University degrees: Postgraduate
Course length: Two years (34 credits)
In the Master of Fine Arts in Poetry program at Columbia College Chicago, you’ll see and be seen: You’ll meet visiting, critically acclaimed poets and learn from top-notch faculty members who will work with you one-on-one as you hone your writing skills and take risks in an open-minded environment. Along the way, you’ll find your own aesthetic and build a community of writers who will help you succeed.
Our Poetry MFA program offers small, intimate classes, advanced instruction in a wide breadth of poetic and literary traditions, and several opportunities to work closely with award-winning faculty members. Your experience at Columbia will help you develop the high level of skill and critical thinking you need to produce creative, effective poetry in your own unique voice.
In your first of two years at Columbia, you’ll take workshops as part of your initial graduate school experience, and you’ll dive into craft seminars and literature courses to study poetry as well as fiction and creative nonfiction. If you intend to be a graduate student instructor, you’ll take composition theory and learn how to teach. If you plan to work on Columbia Poetry Review—the student-edited, nationally distributed literary journal—you’ll start immediately.
As you finish your MFA program, you’ll take a thesis development seminar to learn how to compile and promote your writing as you work one-on-one with a faculty member to shape your thesis into a substantial manuscript. You’ll also continue to take craft seminars that challenge you to explore your unique voice. In a final poetics class, you’ll look at how other poets have shaped the genre—and where you’ll fit into that shape versus where you’ll push the boundaries.
You’ll have several opportunities outside your graduate classes to grow:
