Among the chaos of a top party school rating and an unchanged national academic ranking, Ohio University received another designation — one that recognized its creative writing program.
Poets & Writers magazine named OU's creative writing program the third best in the country.
OU's program was listed behind those at the University of Denver and Florida State University.
The only other Ohio school to be ranked in the top 15 was the University of Cincinnati, which took the eighth-place spot.
OU was one of the first universities to offer a creative writing degree, said Director of Creative Writing Dinty Moore. He added that the top-three distinction positively reflects the program's history and current offerings.
“We were thrilled to be ranked number three program nationally,” Moore said. “The faculty and students worked very hard these past years enhancing the program. We have internationally known faculty teaching fiction, poetry and nonfiction to our graduate and undergraduate students.”
The ranking wasn't a surprise, said Samantha Hall, a senior studying creative writing.
“All of our professors are published,” Hall said. “Mark Halliday and his wife, Jill Rosser, both won prestigious fellowships and awards. Having teachers who are distinguished in the field definitely helps.”
The program offered at the university is rigorous and demands the best work from its students, Hall said.
“Most of us will take a combination of literature and creative writing,” she said. “In addition to creative writing, now you learn modern writing styles. In literature classes, you look at literary history, so you mix a little of the old and the new.”
Hall added that OU's creative writing program puts out two literary magazines —Sphere, created through the undergraduate program, and Quarter After Eight, from the graduate program.
The creative writing program encompasses different branches of writing, and students join the program for different reasons, said Kelly Ferguson, a creative writing Ph.D. candidate. Ferguson is studying in the nonfiction creative writing program.
“I was attracted to the program here at OU for its strong class courses and the good job placements the students get after getting their degree,” she said.
Many of the students going through OU's creative writing program have been published. Hall has published a 50-word story and a 298-word story about racial slurs that she wrote while studying abroad in Avignon, France.
“There’s a new rising genre called flash fiction, which are really short story pieces, and that’s what I do,” Hall said.
The program is built around writers' needs and helps students hone their writing skills, Ferguson said.
“The great thing about the creative writing program is that it’s small, and you receive individual attention,” she said. “Professor Dinty Moore really helped with my creative writing. We also have reading opportunities where we read our work to other people and have them critique it in what is good and what could use improvement. We also get to listen to seminars from famous authors such as George Saunders and have lunch with them. ”
Ferguson wrote a piece called My Life as Laura, which she said retraces the steps of Laura Ingalls Wilder. My Life as Laura will soon be published.
“I actually got to put on a pioneer dress and travel in my car to the places where she lived,” Ferguson said. “It really helped open my eyes and mind to a whole new perspective of writing.”
The program's greatest accomplishment, Moore said, is helping students to grow stronger in their writing and become published writers.
“Many of our graduates publish books with well-respected publishers, sometimes while still in the program, and some of them have won national awards for poetry or prose writing,” he said. “Our students have also been very successful upon graduation in finding excellent jobs teaching in other writing programs across the country. Most importantly, of course, they write beautiful and powerful poems, stories and essays.”
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