Making its home south of Midway Plaisance in Taft House, The Program in Creative Writing is an intersection of imagination and critical inquiry. Creative Writing offers an array of writing-workshop-based classes in a variety of genres, from fiction and poetry to creative nonfiction and translation. In addition, MAPH students focusing in creative writing have the unique opportunity to inform their creative projects with rigorous analytic research in a variety of subjects, such as Art History, Cinema and Media Studies, Comparative Literature, English Language and Literature, Gender and Sexuality, Philosophy, and Visual Arts.
Selected Faculty
Sample Courses
There are initially two open slots for MAPH students in every Creative Writing course that has a graduate-level section listed. MAPH students in the Creative Writing Specialization get priority in these courses, and all students require instructor permission to register. There is no prerequisite on any grad section and all MAPH students are exempt from prerequisites. You can find the numbers for grad sections on Class Search or CIM.
If the two grad spots are already taken, instructors may be willing to open additional seats for graduate students. Students should email the instructor, ask to be added to the waitlist, and once they receive permission, email the MAPH office to be registered during the current quarter's Add/Drop period.
Please visit the Creative Writing page for more details on classes and registration.
Creative Writing Studio: Compress Warp Kill (CRWR 40251) Winter 2027
All excellent fiction is made of strong sentences, strong strings of words that tempt us to linger even as they push us toward the next strong string. This class will focus on how to make such sentences. We’ll read exemplary fiction by various authors—Garielle Lutz, Lydia Davis, Gayl Jones, Paul Beatty, J.D. Salinger, Jose Emilio Pacheco, and more—and discover and discuss how their sentences operate. We’ll do exercises, in and out of class, to master our intentions. We will read student sentences and take them apart. We will force student sentences to box and do yoga and sleep and sing opera. We will smash them up and twist them to find their strengths. If they have no strengths, we will put them to death, and feed their cold bones to other, better sentences in need of more calcium. We will find all the fun and have it. (Adam Levin)
Poetry Workshop II: Poetry as Parasite (CRWR 43136) Winter 2027
Might there be a kind of poem that acts like a parasite latched on to a host body? A poem whose very life is the fusion of various sources, voices, discourses? This poetry workshop invites students to read and write poetry that, either overtly or subtly, engages with other texts. We’ll examine ways that poems create intertextual relationships (e.g. quoting, voicing, alluding, echoing, stealing, sampling, imitating, translating…) and test out these methods in our own writing. Students should expect to engage with the basic question of how their work relates to other poets and poems. Expect to read a substantial amount of work by modern and contemporary poets, submit new original poems for workshop, complete intertextual writing exercises, participate in discussion forums with both initial response papers and follow-up comments, critique peers’ work, and submit a final portfolio. A substantial amount of class time will be spent workshopping student work. (Nathan Hoks)
Creative Writing Studio: Sounding Out Voice in Translation (CRWR 40253) Winter 2027
How do we hear the voice of a text when we’re reading in another language? What makes a voice intrinsically itself? And where can we locate those qualities in the language that the voice speaks in? This workshop explores what translators read for when constructing a narrative or poetic voice in English. Students will select a long-form literary text to translate, and we will work through the drafting process by breaking the text down into short extracts that we will close-read together each week in class. In doing so, we’ll listen through the translation for evidence of how the source wants to sound, in order to discern its voice, its tendencies, and how it behaves in language. Our own translation work will be accompanied by assigned readings that represent a range of contemporary world literature in translation, paying attention to what the translator does with English to sketch a cohesive voice. We’ll build toward the polished translation of a short prose text or a selection of poems, which students will submit as part of a final portfolio, along with a translator’s note that provides critical commentary on their reading of the source text and their treatment of it in translation. (Annie Janusch)
A more comprehensive list of courses and descriptions is available at the Creative Writing course page.
Creative Writing Specialization
The Creative Writing Specialization allows students to structure their coursework and thesis around Creative Writing within MAPH. Students who complete the following requirements will receive a Creative Writing transcript notation:
- MAPH Core course (Foundations of Interpretive Theory).
- 2 Creative Writing Workshops (I and II) in the same genre
- 2 Creative Writing Electives
- These can be any combination of: Winter Quarter Thesis/Major Projects Workshop, CRWR Studios, Workshop I’s in alternate genres, or additional Workshop II’s in primary genre.
Please direct any questions you may have about specializing in Creative Writing to maph-support@uchicago.edu.
Two-Year Language Option for Creative Writing
MAPH's Two-Year Language Option is a great way for students to pursue advanced work in literary translation in their second year. Some possibilities might include advanced workshops on literary translation in various genres, upper-level undergraduate seminars and graduate courses in non-Anglophone literatures across a range of geographical regions and historical periods, and courses on translation theory.
Lawrence Grauman Jr. Fellowship Fund
The Grauman Fellowship, made possible by a generous legacy gift from Lawrence Grauman Jr. (AM '63), supports MAPH students studying English and/or Creative Writing, with a strong preference whenever possible for students who focus their studies on nonfiction writing or literary journalism.
MAPH applicants who plan to work on creative nonfiction or literary journalism can indicate an interest in the Grauman Fellowship on their application.
Recent Creative Writing Thesis Projects
"Fires in Eden: A Novel and Exploration of Black Subjectivity and the Black Radical Imagination"
Cas Crevocoeur, MAPH '26
Advisor: Julie Iromuanya
"A Necrology: A Gothic Magic Realist Novel"
Jasmine Jones, MAPH '26
Advisor: Stephanie Soileau
“Brains, Bodies, and In-Betweens: A Guidebook for Swamptown and Necropolitics in Horror Depictions of the Fragmented Self”
Claire Moacdieh, MAPH ‘25
Advisor: Valer Popa
“Writing Through Heartbreak and Reconciliation”
Autumn Davis, MAPH ‘25
Advisor: Nicholas Twemlow