Degree Requirements and Opportunities

The MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation is a 36 credit hour program that emphasizes literary craft and the integration of creative writing with literary studies. Course requirements include a class in literary theory and criticism, two craft/form classes, three literature electives and four writing workshops.  Everyone must take one of the four workshops outside of their genre of focus.

Under the guidance of a faculty adviser, each student develops a thesis in the program’s final year: a collection of poetry or fiction, a novel,a full-length play (or collection of one-act plays),  or a translation of a text. In addition, everyone will take an MFA exam in their final semester, based on an extensive reading list. We believe that the study of literature enriches and invigorates your own writing.

Most students take three years to complete our program, taking two courses each semester for the first two years, with the final year as a thesis year (one course each semester). Some students complete the program in two years, taking three courses a semester.

Our courses are offered in the late afternoons and evenings (primarily at 6:30pm with occasional electives at 4:30) and it is possible to work in the daytime and take classes at night.

• Tracks

  The MFA program has five tracks: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, playwriting, and literary translation. The course of study centers on writing workshop classes in which faculty lead students in critiques of one another’s writing. Students take three workshops in their own genre, and a crossover workshop in another genre, and they take two craft classes, one in their own genre and one in another genre. They also take a course in critical theory and literature electives that help them to develop a critical vocabulary and a knowledge of various literary and cultural periods and traditions. The faculty will provide intensive discussion and supervision of student work. The program is committed to the integration of creative writing and literary studies.

  The chart below explains the basic requirements for each track:

  Creative Writing Track

  4 Creative Writing Workshops: English 751, 753, 755, or 757 (i.e., three in your genre of focus, one in another genre.)

  1 Literary Theory class: English 636.

  2 Craft/Form Classes: English 760, 761, 762 and 763. NOTE: both craft classes can be in your genre or one in your genre and one in another genre.

  Thesis Sequence: English 758 – Thesis Workshop, and English 759 – Advanced Writing Project.

  3 Electives:  600 or 700 level courses, either from the English Literature MA program, or from participating departments with departmental approval.

  Translation Track

  4 Creative Writing Workshops:
  – 2 Translation Workshops, English 757; and
  – 2 CW Workshops: English 751, 753 or 755.

  1 Literary Theory class: English 636.

  2 Craft/Form Classes: English 760, 761, 762 and 763. NOTE: both craft classes can be in your genre or one in your genre and one in another genre.

  Thesis Sequence: English 758 – Thesis Workshop, and English 759 – Advanced Writing Project.

  3 Electives:  600 or 700 level courses, either from the English Literature M.A. program, or from participating departments with departmental approval.

• Requirements

  Requirements for Matriculation in the MFA Program
  This list is in addition to the general college requirements:

  1. A minimum average grade of B in all undergraduate  work and in all English courses.
  2. Three satisfactory letters of recommendation, preferably from writers and teachers of writing, addressing the candidate’s academic proficiency and writing skills.
  3. A 500-word statement of interest.
  4. Candidates should submit a writing sample: either 10 pages of poetry, 20 pages of prose, or two one-acts or a full-length play.
  5. For the translation track, candidates should demonstrate an appropriate level of fluency in a language besides English and submit previously translated work (5-10 pages) as their writing sample. Fulfillment of these requirements does not guarantee admission; it simply makes a student eligible for consideration. All students must meet the above requirements. The MFA program does not accept non-matriculated students.

  Requirements for the Master of Fine Arts Degree
  The student must:

  1. For CW Track, take four creative writing workshops (chosen from English 751, Fiction Workshop; English 753, Poetry Workshop, English 755, Playwriting Workshop; English 757, Translation Workshop). Three of these are in the student’s genre of focus while one must be in a genre outside of their genre of study. For Translation Track, take two translation workshops and two in other genres.
  2. Take two craft/form courses: English 760, 761, or 762 (as applicable to genre of study)
  3. Take English 636, a Literary Theory Course.
  4. Take three elective courses in the English Department from the list of available graduate literature courses. Courses in literary studies outside the English Department (for example, in Comparative Literature) may also be counted towards the MFA, with permission from the MFA Director.  NOTE: Students may transfer up to 12 credits of graduate work from an accredited institution that correlates to courses in the English Department at Queens College, subject to the approval of the MFA Director. However, workshop and craft courses may not be transferred.
  5. Take a thesis sequence: English 758 (Independent Study) and English 759 (Advanced Writing Project). The thesis, written in the second year of the program, will be written under the guidance of an advisor and a second reader and will consist of either: 25-30 pages of poetry; 60 pages of fiction (novel or short stories); a full-length play (or collection of one-act plays; or a quality translation of a foreign language text.

