MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics - University of Washington Bothell

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MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics - University of Washington Bothell

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Applications are now open for the MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics: an innovative interdisciplinary

The MFA poses the central questions of poetics, inquiring into the social, cultural, and technological aspects of writing to ask: How is creative writing an ethical, political and aesthetic endeavor? What forms might creative writing take in an interconnected, transnational society? How does new media alter the environment and possibilities for creative writing? Each academic year kicks off with the Fall Convergence, a gathering of nationally and internationally renowned writers and artists to engage topics in contemporary poetics. The year closes with the Spring Festival, where graduating students share their thesis work publicly and receive a benedictory reading from a student-nominated invited speaker. Program Highlights
-Focus on experimental writing and hybrid forms
-Vibrant roster of visiting writers, conferences, and festivals
-Evening program designed for students with jobs and other commitments
-Optional residency in second year
-Flexible part-time or full-time thesis completion
-Connections to Seattle’s thriving literary and arts scene

10/28/2026

Gamut Literary Series, in connection with uwbmfa, is pleased to announce Melanie Reed, local surrealist collage artist and writer as our first artist talk and Q&A of the academic year.

Melanie will be joining us to discuss her expertise in a presentation titled, Surrealism as Personal Narrative where she will take us through some of her collected works in order to discuss working with the unconscious, symbols, and the formal visual and textual practices that can enhance our participation in the dialogue and composition surrounding our more surreal works.

Tell all collage artists, symbolists, visual artists, writers and seekers about this event—it’s not to be missed! We encourage dialogue and questions from the audience during the Q&A portion of the talk.

All Gamut Literary Series hosted events are free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.

We look forward to connecting with everyone!

10/13/2026

Please help us welcome Thea Lenarduzzi to our first From the Convergence Zone event of the UWB MFA’s 2026-2027 academic year. We are excited to have the chance to engage with Thea about two of her recent publications, Dandelions and The Tower, and to discuss research on the terms of “Writing What You Don’t Know.”

Thea Lenarduzzi is a writer, broadcaster and editor. Her first book Dandelions (2022), a family memoir and cultural history of migration between Italy and England, won the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize and was shortlisted for the Ackerley Prize for ‘literary autobiography of outstanding merit’. The Tower (2025), a story about power, abuse, myth-making and the limits of what can be known, was shortlisted for the Tadeusz Bradecki Prize, celebrating books that combine fiction and non-fiction in original ways. A biography of Natalia Ginzburg, Collapsing Houses, is due to appear in 2027.

From the Convergence Zone is an academic series hosted by the UW-Bothell MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics program in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences.

Please register for the event at the link below or in our bio. All events are free and open to the public. https://washington.zoom.us/meeting/register/GAaL-OGlROiBn-XEtjZUUQ #/registration

Feel free to reach out with any questions to [email protected]

Photo Credit: Adam Goodison

10/08/2026

Rachel Blau DuPlessis (1941-2026)
We wish to extend our tribute to Rachel Blau DuPlessis, a friend of the program, who passed away early last month. Rachel's work, including feminist theory, literary scholarship, language-based experimentalism, and visual collage, intersected with many of the core interests of our MFA. She participated in our very first Convergence, and we were lucky to have her present as part of last year's, in a panel on the long poem. While she was alive, we wanted to honor her recent achievements, culminations of a life-work that had, as a rule, no clear end or beginning, but instead were part of an on-going process of intellection and experience, sounding and spacing. These were the two-volume publication of her monumentally anti-monumental DRAFTS project, a 114-canto work started in 1986; and its "poetics statement" as it were, A Long Essay on the Long Poem, an exhaustive (yet still tentative, essayistic) account of poems which may be hard to wrap one's mind around, but which one may live one's life in. She was a generous interlocutor, correspondent, teacher and friend to many of us, and will be missed.

10/06/2026

Join us for an information session to learn more about the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing & Poetics at the University of Washington Bothell. Our innovative program encourages writers to experiment across genres, forms and media

During the session, you’ll learn about the MFA curriculum, faculty and creative community, program highlights, admissions process and more. You’ll also have an opportunity to ask questions to help you determine whether the program is the right fit for your creative goals.

Whether you’re ready to apply or just beginning to explore graduate study in creative writing, we invite you to join us and learn more.

Some of the program highlights:
*focuses on experimental writing and hybrid forms
*includes a vibrant roster of visiting writers, conferences, and festivals
*supplies evening classes for students with jobs
*offers an optional residency in the second year
*connects you to the thriving literary and arts’ community

For more information please visit our website https://www.uwb.edu/ias/graduate/mfa or feel free to email us [email protected] and register for the info sessions using the link in our bio.

