Creative Writing (MFA)

Prospective Applicants must complete the following for consideration into the program:

• Complete the online application.
• Official copies of all college transcripts.
• A 1,000-word essay in response to a book of fiction, creative nonfiction or poetry published within the last 10 years. The book you choose to write on must correspond to the genre for which you are applying (e.g., poetry applicants should write an essay in response to a poetry collection).
• A 500-word personal statement on what you hope to achieve from the program; your reading life and which authors have been especially important or influential to you as a writer; any challenges or obstacles you have faced in your writing life as a result of your background and how you have responded to those challenges; and your current writing projects.
• A creative writing sample in the genre for which you are applying.
  • Prose (fiction or creative nonfiction) should be no more than 25 double-spaced pages of one or several stories/essays, a portion of a novel/memoir, or a combination. If submitting a novel excerpt, please attach a brief plot synopsis.
  • Poetry should be no more than 10 single-spaced pages, with no more than one poem per page.

The course listing for the program is as follows:

Permanent Faculty

Aaron Angello (he/him) is an assistant professor of English at Hood College, where he directs the theatre program and teaches courses in creative writing, modern and contemporary poetry, film and media, and drama. He is also creative director of the Endangered Species (theatre) Project and founder of the Frederick Shakespeare Festival. His poetry and essays have appeared in numerous journals, and he is the editor of The Synergistic Classroom: Interdisciplinary Teaching in the Small College Setting. His genre-defying book The Fact of Memory: 114 Ruminations and Fabrications was published in 2022 by Rose Metal Press.

Amy Gottfried (she/her) is a professor of English at Hood College and advises the undergraduate literary magazine, Wisteria. She teaches courses in environmental writing, advanced fiction, and American literature, and has twice earned Hood’s Excellence in Teaching award. Her short fiction has appeared in Passager, Glimmer Train, Adirondack Review, Blunderbuss and Brain, Child. Awards include Blunderbuss’s 2015 Best Stories and Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open, Family Matters, and Short Short Fiction contests. She is currently working on her third novel and a short story collection.

Dorian Elizabeth Knapp (she/her) is the author of three poetry collections, Causa Sui (Three Mile Harbor Press, 2025), winner of the Three Mile Harbor Book Award; Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak (Washington Writers’ Publishing House, 2019), winner of the Jean Feldman Poetry Prize; and The Spite House (C&R Press, 2011), winner of the De Novo Poetry Prize. She is the founding director of the low-residency MFA in creative writing at Hood College and lives in Maryland with her family.

2026 Guest Writers

Christopher Kondrich is the author of Valuing (University of Georgia Press, 2019), selected by Jericho Brown as a winner of the National Poetry Series, and Contrapuntal (Free Verse Editions, 2013). A winner of The Iowa Review Award for Poetry and The Paris-American Reading Series Prize, his work has received support from the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences and the I-Park Foundation. New poems appear or are forthcoming in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Antioch Review, The Believer, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Crazyhorse, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Witness, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts and a Ph.D. from the University of Denver. An associate editor for 32 Poems, he lives and works in Maryland.

Susan Muaddi Darraj (she/her) is an award-winning writer of books for adults and children. She won an American Book Award, two Arab American Book Awards, and a Maryland State Arts Council Independent Artists Award. In 2018, she was named a USA Artists Ford Fellow. Her books include her linked short story collection, A Curious Land, as well as the Farah Rocks children’s book series. She lives in Baltimore, where she teaches creative writing at Harford Community College and the Johns Hopkins University. Her new novel, Behind You Is the Sea, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Aaron Hamburger (he/him) is the author of a story collection, The View from Stalin’s Head, which was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and nominated for a Violet Quill Award. He has also written three novels: Faith for Beginners, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, Nirvana Is Here, winner of a Bronze Medal from the 2019 Foreword Reviews Indies Book Awards, and Hotel Cuba, featured by NPR and named a Best Book of 2023 by Hadassah Magazine. He has taught creative writing at Columbia University, the George Washington University, New York University, Brooklyn College, and the Stonecoast MFA Program.

Robert Eversz is the author of six novels that have been translated into 15 languages. He received an MFA from the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television and continues to study and teach film in addition to writing fiction and nonfiction. His novels include Shooting Elvis, named the best crime novel of the year in Oslo’s leading daily paper, Aftenposten, and best comic novel in the Manchester Guardian; Gypsy Hearts, given a starred review by Kirkus; Killing Paparazzi, which was named among the year’s best books by the Washington Post Book World; Burning Garbo, a finalist for the Nero Wolfe Award; Digging James Dean, listed as an Editor’s Choice in the Boston Globe and Mystery of the Month by BookPage; and Zero to the Bone, given a starred review by Publisher’s Weekly and listed by January Magazine as one of the best books of the year.

