Oklahoma State University

Program description: Oklahoma State University’s graduate creative writing program offers you the opportunity to study in a vibrant, supportive, friendly community of poets and writers of both fiction and creative nonfiction. Stillwater is smallish and growing, the university is large and beautiful, and two large cities—Tulsa and Oklahoma City—are only a little over an hour’s drive away. If you’re familiar with this part of the country, you’ll feel right at home; if you aren’t, you’ll be intrigued by Oklahoma’s landscape and complicated history and, of course, our lively literary community itself.

Our MFA curriculum is focused on workshop with lots of latitude for you to design your own path, and our PhD allows you to specialize in both an area of creative writing and another in literature, screen studies, composition/rhetoric, or TESOL/linguistics—or you can specialize in two areas in creative writing. In summer you might want to travel to Taos to the Doel Reed Center for short courses.

Both the OSU Center for Poets and Writers in Tulsa and the program at the Stillwater campus bring in celebrated writers for readings and craft talks, and our graduate student organization, the Creative Writers Association, sponsors writers of their choice every year as well. Quiet enough to get lots of work done, energetic enough to find plenty of people to talk to and lots to do, dedicated faculty and a diverse English department, we have the perfect balance for graduate student success.