Creative Writing
MFA in Creative Writing
Our program combines generous, attentive focus on student work with active pedagogy in a cooperative process of growth, learning, professionalization, and exploration.
Undergraduate Creative Writing
Rigorous training in poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, with emphasis on international, innovative, and publicly engaged literature.
The Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame offers graduate and undergraduate writers rigorous training in innovative literary technique as well as in traditional forms. We engage robustly with socially grounded critical thought, and give generous individual attention, balancing student-centered creative exploration with robust pedagogical support. The program’s internationally renowned faculty bring expertise in a range of genres and aesthetic approaches, as well as deep experience in publishing, criticism, and editing. As writers and teachers we are committed to the public role of literature: we see our community on campus as part of a global network of writers, poets, thinkers, and critics engaged in understanding, changing, and re-imagining our world.
Contact
Have questions about the programs in Creative Writing? Contact:
Clíona Ní Ríordáin
Director of Graduate Studies, M.F.A.
Thomas J. and Kathleen M. O’Donnell Chair in Irish Language and Literature, Department of English
Email: cniriord@nd.edu
Paul Cunningham
Creative Writing Program Manager
Email: pcunnin1@nd.edu
Events
View all eventsFaculty
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Associate Professor
Dionne Irving Bremyer is originally from Toronto, Ontario. Irving Bremyer writes fiction and nonfiction that investigates and questions personal, cultural, and national hybridity emergent in a postcolonial world. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Story, Boulevard, LitHub, Missouri Review, and New Delta Review, among other journals and magazines. Two essays, “Treading Water” and “Do You Like to Hurt,” were notable essays in Best American Essays 2017 and 2019. She is the author of the novel Quint (7.13 Books) is a fictional retelling of the true story of the Dionne Quintuplets. Her short story collection The Islands (Catapult Books) follows the lives of Jamaican women—immigrants or the descendants of immigrants—who have relocated all over the world to escape the ghosts of colonialism. Her edited collection Breastfeeding and Culture: Discourses and Representations (Demeter Press)include essays that deal with the varied and complicated ways in which cultural attitudes about mothering and female sexuality inform the way people understand, embrace, reject, and talk about breastfeeding. Irving Bremyer been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and has been awarded two Tennessee Williams scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and a scholarship and residency from the Voices of Our Nation Writers Conference. Fiction and Creative Nonfiction Writing, Caribbean Literatures, Contemporary Literature, Antiracist Writing Pedagogies, African American Literature, Narratology. -
Visiting Assistant Professor
Cynthia Cruz is the author of eight collections of poems, two collections of critical essays and one novella. Two new collections of poems are forthcoming: Sweet Repetition in 2025 from the University of Chicago Press and Twilight with Four Way Books in 2026. Cruz is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, as well as a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her recent collection of poems, Hotel Oblivion, was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Cruz earned a BA in English Literature at Mills College, an MFA in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, an MFA in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts, an MA in German Language and Literature at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, and a PhD at the European Graduate School where her research focused on Hegel and madness. Poetry and Poetics; Aesthetics and Art Criticism; German Literature, Modernist and Contemporary European LIterature; Freudian and Lacanian Psychoanalysis; and German Idealism, especially Hegel. -
Director of Creative Writing
ProfessorJohannes Göransson has books in many different genre, ranging from lyric poems to impossible theater and criticism. He has also published books by many prominent Swedish, Finland Swedish and Korean poets, including Aase Berg, Ann Jäderlund, Eva Kristina Olsson, Henry Parland and Kim Yideum. He teaches classes in poetry writing, gothic literature and translation theory. American Poetry, Swedish Poetry, Poetry in Translation, Translation Theory, -
Department Chair
William P. and Hazel B. White Professor of English2022 Guggenheim Fellow Joyelle McSweeney is the author of nine books spanning poetry, prose, drama, translation, and criticism. Her debut volume The Red Bird (2001) was selected by Allen Grossman to inaugurate the Fence Modern Poets Series; her verse play Dead Youth, or, the Leaks (2012) inaugurated the Leslie Scalapino Prize for Innovative Women Playwrights. McSweeney's poetry collection, Toxicon and Arachne (2020), called a "frightening and brilliant book" by Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker, was featured in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, MS., the Poetry Foundation, and elsewhere and awarded the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Her influential essay collection The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (2014) proposes a decadent ecopoetics and reads modern and contemporary literature in light of ecological phenomenon such as mutation, extinction and decay. McSweeney is a co-translator of the award-winning Yi Sang, Selected Works (2020). With Johannes Göransson, she is a co-founder of the international press Action Books, which has built US readerships for poets from Asia, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and elsewhere while advocating for translators and the act of translation itself. In 2022, McSweeney was recognized with the Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, honoring exceptional accomplishment in any genre. McSweeney is a Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame and has twice been awarded The Rev. Edmund P. Joyce C.S.C. Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Creative writing, poetry, poetics, translation, sound, performance, literary form, dramatic form, genre, prophecy, decadence, ecopoetics -
