Master of Arts in Writing
Expand your professional or creative writing skills
by taking only one or two courses or earning
a full graduate degree, in Fiction, Nonfiction,
Poetry, or Science-Medical Writing
Prestige, Quality, Value: Our graduate writing program reflects the international reputation for academic quality, creative innovation, and professional value at Johns Hopkins, a pioneer in writing, research, the humanities, and higher education.
- Take part-time evening and weekend classes to fit your busy schedule
- Tailor your courses to fit personal writing or editing goals
- Learn from respected, practicing writers and editors
- Develop literary craft skills to grow creatively, or
- Build professional or journalism skills to advance your career
- Apply year-round, study at your own pace, publish your work
To learn more about the M.A. in Writing Program and what our students have achieved, read below or click on any topic:
| Fiction |
(novel, short story, experimental writing, screenplay, playwriting, online fiction, novella) |
| Nonfiction |
(essay, feature, memoir, commentary, journalism, creative nonfiction, travel, reviews, biography, profile, blogging) |
| Poetry |
(formal or free verse, short verse, collections, special forms, poetics, prose poetry) |
| Science-Medical Writing |
(nature, technology, health, science, medicine, environment, climate, biotechnology, space, energy, computers. outdoors) |
If you’re ready to find out how to apply, visit http://advanced.jhu.edu/admissions. Or read below to discover what you will learn, who will teach you, and what you might achieve in our innovative, challenging graduate writing program:
WHAT OUR STUDENTS AND GRADUATES HAVE ACHIEVED
Writing Program students and alumni publish in or edit magazines, websites, newspapers, newsletters, literary journals, trade publications, and many other venues. Since 1994, their success includes hundreds of articles, short stories, poems, essays and other work online or in print, plus 52 books and counting -- novels, essay/short story/poetry collections, history, travel, memoir, science, narrative journalism, consumer, nature, creative nonfiction, medicine, and architecture. Our students’ or graduates’ work has appeared in National Geographic, Washington Post, Smithsonian, GQ, New York Times, Salon.com, Esquire, USA Today, National Public Radio, Preservation magazine, Moment magazine, ABC News / Nightline, WebMD, Los Angeles Times, USA Weekend, and Washingtonian, among many other venues. Literary journals in which student or graduate work has appeared include: The Florida Review, Green Mountains Review, Story Quarterly, The Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Gargoyle, North American Poetry Review, Potomac Review, Antioch Review, Baltimore Review, Barrelhouse, The Sun, Mississippi Review, Phoebe, The Connecticut Review, Exquisite Corpse, and dozens of others. Graduates of our program regularly earn adjunct teaching jobs in composition, writing, and journalism at a range of universities, including University of Maryland, Florida State, American University, Ohio University, George Washington University, Towson University, Georgetown University, and many others. Other graduates move on to MFA or PhD programs and have earned full-time teaching jobs, including tenure-track jobs at community colleges, four-year colleges, and universities. Our students and graduates also have landed writing or editing jobs at the Washington Post, National Geographic, Smithsonian, NPR, and USA Today, as well as AARP, Bureau of National Affairs, National Institutes of Health, Brookings Institution, American Red Cross, National Education Association, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Johns Hopkins University, and many other private companies and non-profit organizations – plus Congress, federal departments, and government agencies.
JOIN OUR COMMUNITY OF WRITERS
The Master of Arts in Writing Program at Johns Hopkins focuses on the individual goals of writers and editors and their aim of publication or editing at the highest levels possible. With a part-time format, craft-based courses, and a faculty of practicing writers and editors who excel at teaching, the program offers a nurturing, demanding home to build editing, creative writing, or professional writing skills in a range of subject areas or fields. Our students are challenged to become dedicated, contributing citizens in the community of letters.
ATTEND IN WASHINGTON, D.C., OR BALTIMORE
In 1992, Johns Hopkins founded the M.A. in Writing Program in Washington to provide professional and artistic options for part-time students who choose not to interrupt their careers or personal life for full-time graduate study. Courses are offered on weekday evenings or Saturdays at the main Hopkins Homewood Campus in Baltimore or in Washington, where more than half of our students enroll at the convenient Washington Center, at 1717 Massachusetts Ave., NW (near the Dupont Circle Metro Station on the Red Line.) Some students take only a course or two of special interest. Degree candidates earn their masters in two to four years, with quicker or slower options available. While courses are offered year-round, students may take a term or two off as their schedules require. The M.A. in Writing Program is Hopkins’ part-time, broader-admission alternative to The Writing Seminars, the exclusive, nationally ranked, and internationally known full-time graduate writing program available only in Baltimore. For more about the Seminars, which awards the Master of Fine Arts in fiction and poetry, link to www.jhu.edu/writsem. The programs have separate application processes.
A SAMPLING OF OUR GRADUATES' WRITING AND AWARDS
- Herta Feely won the $10,000 James Jones First Novel Fellowship for her manuscript, The Trials of Serra Blue
- Mike Klesius, freelance writer, former staff writer at National Geographic, was published in Best American Science Writing 2003 (chosen by Oliver Sacks)
- Steve Kistulentz, a fiction writer and poet, is a two-time winner of the John Mackay Shaw Academy of American Poets Prize.
- Ellen Dudley, freelance writer and author of The Savvy Adventure Traveler and American Discoveries, won the Barbara Savage Award for travel writing.
- Michelle Brafman’s short fiction won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Short Story Contest and the Lilith magazine fiction prize.
- Eugenie Bisulco authored the poetry collection, Looking for Mrs. Empty
- Josh Rolnick won the Arts & Letters Prize in fiction and a Florida Review Editor’s Choice Prize.
And our latest:
- Nonfiction student Monica Hesse was recently hired as a staff writer by the Washington Post Style section after interning there.
- Recent fiction grad Dave Housley has a new story collection out from Imprint Books in New York: Ryan Seacrest Is Famous.
- Fiction student Arlene Sanders will publish Tiger Burning Bright: Stories, her first collection, in 2008.
- Cathy Alter, a nonfiction graduate and author of Virgin Territory: Stories from the Road to Womanhood, will publish Up For Renewal: What Magazines Taught Me About Love, Sex, and Starting Over in 2008.
- Alumnus and faculty member Ed Perlman founded Entasis Press, a small literary press in Washington, D.C.
A FACULTY OF EXPERIENCED WRITERS AND EDITORS
Our award-winning instructors include practicing writers and editors who excel at teaching -- authors, journal editors, poets, reporters, short story specialists, magazine editors, freelance writers, publishers, artists, and scientists. Some are leaders in local, regional, and national writing organizations. Their many national awards include those from the Pushcart Prize for fiction, Society of Professional Journalists, Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, National Association of Science Writers, James Jones First Novel Award, Fulbright Scholarship, Overseas Press Club, Harvard Journalism Fellowship for Advanced Studies in Public Health, National Press Club, The Whiting Award, Barbara Savage Award for travel writing, Society for Technical Communication, Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting, Gold Medal the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, and the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. For details and bios of Writing Program instructors visit http://advanced.jhu.edu/writing/faculty
Guest Instructors and Visiting Writers in the program – and special instructors for our summer-time Hopkins Conference on Craft in Florence, Italy – have included National Book Award-winning novelist Alice McDermott; renowned poets Dave Smith and Mary Jo Salter, critic and fiction writer Alan Cheuse; novelist Claire Messud; nonfiction author/editors Jim Conaway and Robert Wilson, Pulitzer winners Wayne Biddle and Steve Twomey; fiction writers Jean McGarry, Stephen Dixon, and Brad Leithauser, and poet/scholar John T. Irwin, the Decker Professor in the Humanities at Hopkins and the chair of the Writing Program.
Past visiting lecturers and readers include Mark Strand and Anthony Hecht in poetry, Russell Baker and Mark Crispin Miller in nonfiction, and Julian Barnes, Robert Stone, John Gregory Brown, Edward P. Jones, and Madison Smartt Bell in fiction.
A sampling of recent current instructors:
- Two-time Pushcart Prize winner Paul Maliszewski has published articles in Harper's, Smithsonian, Granta, McSweeney's, and Wilson Quarterly, and short stories in Paris Review, Gettysburg Review, Boulevard, Mississippi Review, and Story Quarterly.
