Creative Writing Program Celebrates Accomplishments

Eagle students, faculty and staff recently flocked to Showalter Hall to join Eastern’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program as it celebrated recent and forthcoming publications by current faculty members and local alumni.

Along with snacks and drinks, the April 30 event featured readings in poetry and prose from a host of esteemed Eagle writers — Polly Buckingham, Christopher Howell, and Jonathan Johnson among them.

“We are so happy for the opportunity to finally have our MFA community on the Cheney campus,” said Kevin Decker, department chair of EWU’s English and philosophy programs. Established in 1978, the MFA at EWU is a two-year, full residency, studio-based program featuring an intensive study of fiction and poetry.

Additionally, Eastern’s MFA candidates gain experience in publishing, festival promotion and teaching composition and creative writing to undergraduate students while enrolled.

“The writers who came out of this program, some of whom will be reading here tonight, are inspirations and examples of what this community can do,” Decker said. He also emphasized that students in the program have long benefitted from these literary role models who have shaped the presence of the creative writing community in the Inland Northwest for almost fifty years.

Writers such as Jess Walter, Leyna Krow, Laura Read and Maya Jewel Zeller — along with many, many others, Decker said — show how the literary arts here at Eastern have captured, shaped and inspired the future generation of fiction and poetry students.

For more information about the MFA at EWU, including upcoming events, how to apply and more, visit the program’s website or contact Greg Spatz, the program’s director, at gspatz@ewu.edu.

**Story written by Rachel Weinberg.