Creative Writing, Low Residency MFA

The NEC MFA offers several merit-and need-based financial assistance packages.

Full Teaching Assistantships
Full Teaching Assistantships cover the full cost of tuition. The teaching load for full teaching assistants is four courses per year.

Partial Teaching Assistantships
Partial Teaching Assistantships provide partial tuition for students. The teaching load for part-time teaching assistants is one to three classes per year.

The Joel Oppenheimer Scholarship
The Joel Oppenheimer scholarship is awarded to an MFA student whose writing sample demonstrates outstanding literary achievement and exceptional promise.

The Joel Oppenheimer Scholarship is awarded in memory of the distinguished Black Mountain poet, Joel Oppenheimer, who taught at New England College from 1982 to 1988. He lived among the poets and artists of Greenwich Village, and was a columnist for The Village Voice from 1969 to 1978 before settling in Henniker, New Hampshire, where he was a popular presence in the local community. His most important publications include Collected Later Poems of Joel Oppenheimer (1997); Names and Local Arbitrations (1988); Drawing from Life: A Selection of Joel Oppenheimer’s “Village Voice” Columns (1997); Don’t Touch the Poet: The Life and Times of Joel Oppenheimer (1998); Just Friends: Friends and Lovers Poems, 1959–1962 (1980); New Spaces Poems 1975–1983 (1985); and Poetry: The Ecology of the Soul (1983).

Pilgrim Plus Scholarship
New England College provides NEC alumni with a 25% tuition discount applied to graduate level classes across a wide range of graduate programs.

For additional information and assistance with program tuition and financial aid, you may contact Student Financial Services at 603.428.2226 or sfs@nec.edu.

Complete this application if you would like to be considered for a teaching assistantship.

Upon graduation from the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, students will be able to:

• Produce and revise original works of literature through an exploratory process culminating in the completion of a substantial body of high‐quality literary work.
• Engage in rigorous critical discourse surrounding their own writing and the writing of others while developing an in-depth understanding of the writer’s craft and its use in the writing process.
• Locate their writing in historical, theoretical, and cultural contexts through an understanding of the movements that influence the writing, reading, and critical reception of literary works.
• Actively engage in academic, geographic, and cultural literary communities as they contribute to the advancement of the literary arts.
• Demonstrate the skills, knowledge, and discipline necessary for a successful postgraduate professional life in creative writing.

Allison Titus has written three books of poems, a novel, and several chapbooks. Her newest book is called HIGH LONESOME. Her honors include poetry fellowships from the NEA, Yaddo, and the Donaldson Writer-in-Residence program at William & Mary, and her work has appeared in A Public Space, Tin House, The Believer Magazine, and Ninth Letter, among other places. She is co-editor of the forthcoming anthology THE NEW SENT(I)ENCE: Revisioning the Animal in 21st Century Poetry, a collection of writing/manifesto that centers the nonhuman animal’s agency, consciousness, and creaturehood.

Andrew Morgan is a professor, poet, editor, and volunteer whose work can be found in magazines such as Conduit, Verse, Slope, Stride, Fairy Tale Review, New World Writing, Post Road, Pleiades (as part of a “Younger American Poets” feature) and is the recipient of a Slovenian Writer’s Association Fellowship, which sponsored a month-long writing residency in the country’s capital city of Ljubljana. Currently an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at New England College, his first book, Month of Big Hands, was published by Natural History Press in 2013.

Anna Qu is a Chinese-American writer. Her debut memoir, Made in China: A Memoir of Love and Labor was published in 2021 by Catapult. Publisher’s Weekly hailed the memoir as “the arrival of a new voice,” and Time has called it a must-read for the summer. Her work has appeared in the Threepenny Review, Lumina, Kartika, Kweli, and Vol.1 Brooklyn, among others. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and teaches workshops at Catapult and Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop.

Chen Chen is the author of two books of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency (2022) and When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (2017), both published by BOA Editions and by Bloodaxe Books in the UK. His latest chapbook is Explodingly Yours (Ghost City Press, 2023). Chen’s debut essay collection, In Cahoots with the Rabbit God is forthcoming from Noemi Press. His work appears in many publications, including Poetry, The Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and The New York Times. His writing is also widely anthologized, including in 100 Poems That Matter, 100 Queer Poems, three editions of The Best American Poetry, and two editions of The Forward Book of Poetry. His honors include the Thom Gunn Award, two Pushcart Prizes, the National Book Award longlist, and fellowships from Kundiman, the National Endowment for the Arts, and United States Artists. He was the 2018–2022 Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University and has taught for the Stonecoast MFA program, the Antioch MFA program, and the UMass Boston MFA program. He is also recurring faculty at the Fine Arts Work Center. He holds an MFA from Syracuse University and a PhD from Texas Tech University. He lives in Rochester, New York, and teaches for the MFA program at New England College.

Chika Unigwe was born in Enugu, Nigeria. She was educated at UNN and KUL (Belgium) and earned her PhD from Leiden University, Holland. Widely translated, she has won many awards for her writing. Her books include The Middle Sister, On Black Sisters’ Street, and Better Never than Late. She is Creative Director of the Awele Creative Trust, and she was a judge for the Man Booker International Prize in 2016. In 2016–2017, she was Bonderman Professor of Creative Writing at Brown University.

