Creative
Writing
Florida State University
405 Williams Building
Tallahassee, Florida
32306-1580
jcbaggott@aol.com
Phone: 850 644 4230
Fax: 850 644 0811
In 2006, The Atlantic Monthly ranked the top ten MFA programs and the top five PhD programs in the country. Only one program made both of those lists: Florida State University. The Creative Writing Program is now affiliated with FSU's top-ranked schools of Film and Theatre. Our faculty includes winners of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, as well as professors who are not only dedicated to the craft of writing but who are also widely known as teachers of the craft. We also happen to be located in the heart of Tallahassee: a capital city with Southern charm, where the roads are lined with live oaks and the world's best oysters are shucked fresh from the Gulf.
The Creative Writing Program at Florida State University is dedicated to bringing in a diverse, dynamic group of poets, fiction writers, essayists, and memoirists. Through the Warehouse Visiting Writers Series, Writers' Harvest, and Seven Days of Opening Nights, Florida State University has hosted recent visits by such literary heavyweights as Junot Diaz, Antonya Nelson, Salman Rushdie, Rick Moody, Kim Addonizio, Lee Smith, Martin Espada, and David Sedaris, as well as introducing our students to emerging poets and writers celebrating their debut. We also create opportunities for our students to discuss their work with editors and agents. Recent guests have included Josh Kendall, a senior editor at Viking; Jeanne Leiby, the editor of The Southern Review; and Don Share, the editor of Poetry Magazine. The schedule for next year is not yet finalized, but to see who came to visit this year, click here.
We are extremely proud of our graduate students, the lifeblood of our program. No creative writing program in the country has been included more often in Harcourt's Best New American Voices. Recent graduates have published books with Hyperion, Norton, Viking, MacAdam/Cage, Penguin, Henry Holt, Simon & Schuster, Copper Canyon, Houghton Mifflin, and several university presses. Our students have published in The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, The Southern Review, Harper's, Ploughshares, and many other distinguished magazines, as well as read on NPR's Our poets have gone on to capture major national poetry prizes resulting in book publication, including the Prairie Schooner Book Prize, the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry, and The Brittingham Poetry Prize.
Click here to see a small sampling of the recent publications and awards from our dynamic graduate students and alumni.