MFA Program
See writers who attended this programPoetry: Jamaica Baldwin, Ellen Bass, Leila Chatti, Adrienne Christian, Eduardo C. Corral, Kwame Dawes, Tyree Daye, Frank X. Gaspar, Danusha Laméris, Dorianne Laux, Joseph Millar, Mahtem Shiferraw
Fiction: Claire Davis, Pete Fromm, Cate Kennedy, Valerie Laken, Kimberly King Parsons, Mary Helen Stefaniak, Willy Vlautin, Laura Warrell, Kellie Wells, Cecily Wong
Nonfiction: Chris Abani (multi-genre), Sanjiv Bhattacharya, Siddhartha Deb, Omar El Akkad, W. Ralph Eubanks, Apricot Irving, E. J. Koh, Mike Magnuson, Kao Kalia Yang
The program offers merit and need-based scholarships, including the Kwame Dawes Mapmakers Scholarship, awarded to exceptional applicants in any genre; the Katherine Dunn Scholarship, awarded to exceptional students in need; the Pacific MFA Endowed Scholarship; the Marvin Bell Poetry Scholarship; and the Robert Kelleher “A Room of One’s Own” Scholarship. The program also offers teaching associate positions to MFA graduates. In addition, the program offers a Teaching Assistantship in Pacific’s PhD in Education and Leadership program and both the Mapmakers Teaching Assistantship and the Mapmakers Alumni Institute, teaching and ongoing outreach opportunities for students and alumni who’ve been awarded the Mapmakers Scholarship.
Students attend two 10-day residencies each year, in January and June, and one final 10-day residency at the end of the program. The June residency takes place at the Pacific University campus in Forest Grove, Oregon, and the January residency takes place in the beachside resort town of Seaside, Oregon. The program hosts a nightly reading series, lectures, panels, roundtable discussions.
The priority application due date is September 1 for the spring term and March 1 for the fall term. The program accepts applications two and a half months after the priority due dates for each semester, November 15 and May 15 for respective semesters.
As part of the program’s mission to welcome writers from underrepresented communities, it offers the STRATA Workshop, once per term, an online weekend course, which features MFA faculty. It also offers a new online program in medical narratives called “The Body Chronicles.”
Jamaica Baldwin, Michelle Bitting, Catherine-Esther Cowie, Anastasia Edel, Bryan Allen Fierro, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Nancy Miller Gomez, AE Hines, Pingmei Lan, Mariana Lin, Marti Mattia, Rooja Mohassessy, Dion O’Reilly, Lisa Allen Ortiz, Deborah Reed, Leigh Camacho Rourks, Sam Roxas-Chua, Rana Tahir