerings of other schools and programs in the Institute. We call these emphases our Concentrations. These non-required Concentrations are Image + Text, Writing and Performativity, Writing and its Publics and Documentary Strategies. Image + Text traces the relationship of the written word and the visual image, including the cinematic, the static image, and the materiality of language. Writing and Performativity offers students an array of courses focused on the creative and critical practices of performative writing. Writing and Its Publics deals with the public face of writing, be it publishing, community-based work, or writing for various art audiences, while Documentary Strategies takes on a wide array of artistic engagements with documentation, witnessing, and archives of all kinds. Students whose work and interests closely engage one of these four areas can formalize that engagement by declaring an official Concentration, which may be advantageous in their professional lives after the MFA.

Interdisciplinary opportunities

In addition to CalArts’ naturally collaborative atmosphere, the Institute provides several programs of study that can be pursued concurrently with a student’s chosen metier, such as a concentration in Arts Education or Integrated Media.

Learn more about minors and interdisciplinary opportunities 

Courses you might take

What courses would you take as a graduate student in Creative Writing? Browse our available courses in the CalArts course catalog.

Creative Writing courses

School of Critical Studies courses 

Interested in this program?

View our step-by-step application guide to learn more.

Start your application

Meet the faculty

At CalArts, faculty and students are collaborators, teaching, learning, and working together as members of our community of artists. 

Lecture and reading series

  • Katie Jacobson Writer in Residence

    Established in memory of beloved alum Katie Jacobson (MFA 10), this residency brings an influential writer to campus each year for intimate workshops, a lecture, and public reading.

    A female speaker at a podium in front of a projected screen

  • Writing Now

    Structured around the work of several visiting contemporary writers, this reading series and seminar is a required year-long course for all first-year MFA Creative Writing students. 

    Woman in yellow dress and red jacket speaks with a microphone in her left hand

Some of our alumni

  • Douglas Kearney (MFA 04), poet (Patter; Fear, Some; The Black Automaton), performer, librettist -- Whiting Writers Award
  • Emerson Whitney (MFA 14), author (Daddy Boy, Heaven, Ghost Box) poet, journalist -- Maine Literary Award for Memoir
  • Allie Rowbottom (MFA 11), author (Jell-o Girls: A Family History, Aesthetica)
  • Sam Cohen (MFA 10), writer (Sarahland) -- Best Jewish Story Collection of 5781 by alma.com
  • Kenneth Reveiz (MFA 22), poet (Mopes) -- Fence Modern Poets Series Prize
  • Colin Dickey (MFA 01), nonfiction writer (Afterlives of the Saints, Craniokepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius)
  • Malik Gaines (MFA 99), performance artist, curator, co-founder of My Barbarian
  • Janice Lee (MFA 08), Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State, author (The Sky Isn’t Blue, Imagine a Death, Separation Anxiety) -- finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award
  • Henry Hoke (MFA 11), author (Sticker, Open Throat) -- finalist for the Pen/Faulkner Award

More School of Critical Studies alumni

Read about author Henry Hoke’s journey after graduating from the Creative Writing MFA, and how his time at CalArts has influenced his genre-spanning creative process. “It just became really exciting for me to keep separate projects going all at once,” he explains, “because that’s what was encouraged in each professor’s course.” 

Henry Hoke signing copies of his book Open Throat
Henry Hoke Creative Writing MFA 11
Alumni Story: Henry Hoke

On fringe culture, conspiracies, the paranormal, and death

Alumni interview

Shortly after the publication of his fifth book, Under the Eye of Power, in 2023, Creative Writing alum Colin Dickey (MFA 01) sat for an interview with The Sun’s David Mahaffey. “A lot of our anxiety around chaos and disorder is fundamentally tied to our denial of death,” he said. “I had a real terror of death for the longest time, and that’s part of why I started writing about ghosts: to lessen that anxiety.”

Black and white portrait of author Colin Dickey

Colin Dickey. Photo © Rynn Reed, The Sun.

Carribean Fragoza

Faculty Story

“I think as writers, many of us go through some point or another when we’re just wondering, ‘Is this gonna work? Am I gonna be able to sustain this longer?’ I mean, there’s some pretty funky places we can go to as writers.”

Carribean Fragoza’s lifelong dedication to the arts has seamlessly intertwined with her deep commitment to community, as both artist and advocate. From her early admiration for CalArts to co-founding SEMAP, her work reflects a passion for fostering creative spaces that empower marginalized voices, culminating in a multifaceted career where art, activism, and cultural preservation intersect.

CalArts professor Carribean Fragoza crosses her arms and looks straight at the camera.

CalArts professor Carribean Fragoza.

Gallery

Want to learn more?

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