About the Center for Writers

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The Center for Writers was started by Frederick Barthelme in 1977 and has since enjoyed a long-standing reputation for cultivating the talent, rigor, and play of emerging writers. Located in Hattiesburg, about 90 miles from New Orleans, the Center is run by dedicated, nationally renowned faculty whose work in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry appears in prestigious presses and publications. Between 35 and 40 students work toward M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in English with emphases in fiction or poetry, and each student completes a creative thesis or dissertation to fulfill requirements for the degree. The tone of the program is serious but informal, with workshops offered in fiction, non-fiction, prose, and poetry by the program's distinguished faculty. Additional courses in craft, literary forms, and teaching creative writing are also offered regularly, and students participate in a regular reading series and in the publication of a student journal, Product.

Students and graduates have won the Whiting Award, the Henfield Prize, the Flannery O'Connor Award and National Endowment fellowships and published books with Counterpoint, William Morrow, St. Martins, Ticknor and Fields, Georgia, Red Hen, Faber & Faber, Atlantic Monthly Press, Prentice Hall, Sarabande, and a number of other first rank presses. Graduates of the program have gone on to distinguished careers as faculty at the Universities of Tennessee, Central Florida, Tampa, and Alaska-Fairbanks, along with Auburn, UT-Chattanooga, Southwest Minnesota, and Oxford College of Emory University, among other universities. 

The Center for Writers is also home to the Mississippi Review, a nationally recognized literary magazine, which is consistently ranked among the best literary journals and cited by Poets & Writers as one of five journals that agents regularly read.