10/02/2026

We’re excited to present Amaranth Borsuk as a panelist at this year’s Fall Convergence with the theme, Inspiration & Collaboration. Amaranth will be participating on our first panel of the day on Saturday at the North Creek Event Center on UW-Bothell’s campus, 10:30am–12pm, alongside Kristina Podesva, Kazim Ali, and Terri Witek discussing, Writing with Images & Imaginaries.

Amaranth Borsuk is a poet, scholar, and book artist working at the intersection of print and digital media. Her most recent book, W/\SH (Anhinga, 2026), is a work of speculative poetry created with poet and artist Terri Witek. The book includes visual poems, fragments, and epistles envisioning a correspondence between women in two disastrous climate futures who reach for one another across their worlds, hoping to course-correct for the sake of their children. Borsuk is the author of the poetry collections Pomegranate Eater (Kore Press, 2016) and Handiwork (Slope Editions, 2012) as well as three other collaborative books of poems including: Abra (1913 Press, 2016), with Kate Durbin and Ian Hatcher; As We Know (Subito Press, 2014), with Andy Fitch; and Between Page and Screen (Siglio Press 2012, SpringGun Press, 2016) with Brad Bouse. Her contribution to the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, The Book, is a concise introduction to the book’s changing technologies that bridges book history, artists’ books, and electronic literature to reconsider an object we think we know intimately. She has collaborated on installations, art bookmarklets, interactive works, and poems, and is Associate Professor in the School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington Bothell.

You can find more info on our website https://www.uwb.edu/ias/graduate/mfa/fall-convergence or in the link in our bio where you can register! We look forward to seeing you all there.

10/01/2026

We’re thrilled to present Joe Milutis as a panelist at this year’s Fall Convergence, Inspiration & Collaboration. Joe will be speaking on our second panel of the day on Saturday at the North Creek Event Center on UW-Bothell’s campus from 1-2:30pm alongside Sarah Mangold and Nadine Maestas discussing Mythopoetics Today.

Joe Milutis is a media artist and writer whose interdisciplinary work includes experimental sound and radio; video works; new media; experimental narrative and poetics; theoretical writings; and various media/literature hybrids. Since the early 90s, after having produced a number of radio art broadcasts, his work has focused on new genres and media that have uncertain status and value. He was an early proponent of digital multimedia essays, and continues to work in the intersections between new media and contemporary writing. In recent years, he has been exploring experimental translation, in tandem with a creative project utilizing Michael Maier’s seventeenth-century alchemical emblem book, Atalanta Fugiens, as his source material. Current interests also include live video performance collaborations; internet poetry and related image-text experiments; nineteenth-century French poetry; and new Gothic writing.

You can find more information on our Fall Convergence website https://www.uwb.edu/ias/graduate/mfa/fall-convergence or in the link in our bio where you can register! We look forward to seeing you all there.

09/30/2026

We're thrilled to present Jeanne Heuving as a panelist at this year’s Fall Convergence with the theme, Inspiration & Collaboration. Jeanne will be participating on our third panel of the day on Saturday at the North Creek Event Center on UW-Bothell’s campus, 2:45–4:15pm, alongside Lee Ann Brown and Prageeta Sharma discussing, Influence, Collaboration, and Response.

Jeanne Heuving is a writer and scholar. She has recently published Indigo Angel (Black Square Editions, 2023). Comprised of three books—Mood Indigo (Selva Oscura 2019), Brilliant Corners(Chax 2022) and Air Time—Indigo Angel takes its lead from different jazz modalities as these ray out into other arts, the natural world and human history. Crypta is forthcoming from selva oscura press later this year. Heuving's The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics is in the Modern and Contemporary Poetics series (University of Alabama Press 2016). She is the editor ofNathaniel Mackey, Destination Out: Essays on His Work (U of Iowa Press, 2021), and the co-editor, along with the late Tyrone Williams, of Inciting Poetics: Thinking and Writing Poetry(Recencies Series, University of New Mexico Press, 2019). Her book Incapacity (Chiasmus Press) won a 2004 Book of the Year Award from Small Press Traffic; she has just reworkedIncapacity into the longer work, Jeanne, An Autobiography 1975-1995. Heuving founded the MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics at UW Bothell and served as its first director. She is the recipient of grants from the Fulbright Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Simpson Humanities Center, and the Beinecke Library at Yale. She was the 2021- 2022 Judith E. Wilson Fellow in Poetry, Cambridge University (UK).

You can find more information on our Fall Convergence website https://www.uwb.edu/ias/graduate/mfa/fall-convergence or in the link in our bio where you can register! We look forward to seeing you all there.