Airea D. Matthews’ first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which received the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. The collection explores longing, desire, and inheritance with power, insight, and intense emotion. New Yorker critic Dan Chiasson describes Matthews’s experimental forms as, “Fugues, text messages to the dead, imagined outtakes from Wittgenstein, tart mini-operas, fairy tales: Matthews is virtuosic, frantic, and darkly, very darkly, funny.” Matthews is also the author of Bread and Circus, a memoir-in-verse contending with the realities of class and race, which was awarded The 2024 LA Times Book Prize in Poetry.

Lauren Francis-Sharma, a child of Trinidadian immigrants, has written about the Caribbean in both of her critically-acclaimed novels, ’Til the Well Runs Dry and Book of the Little Axe. Lauren holds a degree in English Literature with a minor in African-American Studies from the University of Pennsylvania, a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School, and an MFA from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Lauren, a book reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle and a MacDowell Fellow, is also the assistant director of Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College.

Victoria Lancelotta is the author of Ways To Disappear: Stories, Here in the World: 13 Stories, and the novels Far and Coeurs Blesses. Her short fiction has been included in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and magazines including Agni, The Gettysburg Review, The Southern Review, and others. She has been a fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Djerassi Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony, and is the recipient of a Tennessee Individual Artist Fellowship, multiple Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Grants, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. A Baltimore native, she now lives with her husband in Frederick, Maryland.

John Cotter is the author of the novel Under the Small Lights and the memoir Losing Music, which Oprah Daily calls, “as much a love letter to sound itself as it is a chronicle of loss; your world will sound different after reading it.” The Millions calls Losing Music, “a powerful addition to the memoir canon—hard-hitting, beautiful, profound.” And The Wall Street Journal says, “Evidence that Mr. Cotter’s ear is still keen for the melodies of language sings from every page.” Losing Music was a Vulture Best Book of 2023 and winner of the 2024 Colorado Book Award. John has written about hotel bars for The New York Times, camping in a homeless shelter for Guernica, and mysterious dinosaurs for Prairie Schooner. Further fiction, essays, and criticism, have appeared in New England Review, Epoch, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Georgia Review, Adroit, and Joyland.

Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union (winner of the 2019 Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize) and Haint (winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry). She is the recipient of the 2022 Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award and Poetry Society of America's 2020 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award. She has received grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and The Freya Project. She currently serves on the Cave Canem Board of Directors and on the Lit Youngstown and Poetry Daily Board. For 20 years, she curated the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series Curator and Poetry Programs for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

2025 Guest Writers: Susan Muaddi Darraj, James Allen Hall, Donna Hemans, Steven Leyva, Aaron Hamburger, and Tonee Mae Moll.

2024 Guest Writers: Sandra Beasley, celeste doaks, Robert Eversz, James Allen Hall, Donna Hemans, Steven Leyva, Cleyvis Natera, and Elly Williams.

Summer Residencies

Click here to see our 2025 MFA student handbook.

The cornerstone of the low-residency MFA in creative writing is the intensive residency experience. For 10 days in June, students in the program attend residencies on the Hood College campus, during which they participate in rigorous writing workshops and attend lectures, panels and readings by permanent and guest faculty and graduating students. Residencies are designed to immerse students in activities and subjects central to the writing life and to foster a sense of community and fellowship with other writers; therefore, students are strongly encouraged to stay on campus in one of our newly renovated dorms for the duration of each residency. Visits to Frederick’s thriving historic Downtown are part of the residency; restaurants, shops, theatre, bars, art galleries, concerts and a wonderful independent bookstore are all a 10-minute walk from campus. Room and board are included in the residency fees. View a sample of the summer 2025 residency schedule here.

At the core of the residency is the writing workshop, in which developing writers share their work for critique and provide commentary on the work of other members. Led by an accomplished writer in each genre, workshops meet in the mornings every other day, and students are guaranteed an expert and detailed review of their work.

In the afternoons, faculty and graduating students present lectures and panels on a range of topics within literary history, theory and practice, while evenings are devoted to literary readings. At the end of the residency period, students return to their individual writing lives reenergized and recommitted to the practice of writing. They then commence a period of concentrated reading and writing in the semester between residencies under the close guidance of a faculty mentor.

