UCR - Palm Desert Graduate Center :: Creative Writing Programs :: NewPages Guide
University of California, Riverside –
Palm Desert Graduate Center
MFA in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts
75-080 Frank Sinatra Drive
Palm Desert, CA 92211
Website: palmdesertmfa.ucr.edu
Program director: Tod Goldberg
Program contact: Tod Goldberg
Phone: (760) 834-0928
Email: palmdesertmfa@ucr.edu
Degrees offered: Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts
Genres: Fiction, Non Fiction, Screenwriting, Poetry – students also work in a secondary genre over the course of their studies, effectively as a minor, which includes the above genres as well as playwriting.
Type of program: low residency
Length of program: 2 Years
Enrollment: Fall/Spring
Total credits required: 56
Application deadlines: Aug. 1st (for fall enrollment), Feb. 1st (for spring enrollment)
Scholarships available: no
Core faculty: Tod Goldberg, Elizabeth Crane, Mary Otis, Mary Yukari Waters, Mark Haskell Smith, Rob Roberge, David Ulin, Deanne Stillman, Matthew Zapruder, Jill Alexander Essbaum, William Rabkin, Joshua Malkin, John Schimmel, Kate Anger
Visiting faculty: For an updated list, visit www.palmdesertmfa.ucr.edu
Assistantships: no
Publishing/editing courses: yes, including paid editorial positions on The Coachella Review
Literary magazine: yes, The Coachella Review
Reading series: yes
Recent visiting writers: Jane Smiley, Dan Chaon, Dave Cullen, Steve Almond, Amy Gerstler, Valzhyna Mort, Melissa Rosenberg, Phoef Sutton, editors from Simon & Schuster, Grove, Viking, Penguin, Other Voices, Dzanc, No Tell Books, Paris Review, New York Times, The Collagist, Los Angeles Times, numerous producers and development executives, including recent visits from Furthur Films and Disney, several literary/film agents, including Bonnie Nadell, Jennie Dunham and Caren Bohrman.
Program description: The low residency MFA program at UCR-Palm Desert, the first such program in the University of California system, is unique in that it directly marries your academic pursuits with a real world emphasis on the next stage of your writing career - namely publication and production.
Students work one-on-one with their professors during the course of seven quarters of online study and five intensive 10-day residencies at the beautiful Riviera Resort & Spa in Palm Springs, CA. The program was designed and is taught by writers for writers and is open to all genres of writing - including fiction, creative nonfiction, screenwriting and poetry - and all forms within those genres, including mystery, crime, science fiction and slipstream, commercial Hollywood films and television - and at the same time is open to the wildest kind of experimental, arty, fringy writing. Students also work in a secondary genre during the course of their study which we believe helps create a well-rounded writer and provides a more in depth immersion in literature.
UCR-Palm Desert is also home to the student-edited The Coachella Review, a top online literary journal, which provides our MFA candidates with the opportunity to gain real world publishing experience and which provides limited grants to editors within the various genres.