09/29/2026

We’re excited to introduce Kristina Podesva as a panelist at this year’s Fall Convergence with the theme, Inspiration & Collaboration. Kristina will be participating on our first panel of the day on Saturday at the North Creek Event Center on UW-Bothell’s campus, 10:30am–12pm, alongside Amaranth Borsuk, Kazim Ali, and Terri Witek discussing, Writing with Images & Imaginaries.

Kristina Lee Podesva is an artist, writer, teacher, and editor who works at the intersection of art making, writing, and publishing. She is currently the Editor & Publisher of B R U N A Press + Archive based in Bellingham, Washington.

From 2005 to 2015, she edited the contemporary art journal Fillip and has co-edited the publications Tradición versus Modernidad (Tradition versus Modernity), Sur: Volume 1, 100% Vancouver, and Institutions by Artists: Volume 1.

Her artwork has appeared in exhibitions at Artspeak (Vancouver), Darling Foundry (Montreal), Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver), No Soul for Sale at the Tate (London), Dorsky Gallery (Long Island City), and the Power Plant (Toronto), among other venues. In addition, her publication-based art has appeared in various books and catalogues including Waking Up from the Nightmare of Participation, Recipes for an Encounter, and The F Word.

She has taught in the MFA, BA, and Curatorial Practice MA programs at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco; the BA and Low Residency Masters of Applied Arts program at Emily Carr University in Vancouver; the MFA Critical and Pedagogical Studies Programme at the Malmö Art Academy at Lund University in Malmö, Sweden, and the BA program at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.

You can find more info on our website https://www.uwb.edu/ias/graduate/mfa/fall-convergence or in the link in our bio where you can register! We look forward to seeing you all there.

09/28/2026

We’re thrilled to welcome Sarah Mangold as a panelist at this year’s Fall Convergence, Inspiration & Collaboration. Sarah will be speaking on our second panel of the day on Saturday at the North Creek Event Center on UW-Bothell’s campus from 1-2:30pm alongside Joe Milutis and Nadine Maestas discussing Mythopoetics Today.

Sarah Mangold is the author of five poetry collections and several chapbooks, including In the Service of the Mysteries (forthcoming, Saturnalia Books, 2027), selected by Hadara Bar-Nadav for the Saturnalia Prize; The Atom (Wave Books, 2023); Her Wilderness Will Be Her Manners (Fordham University Press, 2021), selected by Cynthia Hogue for the Poets Out Loud Prize; Giraffes of Devotion (Kore Press, 2016); Electrical Theories of Femininity (Black Radish Books, 2015); and Household Mechanics (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2002), selected by C.D. Wright for the New Issues First Book Prize.

Her work has been supported by fellowships and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Millay Arts, Dora Maar House, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Willapa Bay AiR, and Artist Trust. In Seattle, she founded and edited Bird Dog, a print journal dedicated to innovative writing and art, with a particular focus on long poems and emerging women writers.

Raised in Oklahoma, Mangold earned a BA in English Literature from the University of Oklahoma and an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. Since 2008, she has worked at the University of Washington Continuum College.

You can find more information on our Fall Convergence website https://www.uwb.edu/ias/graduate/mfa/fall-convergence or in the link in our bio where you can register! We look forward to seeing you all there.

09/24/2026

We're thrilled to welcome Lee Ann Brown as a panelist at this year’s Fall Convergence with the theme, Inspiration & Collaboration. Lee Ann will be participating on our third panel of the day on Saturday at the North Creek Event Center on UW-Bothell’s campus, 2:45–4:15pm, alongside Jeanne Heuving and Prageeta Sharma discussing, Influence, Collaboration, and Response.

Lee Ann Brown was born in Japan and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina. She attended Brown University, where she earned both her undergraduate and graduate degrees. She is the author of Other Archer, which also appears in French translation by Stephane Bouquet as Autre Archere (Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2015), In the Laurels, Caught (Fence Books, 2013), which won the 2012 Fence Modern Poets Series Award, as well as Crowns of Charlotte (Carolina Wren Press, 2013), The Sleep That Changed Everything (Wesleyan, 2003), and Polyverse (Sun & Moon Press, 1999), which won the 1996 New American Poetry Competition, selected by Charles Bernstein. In 1989, Brown founded Tender Buttons Press, which is dedicated to publishing experimental women’s poetry. She has taught at Brown University, Naropa University, Bard College, and The New School, St. John’s University, among others. Brown has held fellowships with Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Yaddo, Djerassi, the MacDowell Colony, the International Center for Poetry in Marseille, France, the Howard Foundation and is now the Judith E. Wilson Poetry Fellow at Cambridge University.

You can find more information on our Fall Convergence website https://www.uwb.edu/ias/graduate/mfa/fall-convergence or in the link in our bio where you can register! We look forward to seeing you all there.

Address

18115 Campus Way NE
Bothell, WA
98011

Website

http://www.uwb.edu/mfa

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