The Goucher College English Department offers a program in Creative Writing for students of all levels of interest and ability-- from those who want to experiment to those who seriously plan careers as fiction writers or poets. Fiction and Poetry workshops and tutorials are conducted by nationally recognized professional writers: poet Elizabeth Spires and novelist Madison Smartt Bell. Guest writers teach courses annually under the auspices of the Kratz Center For Creative Writing.
For especially talented and committed students, a concentration in Creative Writing Program is available within the English Major. Well-qualified freshmen and transfer students may enter the program during their first year at Goucher. Counseling about publication and graduate-level Creative Writing degrees is a specialty of this program. Both Bell and Spires have worked with well-published students at Goucher and elsewhere, and both are committed to preparing students for the realities of a literary career.
The Goucher Creative Writing Concentration is a multi-tiered program which offers qualified students the opportunity to specialize in poetry, fiction writing, or a combination of the two for a three-year or four-year period. The first tier of the program consists of the 200 and 300-level poetry workshops taught by Elizabeth Spires and the 100, 200 and 300-level fiction workshops taught by Madison Smartt Bell and by Kratz Center visiting writers. These courses are typically, though not necessarily, taken consecutively in the same year, and are designed to introduce students to the second tier: the Advanced Creative Writing Seminar team-taught by Bell and Spires, in which poetry and fiction students are combined in a single group. Qualified students may advance from the team-taught course to a second Advanced Workshop, taught each spring semester by the Kratz Center visiting writer.
The objective of the top-tier workshops is to build for every student a portfolio suitable for applications to MFA programs in Creative Writing. This enterprise is continued in private tutorials offered to qualified students who have completed the Advanced Seminar. These 400-level tutorials provide a one-on-one editorial experience for students who may be working to complete a novel or a cycle of stories or poems, and who will also receive advice about preparing and polishing their work for publication. A Senior Thesis in Creative Writing is also an option for exceptionally well-qualified students.
Goucher College offers two $500 Reese Awards for students in both poetry and fiction, and also sponsors the Sarah Deford Academy of American Poets Prize. Alumnae of the Creative Writing Program have entered graduate-level Creative Writing Programs at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Hollins College, the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, the University of Maryland, the University of Virginia, and Columbia University.
The Goucher College Creative Writing Program has been a member of the Associated Writing Programs since 1991. Goucher students have been winners of the Intro publication prize, an annual contest sponsored by AWP for both graduate and undergraduate-level creative writing programs, three times in poetry and once in fiction. Recent graduates include Jenn Crowell, 1999, author of Necessary Madness, John Mcmanus, 1999, author of Stop Breaking Down, and Christine Stewart, whose poetry collection won The Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship in 1998. For more information on student accomplishments, and a sampler of student fiction, please visit Goucher College Fiction Workshop.
Elizabeth Spires (B.A. Vassar College; M.A. Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars) is the author of three volumes of poetry: Globe (Wesleyan University Press); Swan's Island (Holt, Rinehart & Winston); Annonciade (Viking/Penguin) and most recently Worldling (Norton). Her poems have appeared in many magazines nationwide, including the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Mademoiselle, the New Criterion , Poetry, and the American Poetry Review. Her work is also featured in anthologies such as The Best American Poems and the Pushcart Prize. Professor Spires has also published three books for children: Riddle Road, With One White Wing, and The Mouse of Amherst. Her awards and fellowships include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two fellowships in writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, and a Whiting Writers' Award.
Elizabeth Spires has taught Creative Writing at Loyola College, Washington College, and at the Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins University, as well as in summer programs such as the Breadloaf Writers' Conference and the Wesleyan Writers' Conference.
Madison Smartt Bell (A.B. Princeton University; M.A. Hollins College) is the author of nine novels, The Washington Square Ensemble , Waiting For the End of the World, Straight Cut , The Year of Silence, Soldier's Joy , Doctor Sleep, Save Me Joe Louis, All Souls' Rising and Ten Indians along with two volumes of short stories, Zero db and Barking Man. His short fiction has frequently appeared in the Best American Short Stories annual anthology, and in magazines such as Harper's, the Atlantic, Antaeus , the Hudson Review, and the North American Review . His reviews and literary criticism appear in the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Village Voice, Antaeus, Harper's, and Spin.
Bell has taught Creative Writing at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Writing Seminars of Johns Hopkins University, and in summer programs at Wesleyan and Columbia Universities, among others. His fellowships include grants from the Howard Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment of the Arts. His fiction writing textbook, Narrative Design, was published by Norton in 1997. His eighth novel, All Souls' Rising, was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award and the 1996 PEN/Faulkner Award.
The Goucher Creative Writing Program has been augmented by the Kratz Center for Creative Writing, founded in 1999 by a gift from alumna Eleanor Kratz Denoon. The Kratz Center brings visiting writers to Goucher, both to teach writing courses and to lecture and read from their work. The presence of the Kratz Center considerably expands Goucher's offerings to Creative Writing students. Recent and upcoming visitors include David Guterson (winner of the PEN/Faulkner award for Snow Falling on Cedars, alumna Darcey Steinke (author of Jesus Saves), and Reynolds Price, author of numerous best-selling works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Other distinguished writers who have read at Goucher include Carolyn Chute, author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine; David Bradley, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; Anthony Hecht; W.S. Merwin; George Garrett, winner of the T.S. Eliot Award and the Bernard Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story; Jill McCorkle; Joyce Carol Oates, A.R. Ammons, Russell Banks; Josephine Jacobsen, Mary Gaitskill, Richard Bausch, and Edwidge Danticat.
The Women Writing About Women Festival brings another well-known writer to Goucher each year, and students have access to active reading series at Loyola College and the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars.
The 100, 200, and 300-level fiction workshops are tracked sequentially from one semester to the next. The 200 and 300 level poetry workshops are similarly sequenced. Both sequences are tracked toward English 315, the Advanced Creative Writing Seminar, to which entry is selective, based on the quality of a work sample submitted, either poetry or fiction or both.
Students may bypass the introductory or intermediate courses and apply directly upper level courses by submitting a work sample. Students may also bypass the 200 level courses and enter the 300 level workshops in either genre by submitting a work sample or obtaining the instructor's permission. Because of enrollment pressure, students are advised to submit a work sample to both the 200 level and 300 level fiction workshops; those who do so will be given priority over those who do not.
Although this tracking pattern allows for some flexibility, students who are interested in doing work over two or three years of their Goucher career in both poetry and fiction are advised to complete the sequential courses in both genres before entering English 315. Students who have already taken English 315 will ordinarily not be permitted to enter lower level courses in either genre.