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.
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Tracks
The MFA program has four 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.
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Requirements
Requirements for Matriculation in the MFA Program
This list is in addition to the general college requirements:- A minimum average grade of B in all undergraduate work and in all English courses.
- Three satisfactory letters of recommendation, preferably from writers and teachers of writing, addressing the candidate’s academic proficiency and writing skills.
- A 500-word statement of interest.
- Candidates should submit a writing sample: either 10 pages of poetry, 20 pages of prose, or two one-acts or a full-length play.
- 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:- 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.
- Take two craft/form courses: English 760, 761, or 762 (as applicable to genre of study)
- Take English 636, a Literary Theory Course.
- 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.
- 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.
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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 WidemanNovels
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 SonCriticism 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 CastleCritical/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 TestPOETRY
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 BurnDRAMA
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 FencesCriticism
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
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Scholarships
Our program is pleased to announce three scholarships and fellowships: The Girro Cestaro scholarship, the Irma Long Scholarship, and the Paper Lantern Lit 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.