About Creative Writing

The English and Literary Studies program offers a concentration in Creative Writing for our majors and a Creative Writing minor for non-majors. Our program combines intensive instruction in creative writing with conventional coursework in literary studies. In doing so, it prepares students for a life of thoughtful, informed, independent-minded citizenship. It is our position that students who write fiction, poetry, and nonfiction at the same time they are studying published and historical works of literature are uniquely positioned to gain insight into the writing process, the complexities of the verbal imagination, textual analysis, and the malleability of culture. Creative Writing students leave college ready to take on most challenges, and, indeed, our graduates have been as likely to make their mark in civic institutions or the corporate world as to devote their lives to authorship.

In addition to a complement of literature courses, students in Ramapo’s Creative Writing program enroll in workshops in which they produce original literary works, critique those of classmates, and learn how a variety of literary and nonliterary texts are constructed. While on this journey through the creative process, they have opportunities to meet and learn from nationally regarded authors who visit through the Readings at Ramapo Series. They meet fellow creative writers and interact through clubs and formal societies and organizations like Sigma Tau Delta and COPLAC, and they have opportunities to work on the college’s literary magazine Trillium, or, if they wish, to go off and make their own. They enjoy internships with New York publishers and literary organizations like Wiley and Sons or The Center for Fiction, use their coursework as preparation for graduate study or a career in editing and publishing or teaching, or simply take their knowledge, skills, and well-founded confidence into the world when they are ready to find it has been waiting for them.