- Ruth Guyer, a regular commentator on NPR and Ph.D. immunologist who has taught here since 1994, published Baby at Risk: The Uncertain Legacies of Medical Miracles for Babies, Families and Society.
- Madeleine Mysko’s novel, Bringing Vincent Home, was released in Fall 2007 by Plain View Press, and her poetry collection, Crucial Blue, is due in 2008.
- Tim Wendel’s novel, Castro’s Curveball -- his thesis as a Hopkins student -- was recently reprinted by the University of Nebraska Press.
FINANCIAL AID AND HOW TO APPLY
Admission to the program is based on a competitive review of writing samples, Statement of Purpose, and other materials. You can apply and, if accepted, start your studies year-round. Applicants are of all ages and backgrounds; some are returning to school after decades in the workplace. The writing samples, published or unpublished, should equal 20 to 40 typed, double-spaced pages. We encourage multiple samples, rather than a single piece of the required length. For details about applications, visit http://advanced.jhu.edu/admissions to go to our academic division at Johns Hopkins, the Advanced Academic Programs. (That link is outside the Writing Program’s website, but you don’t have to pay or complete an application to learn more.) The admissions review differs for a single, specific course compared to the full degree. Please let us know your interests. Hopkins offers Financial Aid in student loans, plus limited, competitively awarded scholarships in the Writing Program beginning in 2008.
CUSTOMIZE YOUR STUDIES
Some students aren’t interested in a degree and take only the courses they want. Many, however, take nine courses to earn an accredited master’s degree in a chosen concentration. These nine courses include core techniques, intensive writing workshops, and varied electives in contemporary writing or voice, revision, description, identity, and specialized forms. To broaden their experience, students often take electives in a different concentration. For instance, nonfiction or science-medical writing students take a fiction course, or fiction writers take poetry or nonfiction courses. The program culminates in a thesis course in which students revise their continuing portfolio of publishable writing, contribute to a literary journal project, and join a festive student reading attended by friends, family, and colleagues. For details about our courses, link to http://advanced.jhu.edu/writing/courses. Here’s a sampling beyond our techniques classes and writing workshops:
Fiction: Writing the Novel, Film & Screenwriting, The Short Story, Voice in Modern Fiction, Drama & Playwriting, Experimental Fiction, Novel Form, Style, & Structure, World Fiction, Evolution of Fictional Forms, Heritage of Fiction I & II.
Nonfiction: Memoir & Personal Essay, Profile & Biography, Literary Travel Writing, Viewpoint Journalism, Crafting a Nonfiction Voice, Writing the Review, International Nonfiction, Masters of Nonfiction, Magazine Style & Substance.
Poetry: Development of Poetry & Poetics I & II, Readings in Poetry, Advanced Poetry Meter & Form.
Science-Medical Writing: The Literature of Science, The Nature of Nature, Medicine in Action, Science in Action. (Students also take Nonfiction courses.)
Cross-Concentration: Identity in Contemporary Writing, The Teaching of Writing, Principles of Editing (in development), Essence of Place, Sentence Power.
Internships, Independent Study: Available to select advanced students.
STUDY AT OUR SUMMER CONFERENCE IN ITALY OR MAINE
Our program offers a special Hopkins Conference on Craft in which students can earn a graduate course credit in a concentrated period. In 2006 and 2007, the conference was held in Florence, Italy. The 2009 conference will be in Bar Harbor, Maine. Our conference features workshops with nationally prominent writers from Johns Hopkins and elsewhere such as National Book Award novelist Alice McDermott, acclaimed poet Mary Jo Salter, fiction writers Jean McGarry and Brad Leithauser, and prominent literary editor Robert Wilson. For more about the conference, see http://writing.jhu.edu/craftconference or email craftconference@jhu.edu.
FIND OUT MORE
For More Information about the Writing program, contact us via email, phone, or mail.
TO APPLY
Visit our admissions wizard at http://advanced.jhu.edu/admissions to apply to the program conveniently online or to learn more details about the application process and the required writing samples. This link will take you from Writing program website to the admissions section.
Calendar