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Hone Your Craft in the Capital City

For more than 40 years, American University’s MFA program has fostered emerging writers wishing to study in our capital city’s only MFA program. Against a backdrop of international culture, scientific innovation, global development, and world-class urbanity, writers will develop their craft and voice with some of the most talented faculty publishing today. Our graduate workshops provide a rigorous and supportive environment where students explore a range of approaches to the art and craft of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

As an MFA student at American, you are free to pursue a single genre or explore several. You will acquire a deeper understanding of your own work and hone your skills in a collaborative setting. Students have the opportunity to engage with DC’s literary scene through events, collaboration, and internships with institutions such as the Library of Congress, the Museum of Poetry, PEN Faulkner, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, among others. Faculty believe in working across genres and interests, developing student voices from the inside out, and experimenting with form and style. The MFA program is also dedicated to providing solid career guidance in the form of professional bootcamps and engagement with early-career and established visiting writers. Whether you’ve been writing for all of your life, or you’re finally fulfilling a dormant dream, this is your moment, and AU is your program. We believe everyone has a story to tell.

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Curriculum
Bootcamps
Faculty
Washington, DC
Careers
Students sit with their eyes on the work on the table in front of them

A Program of Study That Gets Results

This two-year, 36-credit-hour MFA program integrates writing, literary journalism, translation, and the study of literature to prepare students for a range of career possibilities — see their work in the MFA Wall of Fame. Write, give feedback, and receive guidance from a close-knit community of respectful peers and faculty. In the MFA program, you'll find lawyers, military veterans, musicians, teachers, and business executives who are passionate about the written word.

Connect with accomplished professors and the resources you need to reach your goal. Our faculty members have been featured in a variety of media and publications including the New Yorker, the New York Times, National Public Radio, Bill Moyers & Co., and the Washington Post.

See complete Admission & Degree Requirements.

Bootcamps

Unique to American University’s MFA program, virtual and in-person bootcamps are designed to provide students with practical skills and knowledge about the literary world and beyond that they generally do not receive in a classroom.

Bootcamps are open to all current students and alums; registration is required through litgrad@american.edu. Recent topics include

  • Storytelling on stage: how to turn your written work into a performance
  • Podcasting: A beginner’s guide 
  • Understanding intellectual property and contract rights
  • Taxes for writers
  • Literary magazine editing
  • Finding and working with literary agents
  • Life after the MFA: real career talk from alums
  • Grant applications and artist’s residencies: A beginner’s guide
  • The trauma-informed workshop
Dolen Perkins-Valdez speaking to attendees at an event

Prominent Authors Dedicated to Your Success

Our faculty of award-winning poets, novelists, translators, and nonfiction writers will help you help you hone your craft and pursue your career as a writer. You will receive instruction and guidance from successful authors published by university presses and major publishers, including Houghton Mifflin, Scribner, Vintage Books, Viking Press, and WW Norton. Our active and engaged faculty members are regularly featured in top media outlets such as The New York Times, New Yorker, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and New Republic; in literary journals like Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Shenandoah; and on television and radio.

Library of Congress

A City For Writers

Living and learning in the nation's capital provides numerous benefits for MFA students. We partner with organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts, Library of Congress, 826DC, Writopia Labs, and Folger Shakespeare Library to facilitate opportunities for our students.

Our students have recently published books with WW Norton, Copper Canyon, University of Wisconsin Press, and MIT Press. They have been featured on This American Life, Poets & Writers, in Creative Nonfiction, Psychology Today, and more.

We Know Success

97% of graduates are employed, in grad school, or both 6 months after graduation.

Our alumni have gone on to work for organizations including:

  • Amplify
  • Catalogue for Philanthropy: Greater Washington
  • Clutch
  • EEO ClassIn
  • Fulbright Association
  • Goodwin University
  • KIPP DC
  • Macmillan
  • PEN/Faulkner Foundation
  • RH-ISAC
  • Shout Mouse Press
  • Street Sense Media
  • The Building People
  • W.W. Norton & Company, Inc

Folio

FolioPoetry, Prose, and Art

Folio is a nationally recognized literary journal sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences at American University in Washington, DC. Since 1984, we have published original creative work by both new and established authors — with annual prizes in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.
 