• MFA Reading List

  In the spring of their first year, each student should meet with an MFA faculty member in their genre to draft their own reading list of thirty texts, twenty in their genre of focus, five in another genre(s), and five in critical/theoretical work. Using the official MFA reading list on the MFA website as a guide, each student’s list should be personalized and decided upon by the student in consultation with the faculty member. Texts can be drawn from the list or from other sources.

  Download the MFA Reading List here.[pdf link]

  FICTION

  Short Stories

  Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
  James Baldwin, Going to Meet the Man
  Donald Barthelme, Forty Stories
  Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions
  Raymond Carver, Where I’m Calling From
  John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever
  Charles Chesnutt, The Conjure Woman and Other Tales
  Lydia Davis, Break It Down
  Mavis Gallant, Home Truths: Selected Canadian Stories
  Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
  James Joyce, Dubliners
  Franz Kafka, The Complete Stories
  Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
  Haruki Murakami, After the Quake
  Lorrie Moore, Birds of America
  Alice Munro, Selected Stories
  Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O’Connor
  Grace Paley, Complete Stories
  Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
  Eudora Welty, The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty
  John Edgar Wideman, The Stories of John Edgar Wideman

  Novels

  James Baldwin, Another Country
  Willa Cather, My Antonia
  Don DeLillo, White Noise
  Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
  Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
  William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
  Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
  Nadine Gordimer, Burger’s Daughter
  Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
  Nella Larsen, Passing
  Micheline Aharonian Marcom, The Daydreaming Boy
  Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
  Toni Morrison, Beloved
  Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater
  Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo
  Salman Rushdie, Shame
  Jean Toomer, Cane
  John Updike, Rabbit, Run
  V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas
  Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
  Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
  Richard Wright, Native Son

  Criticism and Theory of Narrative

  Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House
  Madison Smartt Bell, Narrative Design
  E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
  Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark
  Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice
  Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners
  Nathalie Sarraute, The Age of Suspicion: Essays on the Novel
  Gertrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar” and “Composition as Explanation”

  NON-FICTION

  Memoir

  Kathleen Alcalá, The Desert Remembers My Name
  Tom Bissell, The Father of All Things
  Jenny Boully, The Book of Beginnings and Endings
  Truman Capote, Music for Chameleons
  Mark Doty, Heaven’s Coast
  Francisco Goldman, The Art of Political Murder
  Lucy Grealy, Autobiography of a Face
  Mary Karr, Cherry
  Maxine Hong Kingston, Woman Warrior
  Gregory Orr, The Blessing
  Chuck Palahniuk, Stranger Than Fiction
  Ann Patchett, Truth and Beauty
  Samuel Pepys, The Unqualified Self
  Andrew Pham, Catfish and Mandala
  John Rechy, About My Life and the Kept Woman
  Paisley Rekdal, The Day My Mother Met Bruce Lee
  Sharman Apt Russell, An Obsession with Butterflies
  Esmeralda Santiago, When I Was Puerto Rican
  Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman and the Beauty of the Spirit
  Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

  Critical/Personal Essays and Reportage

  Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem
  Pico Iyer, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home
  James Baldwin, Notes on a Native Son and Nobody Knows My Name
  Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia
  Mike Davis, City of Quartz
  Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album
  Andrew Holleran, Ground Zero
  Elizabeth Hardwick, Seduction and Betrayal
  Norman Mailer, Armies of the Night and The Executioner’s Song
  Janet Malcolm, In the Freud Archives
  Mary McCarthy, A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays
  George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, Homage to Catalonia, and A Collection of Essays
  Ishmael Reed, Airing Dirty Laundry
  Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation, Styles of Radical Will, and On Photography
  Gore Vidal, United States
  Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
  Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle
  Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

