Experience the Master of Fine Arts Program
Stetson University's MFA in Creative Writing is a two-year, low-residency program that specializes in both Prose (including novels, memoir and the short story) and Poetry “in the Expanded Field" (for students interested in cross-genre experimentation in image, sound, installation, video, performance and site-specific making as well as text). The program is anchored at Florida’s beautiful Atlantic Center for the Arts, a prize-winning ecological preserve. Faculty have included text/image collaborators Terri Witek + Cyriaco Lopes, Amaranth Borsuk, translator/poet Urayoán Noel, award-winning fiction/non-fiction author Steven Dunn and Sarah Labrie, screenwriter and producer for HBO. Graduates go on to live and work as artists and writers, achieving national and international recognition.
Pictured: Arkee Brown, Stetson Residency
The program is designed to develop writers whose creative practice embodies an expanded notion of inquiry, making, contexts and kinships. The curriculum emphasizes craft, experimentation, reading strategies, collaboration, translation, site-specificity and an exploration of the political, social, aesthetic and cultural constellations that form us and our work. Students create a textual work or body of work that reverberates within international contexts and spaces, culminating in a final presentation and performance.
Pictured: Terri Witek & Cyriaco Lopes in workshop with MFA students, Stetson Residency
Stetson University's MFA in Creative Writing was founded in 2015 by Terri Witek and Mark Powell with a goal to create a cross-genre program that offered courses both in Poetry in the Expanded Field and Prose.
Pictured: Pablo Vindel, graduating performance, Atlantic Center for the Arts residency
The current program continues with this goal, giving MFA students the opportunity to explore courses in poetry and prose during the online, low-residency portion of the program as well as exploratory workshops across genres during the two nine-day residencies throughout each year.
Pictured: Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL
The core faculty & staff are experts in their given genres and offer guidance in core workshops and in online packet exchanges throughout the semester. They are joined at each residency by guest artists and writers who run exploratory workshops and expose students to even more ways of writing and creating.
Pictured: Faculty & Guest Writers with MFA Students, Stetson Residency
Through working with multiple instructors every semester, our MFA students are able to gain knowledge from a wide panel of experts in their crafts, while expanding their own work as artists.
From MFA Class of '21 to MFA Professor: "This program will honor who you are as a person and intellectual. It will help you make the things you want to make, and encourage you to make the things you didn't know you wanted to make or could make." -Steven Dunn '21, Whiting Award Winner.
"I've been exposed to so many ways of creating I've never seen before. From Prose to Poetry in the Expanded Field to Visual Arts. I love how exploratory in nature the program is and how the low-residency aspect of the program allows me to continue to make a living for myself, play sports, continue my hobbies, keep up with my creative endeavors, all while getting my Master's at the same time." -Blaze Carter '25. (Full interview).
"To be able to come here and have professors encourage me to be my most authentic self...rather than push me towards expected literary constraints and notions of what writing is supposed to look like has allowed me to flourish." -Bre'Anna Bivens '24 (Full interview).
Burrow Press
Founded by a Stetson MFA alum in 2010, Burrow Press moved its operations to Stetson’s MFA program in 2020. Burrow publishes award-winning poetry and prose in print, as well as online via BP Review. Students in the MFA program have the opportunity to get hands-on experience working with Burrow and to attend quarterly workshops and talks focusing on various aspects of the publishing industry. Burrow maintains strong community ties to Central Florida and beyond and receives vital support from its dedicated base of subscribers.
