Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars


Founded in 1947, the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars is an academic program offering undergraduate and graduate degrees in writing in the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts & Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. It is the second-oldest creative writing program in the United States.
Notable faculty of the program have included Edward Albee, John Barth, Madison Smartt Bell, J. M. Coetzee, Mary Jo Salter, Stephen Dixon, Mark Hertsgaard, Brad Leithauser, John Irwin, J.D. McClatchy, Alice McDermott, Mark Crispin Miller, Andrew Motion, Wyatt Prunty, David St. John, Mark Strand, Robert Stone, and David Yezzi.
Writer David Yezzi currently chairs the program, which has a strong reputation. It has been ranked "One of the Top Ten Graduate Programs in Creative Writing" by The Atlantic. In 1997, US News and World Report ranked the program second in the United States out of sixty-five eligible full-residency MFA programs. In 2011, Poets & Writers ranked Hopkins seventeenth nationally out of 157 eligible full-residency MFA programs. The long respected Science Writing program was closed down in 2013 as an on-campus program, but was re-established as an online/low residency program shortly thereafter.

Degree programs

The Writing Seminars hosts the Turnbull Lectures, a yearly lecture series on the topic of poetry. The series was established in 1891 and has run almost continuously between the years 1891-1984 and 2000–present. Over the history of the series, lectures have been given by Ramón Menéndez Pidal, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, Jacques Derrida, Helen Vendler, and many others. Recent lecturers have included Tracy K. Smith, Terrance Hayes, Richard Wilbur, Paul Muldoon, Stanley Plumly, Edward Mendelson, and Edna Longley.