Write in Wyoming

We’re committed writers, attentive to your work, innovative in our approaches to teaching and mentoring. We’re located in a small Rocky Mountain town with a nice degree of funk about it, elevation 7,200 feet. The trails and scenery in the Medicine Bow Mountains are awesome.

We fully fund every student we admit, with a modest teaching load of just one course per semester, and with ample professional training in college-level instruction. (Assignments are in freshman composition, and our curriculum often includes a course that allows MFA students to co-teach an undergraduate creative-writing course.) Additional funds are available from competitive scholarships offered campus-wide. MFA students often receive robust support from scholarships and grants sponsored by UW.

In the writing program, we don't put students in competition for funding or for approval. Our workshops stress positive, constructive, open-minded engagement with every student’s work. We build out from traditional workshops in fiction and creative nonfiction, and develop new hybrid approaches that enable our students to read and write across genre. We offer special seminars on various topics—prioritizing reading, research, and career-development from the writer’s point of view. Recent course offerings include Podcasting, Flash Fiction/Nonfiction, Longform Manuscripts, Prose Meditations, and Book Arts. Beyond our program’s specific course offerings (see MFA Student Handbook on this site), you’re also free to choose elective courses from across the university.

In the first 16 years of our MFA program, we consistently have been recognized as one of the country’s best. Graduates have released award-winning books with commercial and small-press publishers, and have appeared consistently in publications including The AtlanticGranta, The New Yorker, OrionVirginia Quarterly Review, and The Best American Short Stories, to name just a few. Our students write together and play together. Many have worked in various capacities at Wyoming’s nationally renowned NPR station. Students also host their own lively and well-attended reading series downtown. They go out afterwards and have a good time. They encourage and support one another. They form lasting friendships, and they keep coming back to visit long after they graduate.

Faculty likewise work closely with students, both in classroom settings and one-on-one. Most of all, we focus on helping you find and realize your deepest intent as a writer. Our visiting-writer programming puts you in close contact with a diverse array of brilliant authors, both fellow students from neighboring grad programs, and nationally recognized writers. Our publication workshops put you into conversation with commercial and independent agents and editors, and offer experience in small-press publishing. We take pride in placing graduates in top PhD programs, and in seeing students develop careers in publishing, public radio, non-profit organization, financial-securities advising—plus one student who went back happily to his job as a fishing guide.  

We’ve designed this website and our student handbook to help answer questions you may have about how to apply to the program, and how to fulfill its requirements once you arrive. But if you have a question that you do not find answered here, please contact us and we will look forward to responding.

Contact Us

Creative Writing Program

1000 E. University Ave.

Laramie, WY 82071

Phone: 307-766-6452

Fax: 307-766-3189

Email: cw@uwyo.edu

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