Program description: Our program is a flexible, innovative, two-year program that encourages cross-genre study through graduate workshops and culminates in a creative project. Our graduate assistantships provide valuable teaching experience and training.
You will study with well-published faculty with diverse areas of expertise, including: creative writing pedagogy, flash fiction, memoir and essays, short and feature length screenwriting, eco-poetry, hybrid forms, mixed media and digital media, and literary editing and publishing. Students are encouraged to explore and write in multiple genres. This two-year program of study culminates in a creative project of your own design, which will prepare you for the next step in your career, whether that involves continued graduate study in an MFA or PhD program or a career in professional writing or editing.
Ball State graduate students regularly present at national conferences, receive internal and external grants, earn summer scholarships for the Midwest Writers Workshop, and learn from our visiting writers, including those participating in the In Print Festival of First Books. Our students have had poetry collections come out from presses such as Dancing Girl and Ravenna and publish their work in leading journals, including AGNI, Callaloo, CALYX, Mid-American Review, Midwestern Gothic, and Prairie Schooner.
Graduates from our master’s program have gone on to a variety of careers. We have an excellent placement rate for master’s students seeking admission to highly regarded MFA and PhD programs in Creative Writing. Graduates have also gone on to successful careers in marketing, publishing, teaching, university administration, and freelance writing.