MISSION
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The Creative Writing Program at the University of La Verne encourages all students — majors, minors, passersby — to develop their craft, examine the culture around them, and challenge themselves to expand readers’ understanding of what it means to live.
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Our Major and Minor programs offer students the opportunity to practice creative writing through a careful study of the modes and theories of the art, as well as contemporary and historical applications. Our courses encourage students to learn and employ techniques common to the traditions of creative writing while simultaneously helping them to understand the literary and cultural contexts of their writing.
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Students graduating with a Creative Writing major will be fully prepared to enter and excel in graduate creative writing studies, particularly at the MFA level but also the PhD level. Students will also have professional experience which will prepare them for work in publishing and advertising — for example, working on our literary journal Prism Review (through our WRT 305: Literary Magazine Staff course). This prepares students for teamwork, instructs them in editing and assessing manuscripts, and gives them the chance to create a current, relevant literary publication. Beyond careers in writing and writing-related fields, all our creative writing classes stress the need for analytical thinking: to be successful writers, students must learn and be able to integrate abstracts concepts, learned knowledge, and reflections on everyday life, and they must integrate all of this into small and self-contained systems. The ability to do such analytical synthesis is one of the most highly desired skills in today’s professional world.
News!
We’re proud to announce the winner and runners-up for our inaugural ULV Undergrad Writing Contest. Brent Armendinger, a local poet, graciously served as the judge and read all the anonymously submitted manuscripts. Along with a $100 gift card to Powell’s Books, the winning work has also been published in issue 13 of Prism Review beside the works of renown national writers. The runners-up each received a copy of Prism #13, a good work of contemporary literature, their own writing notebook, and a gift card to Coffeeberry. Congrats to them all!
Winner: “Branded,” by Rebecca Ayala
About the story, Brent wrote, “The narrator of this story, a young girl trying to claim authority over her own life, speaks in a voice both razor-sharp and vulnerable. The sentences unspool with surprising – often hilarious – imagery and an effortless, intoxicating music. Even its most surreal moments are utterly believable, as the narrator attends to a world far beyond the radar of those around her.”
– Read “Branded”
Runner-up: “Signs and Happiness,” by Ashley Cole
“This poem has the feeling of a person being interviewed – but the questions have disappeared, and the answers seem to be spoken in several different rooms. It withholds as much as it reveals, embracing the honesty in fracture. At times the language is deceptively simple, but then it opens into unexpected images, into descriptions of movements that are as impossible as they are necessary.”
Runner-up: “Kernville,” by Brittany Hoffinger-Steele
“The language in this story is as thick and varied as the landscape it describes. It balances fact and imagination gracefully, with wonderful attention to movement and visual detail. It’s a moving and understated call to ecological awareness.”
Runner-up: “Fainting Worries, No One,” by Hieu Le
“Like the city it describes, this poem attends to play, beauty, and brokenness. It reminds us that our view of Los Angeles will always be fractured, in syntax that itself is “undone,” “cracked open,” and “spilled out.” Its words enact the strange proximity we experience in the city, where bodies and buildings slip into each other.”