The MFA Program in Creative Writing is nationally ranked and our graduates are the recipients of many distinguished awards and fellowships. They include winners of the National Poetry Series competition, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Award, the Ruth Lake Award, the Nimrod Prize, the Caine Prize in Fiction, the Commonwealth Prize, the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize, AWP Intro Journal awards, the Philadelphia Foundation Award in Creative Writing, the D.C. Commission of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and the Maryland and Rhode Island State Council of the Arts Fellowship. They have gone on to receive Stegner Fellowships and grants from the National Endowment of the Arts, and their work has been included in anthologies such as Best New American Voices, the O'Henry Awards, American Poetry: The Next Generation, The New American Poets, and Beyond the Frontier: Contemporary African-American Poetry.
We are located in a rich literary community, with an abundance of fiction and poetry readings, including readings at Georgetown, Howard, Johns Hopkins, George Mason, George Washington, American University, and the PEN/Faulkner, and a variety of local bookstores. Each year the Program in Creative Writing, in conjunction with the Jiménez-Porter Writers' House [1] brings visiting writers to visit workshops and read in the Writers Here & Now [2]series.
Links:
[1] http://www.writershouse.umd.edu/
[2] http://www.english.umd.edu/academics/clcs/lectures/whn
[3] http://www.english.umd.edu/academics/creativewriting/mfa/overview
[4] http://www.english.umd.edu/academics/creativewriting/mfa/courses
[5] http://www.english.umd.edu/academics/creativewriting/admissions