Our History
The University of Wisconsin-Madison has a long and rich literary tradition. Even before the Program in Creative Writing was founded, the University's students included such distinguished writers as Eudora Welty, Delmore Schwartz, Saul Bellow, Jean Toomer, Lorraine Hansberry, Joyce Carol Oates, Carl Djerassi, Peter Straub, Ed Ochester, Anne Lauterbach, and Wallace Stegner, while writers teaching at the University included James Merrill, James Dickey, Wallace Stegner, Dean Young and Steve Stern.
The Program in Creative Writing was established In 1978 by professor and poet Ron Wallace. It is one of four programs in the Department of English, the others being the programs in Literary Studies, Composition & Rhetoric and English Language & Linguistics.
The Program in Creative Writing initially focused entirely on undergraduates, offering them the chance to major in English with an emphasis in either fiction or poetry. The capstone of this course of study was, and remains, the book-length thesis each creative writing "major" completes in a directed study course taken during the senior year.
In 1986, with the help of our generous donors and the hard work of Ron Wallace and Professor Jesse Lee Kercheval, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing was established to provide a year of financial support to writers working on first books in the genres of fiction and poetry. At first the Institute provided this support to one poet and one fiction writer each academic year, but the number of fellows has gradually increased; today the Institute annually awards up to six fellowships in these genres. In addition, as of 2007 the Institue has awarded one semester of support each spring to a mid-level playwright through the Carl Djerassi Distinguished Fellowship in Playwriting. Since the Institute's inception, its fellows have won numerous awards and published more than 80 books.
In 2002, the Program in Creative Writing admitted its first class of MFA students. The addition of the MFA Program in Creative Writing, a small two-year graduate program offering degrees in fiction and poetry, has made the Program in Creative Writing the only one in the country to support creative writing at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate levels.
In addition, the Program in Creative Writing is one of the few in the country to offer a Creative Writing Minor for the University's PhD students.