The Expanded Field at Stetson University's MFA

Stetson’s University MFA program is a two-year, low-residency creative writing program that specializes in “the Expanded Field”:  we are interested in students who want to experiment in image, sound, installation, video, performance and site-specific making as well as text. 

What is the "Poetry in the Expanded Field?"

"The phrase “expanded field” is borrowed from an iconic essay by Rosalind Krauss: Krauss suggests that if we map out the possibilities of what something “isn’t “when we try to say what it “is,” we'll have more room to make things: whole shared fields may suddenly appear! In practice this means writers might work among different studio practices and come up with wondrous new combos: text /sound/ textile/ video/ gesture/ photo/ action: what do you love that your writing leaves out? What does it mean to "make a mark"? With its long international history of cross-arts making, poetry offers an especially wonderful site for this text-based play: leave a poem in a sleeve with Lady Murasaki, draw words in air with Raul Zurita. So many great models to consider over historical time and real spaces, so many lovely moving parts to experiment with as we think of words having as much materiality other things in the world!" - Terri Witek, Poetry in the Expanded Field Professor

What to expect while creating in "the Expanded Field":

• "The people who come to the program are from many different backgrounds. That is one of the things that is most interesting about our program...people come from the Visual Arts, some come from Theater, from Dance... it's people interested in expanding the possibilities of their creative life. We are text based, but there are very few programs in the United States that allow for the amount of experimentation that Stetson's MFA allows for." - Cyriaco Lopes, Poetry in the Expanded Field Professor
  
  
• "What attracted me to the program is that it is exploratory in nature. A lot of times I didn't fit into art or creative writing schools because they were pushing me to do things in a way they wanted me to do them. This program constantly surrounds you with ways of creating you may have never even heard of. You're exposed to everything from Prose to Poetry in the Expanded Field to Visual Arts...it's a beautiful creative space where you can find new parts of yourself and your art." - Blaze Carter '25
  
  
• "The professors here encourage me to be my most authentic self when I write rather than pushing me towards certain literary constraints. They used their knowledge and expertise to to help me navigate through various sources and so many different ways of writing...they opened up a landscape for me that has been truly transformative and rewarding." -Bre'Anna Bivens '24