Cafe MFA

Cafe MFA is an MFA student-run online publication, covering a range of local writing news, interviews, book events, writing tips, and more.

Visiting Writers SeriesSIS Founders Room | 7:00 p.m.

Please find author details and more at the Visiting Writers Series page.

  • Tania James
    October 15
  • Emily Bazelon 
    November 12
  • David Means
    December 5
  • Patricia Coral
    April 1, 2026
St Peter's Basilica viewed from the Tiber River

Achievements ·

Poetry and the Eternal City: David Keplinger Wins Prestigious Rome Prize

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Rhonda Zimlich

Literature ·

A Writer’s Life: A CAS Conversation with Rhonda Zimlich

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Bulletins

MFA alum Emily Holland was just awarded the 2025 Jean Feldman Poetry Prize from the Washington Writers’ Publishing House and her debut collection of poetry, Notifications On, will be published in January 2027.

Alum David Leftwich has been selected as the Winner of the 2025 Omnidawn 1st/2nd Poetry Book Contest by poet Daniela Molnar. 

Rachel Louise Snyder won the Independent Publishing Book Awards 2024 Gold Medal in the category of Autobiography/Memoir for 2023's Women We Buried, Women We Burned.

See also: MFA Wall of Fame.

Heaven Santiago, Jalisa Orellana Hardy, Isabella Salcedo, Tara Hollander

Instapoetry and PoetryTok: Rethinking Poetry for the Digital Age

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Spotlight: Valzhyna Mort

Valzhyna Mort, credit: Tanya KapitonavaAlumna Valzhyna Mort has gained international acclaim for her third poetry collection, Music for the Dead and Resurrected (FSG, 2020), which won the 2021 International Griffin Prize and was named one of the best poetry books of 2020 by the New York TimesPublishers Weekly called this work in their starred review, "poems of reclamation and resurrection; to live in them is to confront the hard work of witness." The New Yorker wrote in its review, "Memory, metaphor, and myth intermingle to sometimes nightmarish effect in this collection by a Belarus-born poet. Mort excavates the individual and communal traumas wrought by a violent and repressive national history, and calls herself 'a test-child exposed to the burning reactor of my grandmother’s memory.'" Mort teaches poetry, literature, and translation at Cornell University.


See more in our alumni Wall of Fame.

Look inside the Creative Writing MFA

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For more than 40 years, writers have come to American University to develop their work and exchange ideas in the District’s only creative writing MFA program.

Frequently Asked Questions

The application deadline is February 1. All applications are automatically considered for merit awards. After February 1, the program continues to consider applications, but cannot guarantee those applicants will be considered for merit awards.

The required MFA thesis consists of an original, book-length manuscript. It may be a novel, a novella, a memoir or collection of stories, creative nonfiction, or poems. The thesis is due approximately a month before the end of the student's final semester.

Most students complete the 36-credit degree in 2 years. Full-time study is 9 credits (3 classes) per semester. Others pursue their degree part-time, taking 1-2 classes per semester as best fits their schedules. All workshops, and many literature courses, are offered at night, so that students with full-time jobs can still complete their coursework.

The committee regards the writing sample as the most important part of the application. It's therefore important that you pay close attention to the manuscript guidelines (see below). Send what you feel is your strongest work that shows your demonstrated talent. It is not important to the committee whether or not work has been previously published.

Those submitting applications in poetry should send no more than 12 poems or 15 pages (with no more than one new or continuing poem per page). If submitting fiction/nonfiction, please submit 15-25 pages. While the catalog calls for a 25-page writing sample, we value quality over quantity. We are interested in seeing only your very best work, which can consist of one or more stories or works of creative nonfiction or an excerpt from a novel. If you send an excerpt from a novel, please include a brief description of the work as a whole.

Still have questions? Email litgrad@american.edu.