Creative Writing at Missouri

The University of Missouri-Columbia prides itself on its writing programs. Its writing-across-the-curriculum Campus Writing Program receives regular plaudits in the US News rankings, and the University is home to the oldest and largest journalism school in the world.

The alma mater of Tennessee Williams, George C. Scott, Tom Berenger, Robert Loggia, Kate Capshaw, Chris Cooper, and Brad Pitt, the University conferred honorary alumnus status on Mark Twain and, more recently, Burt Reynolds.

The University is home to the Missouri Review, which enjoys both the largest submission rate and the largest circulation rate of the academic literary magazines in America. The creative writing program within the department of English sponsors readings and workshops by the world's most important writers as well as a summer program in Greece.

The departmental creative writing program is founded upon the notion that writers should be deeply aware of the literary and cultural traditions in which they work and that scholars and critics should be in constant contact with the practitioners whose work they study. The integration of literature and writing—rather than their separation or segregation—is the program’s hallmark, and its students have achieved enormous success in national and international writing competitions as well as in the academic job market and world of professional writing.

The University of Missouri-Columbia has graduated poets, novelists, creative nonfiction prose writers, translators, and writers of children’s books. In crime fiction it numbers among its graduates such modern masters as Jeffery Deaver and James Lee Burke.

Students are immediately struck by the creative energy of the University and the state of which it is a part. Missouri is the home of Mark Twain and Joseph Pulitzer, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Marianne Moore, Howard Nemerov, Maya Angelou, George Caleb Bingham, and Thomas Hart Benton; the state of Sara Teasdale, Robert Heinlein, William S. Burroughs, Fannie Hurst, Winston Churchill, William Least Heat-Moon, and John Neihardt; of Josephine Baker, Scott Joplin, Chuck Berry, and Tina Turner; of Walt Disney, T. S. Eliot, Tennessee Williams, Kate Chopin, and Langston Hughes.