Letter from the Director
Graduate Program Menu
Welcome. This is Eric Goodman, Director of Creative Writing. I’m glad you’ve found our website. Here are a few facts about our Master’s program that may interest you.
We have no more than 25 graduate students here at any one time, divided among our well-established poetry and fiction concentrations and the new track in creative non-fiction we began piloting in 2006. With nine full time creative writing faculty (we also have more than 270 undergraduate majors), we can give each student a great deal of attention. More than 90% of the graduate students receive graduate assistantships currently worth $11,542/year plus $1,800 in the summer. (More than half teach, after receiving extensive training from one of the best composition-rhetoric programs in the country.) And in Oxford, Ohio, a quiet, pretty, friendly place 50 minutes outside Cincinnati, that’s enough to live relatively comfortably, and write, write, write.
Within the past few years, work from present and former Miami graduate students has appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Short Stories, Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Workshops, Best American Gay Fiction, and won AWP Intro Journals Awards in Poetry, Fiction and Creative Non-Fiction. Recent graduates have had first books published by Random House, Alfred A. Knopf, Harcourt and in spring 2005, for the first time, a member of the fiction program sold a novel while still in the workshop. Adrienne Miller, Esquire’s literary editor, periodically returns to campus; Ms. Miller was an undergraduate creative writing major at Miami, who graduated in 1994, and published her first novel in 2005. Poetry, creative non-fiction and short fiction from Miami M.A.s has also appeared recently in premier journals including Antioch Review, Black Warrior Review, Descant, Exquisite Corpse, Glimmer Train, Greensboro Review, Kenyon Review, Paris Review, River Styx, Shenandoah, Seneca Review, Tampa Review, Third Coast and Witness.
In short, the program is thriving. The students publish. My colleagues and I publish. We like our students and each other. Many well-known writers visit each year, some just to read, two for week-long Sprint courses with our graduate students. Because of the small size of the program, both first and second year students play key roles in editing OxMag, our graduate-student edited, Pushcart Prize-winning literary journal. One graduate student works with the Miami University Press, which started in 1992, publishing two books annually from poets in mid-career. In the fall of 2004, the MU Press’s mission changed, with the publication of our first collection of short fiction, Marianne Villaneuva’s Mayor of the Roses, followed in 2005 by Rainbow Darkness, an anthology of African American poetry edited by Keith Tuma. In 2005, MU Press launched its annual Novella Prize competition and published the winning entry, The Waiting Room, by Albert Sgambati.
Each year, it seems, one or two of our best M.A.s wins a full-ride fellowship to one of the top M.F.A. or creative writing Ph.D programs in the country. (To read the comments of former Miami graduate students, go to Student Comments.)
One more thing. Many people wonder why we, in Southwest Ohio, are called Miami. Are we lost? Hallucinating? Founded in 1809 (before Florida achieved statehood), we’re located in the scenic Miami River Valley, named for the local Miami tribe. It turns out the other Miami was settled by wandering Ohioans who missed the area, and named it in our honor. Daytona Beach is similarly named for Dayton, Ohio, 50 miles up the road.
So now you know. We’re looking for a few good poets, fiction and creative non-fiction writers each year who yearn to write better and to make a career. No guarantees on the career, but we’ll feed you and teach you, keep you here for two productive years and send you on your way as a better writer.