With the goal of establishing a center for experimental writing in the Rockies, Marilyn Krysl, Peter Michelson, Reg Saner, and Sidney Goldfarb founded the University of Colorado Creative Writing Program in 1975. They were soon joined by Ronald Sukenick, Ed Dorn, Steve Katz, and Clarence Major. The 1980s and 1990s brought new, diverse and cutting-edge faculty, such as Padma Perera, Robert Steiner, Joy Harjo, Linda Hogan, Lorna Dee Cervantes, and Lucia Berlin. In the words of Sidney Golfarb, CU’s Creative Writing Program was “an exploding and important part of the world literary scene.”
Over the years, the program has been affiliated with various publication ventures. In the ’80s and ’90s, it served as the headquarters for The Fiction Collective and the Nilon Fiction Prize as well as The American Book Review and Black Ice. Other publications have included the cultural and literary journal Rolling Stock, as well as a series of student-edited journals such as Eat it Alive, Sniper Logic, and Square One. Since 2007, the program has been home to Subito Press, publishing innovative and experimental poetry and fiction. It also hosts the MFA student run literary journal, Timber.
Our accomplished faculty now consists of Julie Carr, Jeffrey Deshell, Marcia Douglas, Noah Eli Gordon, Stephen Graham Jones, Ruth Ellen Kocher, and Elisabeth Sheffield. The program has grown and evolved over more than three decades, transitioning, for example, from a two-year MA to a three-year MFA. Throughout these changes, we remain writers committed to our craft and our teaching. Characterized by our tradition for experiment, we honor our distinguished past as we usher new writers into the future.