Director's Message

Welcome to the University of Miami Creative Writing website. We are a small and selective program offering a Bachelor of Arts in English with a creative writing concentration as well as a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing.

Senior faculty and author Lester Goran first established undergraduate coursework in creative writing in 1965, and in 1991 he helped develop what is now known as our graduate program. Over the years we have come into our own, like a great novel in progress.

We have a prolific core of nationally and internationally recognized faculty. 2009 has been a fruitful year, and we are pleased to announce that in addition to the publication of senior poet Maureen Seaton’s two new books of poetry, Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2009), and Sow's Ear chapbook, America Loves Carney (2009), her memoir, Sex Talks to Girls, (University of Wisconsin Press, 2009) was awarded the 2009 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Memoir/Biography.

This year also saw the publication of Jane Alison’s Sisters Antipodes (Houghton Mifflin Harcout, 2009), A. Manette Ansay’s Good Things I Wish You (Harper, June 2009), and Mia Leonin’s Havana and Other Missing Fathers (University of Arizona Press, September 2009). We are pleased to showcase their great works in our new reading series, Lyric Hybrid: New Writing at the University of Miami.

Both our graduate and undergraduate alumni are also distinguished in the literary and commercial proliferation of great books. Among some of our most widely recognized alumni are Donald Justice, Tom Cavanagh, Michelle Richmond, Crissa-Jean Chappell, and Chantel Acevedo. We are proud to note that alum Terrence Cheng, author of Sons of Heaven (William Morrow, 2002), has recently been named chair of the English Department at Lehman College in New York. And most recently, poet alum Neil de la Flor received the 2009 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize for his manuscript Almost Dorothy(forthcoming January, 2010). Judge and poet Forrest Gander describes de la Flor’s poetry in this way: "With a scenery-chewing imagination, deft linguistic cuts, slippery line breaks and disjointed or dehiscent narrative elements, Neil de la Flor abandons genre rules to explore gender roles, religion, domestic relations, science and history.”

In addition to our traditional attention to workshops, readings, and open mics, our program offers students the experience to solicit, design, and publish undergraduate fiction and poetry through Mangrove, our print and online literary journal directed by faculty advisor and poet, Walter K. Lew.

The creative writing program also encourages our students to interact with the local and international community. When the tsunami hit Sumatra and spread throughout the Indian Ocean in 2004, students organized a reading marathon to raise disaster relief for the American Red Cross. And when Katrina devastated New Orleans our writers and poets—faculty and students alike— raised money by reading at Luna Star Café in North Miami Beach.  More recently, our graduate students have been organizing performances and engaging the Miami community in the most unlikely places, such as shoe stores and stationery shops.

We are a creative writing program that honors the tradition of reading and writing literature that matters—on and off the page. And while ultimately writing is a solitary practice, we strive to be a community of writers who encourage, support and challenge one another to be our best selves. In 2010 Professor Lester Goran will be celebrating his 50th teaching anniversary at UM. In the upcoming year, you will be hearing more about the accomplishments, books, and success of his students.  At the request of President Donna Shalala, we have developed a new open mic series on campus. USpeak: Open Verse and Story Performances features a prominent local poet or writer as well as an open mic where we encourage all members of our UM community to write, read, and speak their stories.

Through this Web site, I invite you to explore the many facets of our Creative Writing Program.  If you have any questions or need of further information, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Sincerely,
 
M. Evelina Galang
Creative Writing Director