David Ryan is the author of Animals in Motion: Stories (Roundabout Press) and Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano: Bookmarked. His fiction appears in the 2022 and 2023 O. Henry Prize anthologies, The 2023 Desperate Literature Short Fiction Prize (Spain/UK), Threepenny Review, Fiction, The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, New England Review, Conjunctions, Bellevue Literary Journal, Fence, Kenyon Review, New Letters, Esquire, Tin House, BOMB, and elsewhere. His work has been anthologized in Flash Fiction Forward (W. W. Norton), Boston Noir 2: The Classics (Akashic), and The Mississippi Review: 30 Years. His nonfiction appears in The Paris Review, Tin House, BOMB, Bookforum, The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Fiction (Oxford University Press), and others. A recipient of a MacDowell fellowship and Connecticut State Arts grants, he’s a co-founding editor of Post Road Magazine, where he currently edits the Fiction and Theatre sections.

Jennifer Militello is the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. She is the author of the forthcoming hybrid collection Identifying the Pathogen, named a finalist for the 2024 FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, The Pact (Tupelo Press/Shearsman Books, 2021), called “emotionally resonant” by Publishers Weekly and “an incantatory homage to love” by the Times Literary Supplement, and the memoir Knock Wood (Dzanc Books, 2019), winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize, as well as four previous collections of poetry. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and Poetry.

Moses Ose Utomi is a Nigerian-American fantasy writer and nomad currently based out of San Diego, California. He has an MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College and short fiction publications in Fireside Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, and more. He is the author of the young adult Fantasy novel DAUGHTERS OF ODUMA and the fantasy novellas THE LIES OF THE AJUNGO and THE TRUTH OF THE ALEKE. When he’s not writing, he’s traveling, training martial arts, or doing karaoke—with or without a backing track.

Paige Ackerson-Kiely is the author of three collections of poetry—In No One’s Land (Ahsahta, 2007); My Love is a Dead Arctic Explorer (Ahsahta, 2012); Dolefully, A Rampart Stands (Penguin, 2019); and other works of poetry and prose. Her poems have appeared in numerous national and international journals, and she’s received grants and fellowships from Poets & Writers, Boomerang, Vermont Arts Council, and others. Paige is especially interested in the prose poem and is currently at work on a collection concerned with middle age and the history of transportation. She lives in New York City and directs the MFA in Writing Program at Sarah Lawrence College.

Tara Ison is the author of four novels—A Child out of Alcatraz, The List, Rockaway, and At the Hour Between Dog and Wolf—the essay collection Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies; and the short story collection Ball. Her work has appeared in Tin House; BOMB; The Kenyon Review; Salon; Black Clock; O, the Oprah Magazine; and several anthologies. She is the recipient of multiple Yaddo fellowships, the PEN Southwest Award for Creative Nonfiction, and two NEA fellowships. She is also the co-writer of the cult classic movie Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead. Ison is a Professor of Creative Writing at Arizona State University.

Andre Dubus III is the author of The Cage Keeper and Other Stories; Bluesman; and the New York Times bestsellers, House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days (soon to be a major motion picture) and his memoir, Townie, a #4 New York Times bestseller and a New York Times “Editors Choice.” His work has been included in The Best American Essays and The Best Spiritual Writing anthologies, and his novel House of Sand and Fog was a finalist for the National Book Award, a #1 New York Times Bestseller, and was made into an Academy Award-nominated film starring Ben Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly. His novella collection, Dirty Love, was published in the fall of 2013 and has been listed as a New York Times “Notable Book,” a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a 2013 “Notable Fiction” choice from The Washington Post, and a Kirkus “Starred Best Book of 2013.” His new novel, Gone So Long, was published in 2018 (W.W. Norton). Mr. Dubus has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, The National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over 25 languages, and he teaches full-time at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife, Fontaine, a modern dancer, and their three children.

Carmen Maria Machado grew up in a household where storytelling was always present and has been writing her whole life. She learned about stories through reading, as well as oral tradition in her family. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.

Carmen is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House; the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods; and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “The New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.”

Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She lives in Philadelphia and is the former Abrams Artist-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.

Jericho Brown is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Brown’s first book, Please (2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of the collection The Tradition (2019), which was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared in BuzzFeed, The Nation, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New Republic, Time, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry anthologies. He is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta.

Ocean Vuong is the author of The New York Times bestselling novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, out from Penguin Press (2019) and forthcoming in 30 languages worldwide. A recipient of a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” Grant, he is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize.

Vuong’s writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Granta, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker—alongside Hillary Clinton, Ban Ki-Moon, and Angela Merkel—Ocean was also named by BuzzFeed Books as one of “32 Essential Asian American Writers” and has been profiled on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” PBS NewsHour, Teen Vogue, Interview, Poets & Writers, and The New Yorker.

Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he serves as an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at UMass-Amherst.

Vievee Francis is the author of The Shared World, which is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press; Forest Primeval (TriQuarterly Books, 2015), winner of the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Award; Horse in the Dark (Northwestern University Press, 2012), winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize; and Blue-Tail Fly(Wayne State University Press, 2006). Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including Poetry, Best American Poetry 2010, 2014, 2017, 2019, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She has been a participant in the Cave Canem Workshops, a Poet-in-Residence for the Alice Lloyd Scholars Program at the University of Michigan, and teaches poetry writing in the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop (USA, UK, and Barbados). In 2009 she received a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and in 2010, a Kresge Fellowship. She is the recipient of the 2021 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry.

Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems is With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024). Her prior book of poetry is The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon Press, 2022). Her nonfiction book, Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions), was published in 2021. Her book of poems, OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was also a finalist for the Griffin International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as longlisted for the National Book Award. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.