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Curriculum

From Craft to Career

Two required bookend courses frame your MFA experience. You’ll begin by building a strong foundation in craft and mastering our distance mentorship model, then graduate with the professional skills to navigate publishing, connect with industry professionals, and launch your writing career. 

Pan-European Residencies

Write, learn, and explore Barcelona, Dublin, and Vienna through three immersive summer residencies. Designed for working writers, our flexible format combines international experiences with one-on-one faculty mentorship between sessions. 

Genre-Specific Workshops

Work closely with faculty and fellow writers in immersive, genre-based workshops. Share your work, exchange feedback, and build lasting mentorships through individual conferences and personalized guidance. 

Residency workshop requirements include:  

  • Submission of four pieces of creative work, each either 8 to 25 double-spaced pages (for prose and screenwriters) or 5 to 10 single-spaced pages (for poets) 
  • Submission of critiques and annotated manuscripts of all colleagues’ work discussed in workshop 
  • Attendance and participation at all workshop discussions 
  • Attendance at individual conferences with the instructor 
  • Submission of a reflective essay by September 1 expressing what was learned through the workshop, craft, and locale curriculum during the residency  

Cross-Genre Craft Seminars

Explore writing beyond your genre. These shared seminars unite all MFA students, encouraging experimentation, broader creative insight, and stronger teaching skills. 

Locale Seminars 

Offered during each residency, locale seminars combine classroom learning with field experiences that connect students to the culture, history, and creative energy of each setting. 

Craft and locale seminar requirements include: 

  • Complete in advance assigned reading  
  • Write journal entries about the readings and seminar discussions 
  • Attend and participate in each seminar meeting  

Field Experience

By going out of the classroom and into the city, field experiences supplement the curriculum of the locale seminars.  

Field experience requirements include: 

  • Attend every field experience 
  • Write a journal entry about each experience 

Writing Mentorships (Distance Learning Between Residencies)

From September to May, students work one-on-one with a practicing writer through monthly exchanges of creative work, feedback, and critical response. Each mentorship also includes a curated reading list designed to deepen craft and inspire revision. 

Instructors provide detailed line edits, margin comments, and feedback letters that offer broader guidance, revision strategies, and publication advice when appropriate. 

Writing mentorship requirements include: 

  • Submission of four separate creative works each semester, one on the first of each month apart from January. Each submission must be either 8 to 25 double-spaced pages (for prose and screenwriters) or 5 to 10 single-spaced pages (for poets) 
  • On each following month of distance learning, the submission of a brief response essay pertaining to the individualized reading list developed with the instructor 

Note: Instructors will respond monthly to the creative work and the response essay previously submitted by the student. 

Sitges coast and Maricel museum (Barcelona, Spain)