Our Chair's Welcome
Chair’s Welcome
Welcome to the Department of Creative Writing at the Ãå±±ÂÖ¼é of Texas at El Paso, .
UTEP is a comprehensive public research university and a leading Hispanic-Serving Institution, serving almost 25,000 students, many from the Ciudades Gemelas, or Twin Cities, of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez---a vibrant metropolitan area of over 2.7 million people where both English and Spanish are heard in most public places.
The Department of Creative Writing, located on the 9th floor of the Education Building on UTEP’s incredible campus, is home to three rigorous and rewarding programs: our undergraduate BA program, a residential bilingual MFA program, and a separate, fully online MFA program.
Our Residential Bilingual MFA program was the first, and remains the only, Bilingual MFA Creative Writing Program in which Spanish and English coexist. Our Bilingual MFA students, hailing from all over the U.S., Latin America, and Spain, produce fiction, poetry, and translation in English, Spanish, and sometimes a combination of both. Bilingual MFA graduates have gone on to publish award-winning books in the U.S. and Latin America, receive doctoral degrees, teach in universities, and edit journals and presses. You do not need to be bilingual to be accepted into our competitive Residential Bilingual MFA program, you just need to be a good writer willing to embrace our dynamic cultural and linguistic community. Most of our Residential MFA students, upon acceptance into the program, receive teaching assistantships.
Additionally, we pioneered the first fully online MFA Creative Writing Program, in which students from around the world work with our core faculty—as well as prestigious visiting writers, such as Heather Hartley, Laurie Ann Guerrero, Natalie Diaz, Liz Scheid, JD Pluecker, Carolina Ebeid, and Dennis Bush—creating a vibrant and supportive community of writers. The Ãå±±ÂÖ¼é MFA does not have a residency requirement, but candidates are welcome to come to El Paso for a semester (or take up to three residential classes). Our online MFA is perfect for writers who are also mid-career professionals who want to continue their study of creative writing but cannot relocate to do so.
Our core faculty for all three programs include Sylvia Aguilar Zéleny, Nelson Cárdenas, Daniel Chacon, Andrea Cote Botero, José de Piérola, Tim Z. Hernandez, Sasha R. Pimentel, Jeff Sirkin, and Lex Williford. They are award-winning, internationally recognized poets, fiction and non-fiction writers, and translators who in addition to their genres, specialize in topics such as Documentary Poetry, Young Adult Fiction, Literary Translation, Writing About Popular Music, Kafka & Mysticism, and Poetry & Photography.
I invite you to visit our campus to meet our international community of writers. To quote our previous Chair, Daniel Chacón, “With us, there are no borders.”
Sincerely yours,
Dr. Rosa Alcalá, Creative Writing Department Chair