For the second residency, students may elect to attend the Prague Summer Program for Writers, the nation’s oldest study-abroad program for creative writers in the English language. Approximately 2,000 established and aspiring writers have attended the Prague Summer Program since its inception in 1993. Included among the program’s outstanding permanent faculty are two MacArthur Fellows and a National Book Award winner in fiction. Fees for the three-week program are equal to those for a 10-day on-campus residency. Students are responsible for their own airfare and meals, but breakfast is provided with program housing. Two fully-funded teaching assistantships are available for each residency, one in poetry and one in prose. Assistantships are competitive.

Mentorship Semesters

Along with the residency experience, literary mentorship is a hallmark of the low-residency MFA in creative writing. The mentorship semester is designed to help students develop a close working relationship with an experienced teacher and published author who can direct them in all matters of literary craft, criticism and publishing. As immersive experiences, the mentorship semesters also provide students with a solid foundation in literary history, theory and practice, and students are expected to read broadly and deeply both within their genre and across genres.

Under the guidance of a faculty mentor, students produce original creative work while simultaneously developing their own course of study within the areas of literary history, theory, and practice. At the beginning of each semester, students confer with their faculty mentor to create a reading list, along with a submission schedule for critical essays and original work. Over the course of each semester, students submit to their faculty mentor packets of original poetry or prose and critical essays. The faculty mentor then provides extensive feedback, including suggestions for revision and further reading. Participation in the residencies is required for enrollment in the mentorship semesters.

Advantages of the Low-Residency Model

The low-residency model for an MFA in creative writing offers several advantages compared to traditional full-residency programs, including: 

1. Flexibility. Low-residency programs are designed to accommodate students who may have work, family or other commitments that make it challenging to attend a full-time, on-campus program. With the low-residency model, you have the flexibility to continue working or fulfilling other responsibilities while pursuing your degree.
2. Geographic Independence. Low-residency programs allow students to participate from anywhere in the world. You are not limited by geographical proximity to a specific institution, which means you can choose a program that aligns with your interests and needs regardless of your location.
3. Intensive Residency Periods. Low-residency programs typically include short, intensive residencies on campus or at a designated location. During these residencies, you have the opportunity to engage in workshops, panels, readings and networking events with faculty and fellow students. This concentrated period of interaction provides a focused and immersive experience.
4. Personalized Attention. In low-residency programs, students work closely with faculty mentors or advisers. One-on-one mentorship allows for personalized attention and guidance tailored to your specific writing goals and needs. This individualized approach will help you hone your craft and develop your unique voice.
5. Diverse Perspectives. Low-residency programs attract students from a variety of backgrounds, cultures and experiences. The cohort of students often includes individuals with diverse perspectives and writing styles. This enriches the learning environment, fosters cross-cultural understanding and encourages creative collaboration.
6. Cost Savings. Low-residency programs may offer cost savings compared to full-residency programs. Since you are not residing on campus full-time, you can save on expenses such as housing and commuting. This can make pursuing an MFA more financially feasible for some individuals. 

With an MFA in creative writing, you can pursue a variety of career paths related to writing, literature and communication, including:

• Author. An MFA in creative writing equips you with the skills and knowledge necessary to write and publish your own literary works. Through the mentorship semesters and summer residencies, you will develop your craft and learn about the business of literary publishing.
• Editor. MFA graduates work as editors for publishing houses and literary magazines, or as freelance editors. You can help writers polish their manuscripts by providing feedback and copy edits.
• Copywriter. Advertising agencies, marketing firms and businesses hire creative writers to develop persuasive and engaging copy for advertisements, websites, product descriptions and other promotional materials.
• Content Writer. With the rise of digital media, there is a high demand for skilled content writers. You can create engaging articles, blog posts, social media content and other written material for websites, online publications and businesses.
• Literary Agent. As a literary agent, you can represent authors and their literary works. You'll review manuscripts, negotiate publishing contracts and guide writers through the publishing process.
• Writing Instructor/Professor. Many MFA graduates find fulfillment in teaching creative writing. You can work as an instructor or professor at universities, colleges, writing workshops or community centers, sharing your knowledge and helping aspiring writers develop their skills.
• Freelance Writer. You can work as a freelance writer, taking on a range of writing assignments. This may include magazine articles, blog posts, ghostwriting projects, content creation for businesses or contributing to anthologies and literary journals.
• Communications Specialist. Corporations, nonprofit organizations and government agencies often employ MFA graduates as communications specialists. You can write press releases, speeches, reports and other communication materials.
• Writing Coach/Consultant. With your expertise, you can offer your services as a writing coach or consultant. This involves assisting aspiring writers, providing feedback on their work and helping them improve their writing skills.

Many MFA graduates combine multiple roles or pursue a mix of freelance and traditional employment opportunities to build a diverse career in the writing field.