Professor
An NEA Fellow, Orlando Ricardo Menes was born in Lima, Perú, to Cuban parents but has lived most of his life in the U.S. He considers himself Cuban American. Since 2000 he has taught in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame where he is Professor of English. Menes is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently The Gospel of Wildflowers & Weeds (University of New Mexico Press, 2022), Memoria (Louisiana State University Press, 2019), and Heresies (University of New Mexico Press, 2015). He also won the 2012 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry for Fetish (University of Nebraska Press, 2013). His poems have appeared in several prominent anthologies, as well as literary magazines like POETRY, The Yale Review, Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and the Hudson Review, among many others. In addition, Menes is editor of Renaming Ecstasy: Latino Writings on the Sacred (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2004) and The Open Light: Poets from Notre Dame, 1991-2008 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011). Besides his own poems, Menes has published translations of poetry in Spanish, including My Heart Flooded with Water: Selected Poems by Alfonsina Storni (Latin American Literary Review Press, 2009). poetry, poetry writing, Caribbean literature, translation -
Assistant Professor
Xavier Navarro Aquino was born and raised in Puerto Rico. Named one of the writers to watch for fall 2021 by Publishers Weekly, Navarro Aquino is the author of the novel, Velorio out from HarperCollins and in Spanish from HarperCollins Español. His fiction has appeared in Tin House magazine, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, Guernica, among others. Navarro Aquino has been awarded scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a MacDowell Fellowship, and an American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellowship at Dartmouth College. Postcolonial Studies, Caribbean Literature, Hispanic/Latinx Literature, Contemporary Fiction, Contemporary Poetry, African and African American Literature -
Associate Professor
Dr. Roy Scranton is a scholar, critic, essayist, and novelist, best known for his work on war, war literature, and the philosophical challenges posed by climate change. He is the author of six books, and has written widely for publications such as the New York Times, Rolling Stone, MIT Technology Review, the Yale Review, and elsewhere.Dr. Scranton grew up in Oregon, dropped out of college, and spent his early twenties wandering the American West. He served four years in the US Army (2002–2006), including fourteen months in Iraq, then completed his bachelor’s degree and earned a master’s degree at the New School for Social Research, before earning a Ph.D. in English at Princeton.His essay “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene” was selected for the 2015 Best American Science and Nature Writing. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences at Rice University (2016), has been awarded a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities (2014), a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction (2017), and a Guggenheim Fellowship for Literary Criticism (2024), and held the inaugural Teaching Lab Fellowship at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (2021).Dr. Scranton is the founding director of the Notre Dame Environmental Humanities Initiative (EHUM). Environmental Humanities, Postcolonial Anthropocene Studies, War Literature, The Novel, Literary Journalism and the Essay, 20th-Century American Literature, Experimental Writing -
Dorothy G. Griffin College Professor of English
Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi is an American novelist and non-fiction writer. She is the author of Call Me Zebra, named a Best Book of the Year by over twenty publications and the winner of the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award, the John Gardner Award, and long listed for the PEN/Open Book Award. Her other novels include Savage Tongues and Fra Keeler, for which she received a Whiting Writers' Award and a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" award. She is the 2023-2024 Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fiction Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. A recipient of fellowships from Fulbright, the Aspen Institute, and MacDowell, her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories, The Sewanee Review, The Yale Review, The New York Times, and The Paris Review among other places. In 2020, she founded Literatures of Annihilation, Exile & Resistance, a conversation series focused on the intersection of the arts and transformational migrations. Born in Los Angeles, she spent her childhood in Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and Spain, and speaks Farsi, Italian, and Spanish. She is the Dorothy G. Griffin College Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame. Fiction and Non-Fiction Writing; Middle Eastern, Latin American, Iberian Literature, and American Literatures; Global Anglophone Literatures; Literatures of Exile/Migration; Ethics and Aesthetics of the Novel; Literary Ecology