  POETRY

  Individual Poetry Collections

  John Berryman, The Dream Songs
  Elizabeth Bishop, Geography III
  Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected
  Rita Dove, Thomas and Beulah
  T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
  Martin Espada, The Republic of Poetry
  Allen Ginsberg, HOWL
  Louise Gluck, The Wild Iris
  Joy Harjo, She Had Some Horses
  Linda Hogan, The Book of Medicines
  Langston Hughes, Selected
  Galway Kinnell, The Book of Nightmares
  Bill Knott, [see his webite: http://billknott.typepad.com]
  Yusef Komunyakaa, The Pleasure Dome
  Philip Levine, What Work Is
  Robert Lowell, Life Studies
  Marianne Moore, Selected
  Paul Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel
  Marilyn Nelson, Wreath for Emmett Till
  Sharon Olds, The Father
  Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons
  Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language
  Alberto Rios, The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body
  Muriel Rukeyser, The Book of the Dead
  Sylvia Plath, Ariel
  Anne Sexton, Transformations
  C.K. Williams, Selected
  William Carlos Williams, Selected
  Charles Wright, Chickamauga
  (NOTE: for Selected, read at least the latter half.)

  Criticism and Theory of Poetry

  T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and Individual Talent”
  Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming”
  Seamus Heaney, “Feeling Into Words”
  Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain”
  Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”
  Marjorie Perloff, The Poetics of Indeterminacy
  Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken”
  Muriel Rukeyeser, The Life of Poetry
  Gertrude Stein, “Poetry and Grammar”
  Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens”
  CD Wright, Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil
  [Also see the introductions to the anthologies below.]

  Anthologies

  Anonymous/ Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, Judy Yung, eds., Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910-1940
  Agha Shahid Ali, Call Me Ishmael Tonight: A Book of Ghazals
  Kurt Brown and Harold Schechter, eds., Conversation Pieces
  Eavan Boland and Mark Strand, eds., The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms
  David Lehman, ed., Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present
  Phillis Levin, ed., The Penguin Book of the Sonnet
  Donald Allen and George F. Butterick, eds., The Postmoderns: The New American Poetry Revised
  Camille Paglia, ed., Break Blow Burn

  DRAMA

  Plays

  Aeschylus, The Agamemnon
  Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Krapp’s Last Tape
  Bertolt Brecht, Baal, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagony, Mother Courage, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle
  Anton Chekhov, The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, and The Three Sisters
  Caryl Churchill, Top Girls and Cloud Nine
  Euripides, Hippolytus, and The Bacchae
  William Finn, Falsettos
  Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, and The Wild Duck
  Tony Kushner, Angels in America and Caroline, or Change
  Neal Labute, The Distance from Here
  Tracy Letts, August: Osage County
  David Mamet, American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen Ross, Oleana, and Speed the Plow
  Arthur Miller, All My Sons and Death of a Salesman
  Moliere, The Miser and The Misanthrope
  Marsha Norman, ‘Night Mother
  Suzan-Lori Parks, Tog Dog/Underdog
  Eugene O’Neill, A Long Day’s Journey into Night
  Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party, The Homecoming, and Betrayal
  Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author
  Jean Racine, Phaedre
  Sam Shepard, Red Cross, La Turista, Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, and True West
  William Shakespeare, The Complete Plays
  George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara and Heartbreak House
  Stephen Sondheim, Company, Follies, and Sweeney Todd
  Sophocles, The Oedipus Trilogy (Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone)
  Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, and Rock ‘n’ Roll
  August Strindberg, Miss Julie, The Father, and The Dream Play
  Paula Vogel, How I Leaned to Drive
  Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire
  August Wilson, The Piano Lesson, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and Fences

