Dear Prospective Students,
Our Master in Fine Arts faculty is comprised of a dedicated group of poets and fiction writers who have won awards ranging from Guggenheim to MacArthur Fellowships, and who have—collectively—written, translated, and edited more than fifty books. Each year, we draw nine poets and nine fiction writers from an international applicant pool of roughly 1,000. These students spend two years taking craft classes, workshops and literature classes, attending readings, and meeting individually with faculty members. At the end of their second year, our students submit their MFA theses.
The acclaimed Zell Visiting Writers Series brings more than a dozen poets and fiction writers to campus every year, both to read and meet with students. Recent visitors include Alice McDermott, Ada Limón, Torrey Peters, Elizabeth Alexander, Charles Baxter, Ocean Vuong, Justin Torres, Anne Carson, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ross Gay and Rumaan Alam. Our students also participate in reading series themselves, and are able to apply for the University of Michigan Hopwood Awards. Named for their benefactor Avery Hopwood, a preeminent playwright of the Jazz Age, the Hopwood Awards collectively offer more than $250,000 in prize money every year to Michigan graduate and undergraduate writers.
Our alumni have gone on to accomplish remarkable things, garnering—in recent years—the National Book Award, The Yale Younger Poets Award, the Whiting Award, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, and many other honors. Their work has appeared in acclaimed venues such as The New Yorker, and been anthologized in collections such as The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Poetry. Their books have also been published by some of the most celebrated imprints and presses in the country, including Scribner, Riverhead, Viking, and Graywolf. (Here is an incomplete list of books by our alumni.) Many have gone on to teach and champion literary arts in colleges and universities as well as in publishing houses, arts foundations, and community programs.
These are all individual successes, of course, but grounded and nurtured, we believe, in a program culture that reflects the best values of a good writing workshop: empathy, compassion, rigor, dedication, collegiality and mutual respect (including respectful disagreement). We delight in being a diverse community - drawn from many different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives - united in the shared endeavor of creating meaningful art.
On behalf of my colleagues and our students, thank you for your interest, and very best wishes for your own writing.
Sincerely,
Peter Ho Davies
Director of the Helen Zell Writers' Program
Please direct admissions and academic inquires to graduate.english@umich.edu and Helen Zell Writers' Series, author/agent inquires to Julie Cadman-Kim (kimjulie@umich.edu).
