Diploma in Creative Writing

The Graduate Program in English is home to a unique Graduate Diploma in Creative Writing. Focused on developing students’ writing skills, the diploma affords graduate students from all disciplines the opportunity to take workshop-based courses in poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, and to work on a Capstone Project under direct supervision from York Creative Writing faculty and established professional writers. Students join a vibrant community of novelists, short story writers, memoirists, poets, and journalists, and gain access to the Writer-in-Residence Program and the Rishma Dunlop Reading Series hosted by the Department of English.

While students pursuing the Diploma are required to take one of our Poetry or Prose Workshops, and one course in Creative Nonfiction, our workshop-based seminars are open to all graduate students, regardless of faculty affiliation, ability and level of experience. We encourage enrolment from anyone interested in supplementing their academic work with creative practices, developing their writing and critical reading skills, learning about literary culture, gaining insight into the publishing industry, or simply experimenting with poetry and prose in a supportive, encouraging, intellectually rigorous atmosphere.

Our program is guided by the belief that through the writing of literary work and the informed consideration of ideas, students have a chance to think in ways of essential value in our moment, with its transformative technologies, its incursions of the implausible into the real—and its eternal verities. The practice and analysis of creative writing allows us to think laterally and vertically, not only absorbing ideas but sounding the self; not just producing shaped arguments but making artifacts that, while containing ideas, aren’t contained by them. It can also be pretty fun.