  Criticism

  Aristotle, The Poetics
  Antonin Artaud, “The Theatre of Cruelty” and “The Theatre and the Plague”
  Eric Bentley, The Life of the Drama and The Playwright as Thinker
  Henri Bergson, “On Laughter”
  Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre (trans. John Willett)
  Peter Brook, The Empty Space
  Joseph Chaikin, “The Presence of the Actor”
  Horace, “The Art of Poetry”
  Hekrik Ibsen, Letters on the Theatre
  Gotthold Lessing, “Hamburg Dramaturgy”
  David Mamet, Writing in Restaurants and Three Uses of the Knife
  Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
  Jean Racine, “Prefaces” to Andromache and Phaedra
  George Steiner, The Death of Tragedy
  Stendahl, “Racine” and “Shakespeare”
  Maurice Valency, The Flower and the Castle and The Breaking String
  Emile Zola, “Naturalism in the Theatre”

  TRANSLATION

  In addition to critical and theoretical texts below, translation track students select, with the guidance of their advisor, a minimum of twenty books, which include other translations and possible rhetorical models in English that help inform their process.

  Esther Allen and Susan Bernofksy, eds., Translation: Translators on their Work and What it Means

  William Arrowsmith & Roger Shattuck, eds., The Craft, and Context of Translation

  Mona Baker, In Other Words: A Course Book on Translation

  Mona Baker, Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies

  Willis Barnstone, Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice

  Susan Bassnett, Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice

  Susan Bassnett and Lefevere, Translation, History, and Culture

  David Bellos, Is That a Fish in your Ear: Translation and the Meaning of Everything

  Walter Benjamin, “Task of the Translator” (essay)

  Andrew Chesterman, Can Theory Help Translators: A Dialogue Between the Ivory Tower and the Wordface (Translation Theories Explained)

  Dick Davis, “On Not Translating Hafez” (essay)

  John Felstiner, Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu

  David Halpern, Dante’s Inferno: translations by twenty contemporary poets

  Seamus Heaney, On Beowulf and Verse Translation (introduction to translation)

  Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A New Life in a New Language

  Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation” (essay)

  Donald Keene, Japanese Literature: an introduction for Western readers

  Clifford E. Landers, Literary Translation, A Practical Guide  

  Manuela Perteghella and Eugenia Loffredo, Translation and Creativity: Perspectives on Creative Writing and Translation Studies

  Gregory Rabassa, If This Be Treason: Translation and its Discontents

  Douglas Robinson, Becoming a Translator: An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Translation

  Rainer Schulte and Biguenet, eds., The Craft of Translation;

  Rainer Schulte and Biguenet, eds., Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida

  George Steiner, After Babel:Aspects of Language and Translation

  Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation

  Lawrence Venuti, The Translation Studies Reader

  Rosmarie Waldrop. Lavish Absence

  Eliot Weinberger and Octavio Paz, eds. 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem is Translated

  Steven Yao, Translation and the Languages of Modernism

  Relevant essays from journal publications such as Poetry Magazine’s Translation Issue, Translation Studies, and Circumference

• Scholarships

  Our program is pleased to have several scholarships, prizes, and fellowships:

  The Joel P. Adler Scholarship
  The Girro Cestaro III Memorial Scholarship
  Hoyt Jacobs Memorial Poetry Prize
  Freda S. Johnson & J. Chester Johnson Scholarship
  Irma and Harry Long MFA Scholarship
  Nancy Comley Scholarship
  Queens College Foundation Master’s Scholarship
  Louis Armstrong House Museum Archives Fellowship

• Internships

  A number of our students have held internships at New York City literary organizations, including The Poetry Society of America and The Asian American Writers Workshop. We do not offer course credit for internships but we encourage students to seek out these opportunities.

• Teaching

  Second year students may have the opportunity to compete for teaching positions within the English Department. The number of courses available for MFA students each year varies and depends on budgetary constraints, but MFA students have taught creative writing, literature and composition.

• The Advanced Certificate in English Language Teaching

  Queens College is located in one of the most linguistically-diverse places on the planet. Our MFA program is one of the rare programs to offer both a degree in Creative Writing and Literary Translation.  With our new partnership, students now have the additional option of a Advanced Certificate in Teaching English as a Second Language.

  In an increasingly competitive job market, where an MFA alone is often not sufficient to teach on the college-level, this Advanced Certificate in English Language Teaching will enhance the degree and give graduates other options.

  For more information, see http://www.qc.cuny.edu/Academics/Degrees/DAH/LCD/Pages/ELT-certificate.aspx.