WVWC MFA: Write in the Heart of Appalachia

Cultivate a writing life. Join a writing community.

West Virginia Wesleyan’s low-residency Master of Fine Arts program offers writers the opportunity to study fiction, nonfiction or poetry with accomplished and dedicated mentors in an intimate, student-centered environment. Read what students are saying, explore recent program news, learn more about the low-residency model, and investigate our new cross-genre study and audit options.

• Faculty/student ratio of no greater than 1:4

• Grounding in the best of past and current writing

• Emphasis on craft and technique

The MFA is a two-year, 49 credit hour program. Students join an extraordinarily warm community every summer and winter for an intensive ten-day residency that initiates an independent semester of apprenticeship completed off-site through correspondence with a mentor. Students work with a mixture of new and returning faculty, working one-on-one with a different faculty mentor within their discipline throughout each residency and off-campus period.

Located in central Appalachia, the program welcomes and fosters writing that explores place and identity, though that emphasis is secondary to fostering excellence in all writing, and applicants are accepted on the basis of writing quality, regardless of thematic content. As a natural outgrowth of investigation of place, interested students may substitute one campus residency with a Wesleyan-supervised field seminar in Ireland, or may design and propose a seminar for other travel destinations.

For more information, including student testimonials, on Wesleyan's MFA program, visit the MFA page on Wesleyan's website, or contact program director Jessie Van Eerden at vaneerden@wvwc.edu.