Bryn Mawr College, the highly selective liberal arts institution for women in suburban Philadelphia, has announced that it will be offering a new major in creative writing. The program will start this fall.
The major will offer core classes in fiction and poetry and others including writing for radio and podcasting, screenwriting, and visual poetry. In addition to core requirements in creative writing, the major will require academic study both in literatures in English, and in a series of allied courses in other departments.
“We’re through the roof that there will finally be a standing major in creative writing at Bryn Mawr College,” says program co-director Professor Daniel Torday. “It has come about in the most organic way: for years students have created their own version of a creative writing major through our Independent major program. So making it official was surprisingly easy. We simply had to describe what students have already been doing, and codify it. This is the exciting kind of thing that can happen at a small college like Bryn Mawr: for us to be led by our students, their desires, their talents, and their interests.”
As evidence of the existing strength of the new department, Professor Torday points to the fact that recent alumnae Michelle Zauner and Tae Keller have landed at the top of The New York Times best-sellers list. “This is a remarkable fact for an undergraduate college of 1,200 students,” says Professor Torday. “Beyond that, every year we send students to the most prestigious and selective MFA programs and see them publishing their work in magazines, in anthologies, and their own books.”