|
The AWP Director's Handbook A Compendium of Guidelines and Information
for Directors of Creative Writing Programs A Publication of The Association of Writers & Writing Programs 2009
A Letter from AWP's Executive Director Dear Creative Writing Program Director: AWP was established in 1967 by fifteen writers representing thirteen programs in creative writing. Our association has grown since then. Creative writing is now taught at most of the 2,400 departments of literature in North America. More than 300 graduate programs in creative writing have been established in the U.S., Canada, U.K., Europe, and Australia. AWP’s membership includes 495 colleges and universities and 30,000 writers, teachers, and students. Academe in North America has excelled in providing access to education for all economic classes and races of peoples. Creative writing programs have been part of an amazing experiment in democratic participation in higher education and the arts; our programs have helped democratic nations produce literature that more closely represents their peoples. Our literature now includes multitudes. In the United States, AWP has helped to establish the largest system of literary patronage for living writers that the world has ever seen. A conservative estimate of our programs’ support for writers exceeds $250 million in annual expenditures on salaries, honoraria, lectures, readings, library acquisitions, conferences, and publications. If you consider that, in a typical year, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) dispensed $7 million to literary projects and fellowships, you can appreciate how successful AWP and its members have been in building a new network of support for contemporary literature. AWP once concentrated its energies upon the establishment of new programs. Most institutions at first provided tough resistance to the building of our programs, as most departments of English preferred their authors long dead and safely entombed in anthologies (where the authors were far less likely to talk back to their critics). Now that hundreds of programs have been established and creative writing is one of the most popular academic disciplines in the arts and humanities, we are free to devote ourselves to building audiences for literature while we improve our programs. As a portion of all BA degrees conferred in all disciplines, BAs in English have fallen from 7 out of every 100 BAs conferred in the 1970s to less than 4 out of every 100 conferred today. Because classes in creative writing are among the most popular and over-subscribed electives among undergraduates, our programs are in a unique position to help develop new audiences for literature. As a result, the AWP Board of Directors has recently given special attention to undergraduate education; there are four new sets of recommendations in this handbook for undergraduate teachers and programs. The Nation’s Report Card and other national surveys indicate significant changes in the leisure activities and reading abilities of Americans. In spite of rapid growth in the general population, the numbers of avid and skilled readers of literature may be diminishing. Because our culture has changed so much, we can no longer assume that our incoming students have skills similar to the students of earlier decades. AWP recommends that programs adjust their curricula in keeping with the changing skills and needs of their students as readers, as writers, and as professionals in the workplace. The documents gathered here were written by experienced Program Directors and teachers to help you build a better program for the study, creation, and appreciation of literature—and, we hope, a better program for the development of bigger and wiser audiences for literature. AWP welcomes your suggestions toward making these documents more useful. Please write to hallmarks@awpwriter.org. Thank you for your work in helping the next generation of writers and readers flourish.
|
|
Members of AWP are invited to read the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Strategic Plan 2000 - 2010. This document details the goals, objectives, and strategies that the association will pursue throughout this decade. The complete Strategic Plan is available as a downloadable file in Portable Document Format (PDF). If you are a member of AWP, the AWP Board of Directors encourages you to send your comments on the Strategic Plan. Write to services@awpwriter.org or to any board or staff member of AWP. |
