Imagine the pressure to write a story about a top 10 creative writing program. It better be good! Well, C-VILLE succumbed, so we’ll just tell you this: The Atlantic Magazine ranked UVA’s Master of Fine Arts (MFA) creative writing program among the best in the nation.
The article, titled "Where Great Writers Are Made," used four criterion in finding the 10 best programs: alumni, faculty, selectivity and funding. Even with those benchmarks, Edward J. Delany, the article’s author, admitted that the quality of creative writing pedagogy is awfully hard to quantify, using an apt metaphor: "You can count how many bottles go in, and how many empties go out, but you can’t prove the party was fun."
While UVA’s high-wattage alumni, such as Edward P. Jones and Franz Wright, rank up there with other programs, the program’s big-name faculty sets it apart. Ann Beattie, John Casey, Rita Dove, Deborah Eisenberg, Gregory Orr and Charles Wright all teach there. (In case you don’t recognize these names, just remember, they’re famous…for writers.) UVA is also one of the most selective programs. Of the more than 500 applicants each year, it takes five fiction writers and five poets.
But where UVA really makes its mark is funding—hunger may have fueled Hemingway’s early writing, but he sure needed booze money to inspire The Sun Also Rises. In 2005, the University of Michigan started something of an MFA-funding arms race when, according to The Atlantic, a $5 million donation allowed it to waive tuition and actually pay its students $20,000 their first year. UVA responded by cutting a slot so as to boost its first-year stipend to $15,000.
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