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In each of the past two years, a CU-Boulder faculty member has won a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts—one for prose and one for poetry.

These achievements are notable but not surprising. The winners and their program director note that recognition for the program’s innovative work in creative writing is common.

“In the last two academic years, at the very least, there hasn’t been a member of the program who hasn’t had a wide release, a public performance, a national award,” says Ruth Ellen Kocher, associate professor of English and director of the University of Colorado’s Creative Writing Program.

“The program has a highly productive faculty,” Kocher adds.

“The unique thing about our faculty is that we really inspire our students to not only be innovative, but we also try to inspire them to consider and reconsider what it is to be innovative.”

Elisabeth Sheffield, associate professor of English, won a $25,000 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in Prose this year. In 2011, Julie Carr, assistant professor of English, won a $25,000 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry. Both are members of the Creative Writing Program.

As Kocher emphasizes, the program’s faculty have a large literary footprint: Noah Eli Gordon, assistant professor of English, has won the SFSU Poetry Center Book Award and been named a winner or finalist for many other awards. English professor Stephen Graham Jones has won a Kayden Book award and many others. And Associate Professor of English Marcia Douglas won a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, among other distinctions.

Emphasizing the quality of their program more than their own personal recognition, Sheffield and Carr talk about their program, the state of writing and the life of a writer.

As Sheffield notes, studying creative writing stimulates the life of the mind, but may not convey great remunerative benefits.

“What I think we do is provide a sanctuary for people to think intensely about language, literature, about their own writing.” It is a place where people can join the community of writers, Sheffield adds.

It’s important to think about writing as a verb rather than as a condition or state of being, she continues. “As soon as you think, ‘I am a writer,’ then you’re not a writer. You’re not writing.”

“Writing is about the act of writing. It’s often very painful and frustrating. At the same time, it’s intensely satisfying.”

“You can sit in front of your computer and sometimes hate yourself at the end of the day.” But, “There’s a satisfaction in struggling so hard with something and being so engaged with it that you forget yourself.”

Sheffield won the NEA fellowship on the basis of excerpts of a novel in progress she’s been crafting for nearly four years. The NEA fellowship and other support will allow her to finish it.

Like many in the world of writing and publishing, Sheffield sees a landscape in flux. Readers are buying fewer books, magazines and newspapers. Many small publishers (and publications) have been subsumed by large corporations. In their latest incarnations, these companies are less interested in literature and taking risks, Sheffield observes.

“They’re publishing memoirs by celebrities.”

But in the digital world, people spend prodigious amounts of time reading and writing. “Even as we talk about the dumbing down of culture, people are thinking about putting their thoughts into words more than ever.”

Sheffield is not writing the obituary of small publishing houses or the recognition of stellar writing: “I’m not entirely pessimistic. The people who are really interested in language as an art form, I don’t think they’re a bigger or smaller part of the population than they were before.”

She cites James Joyce, whose masterpiece was published serially in an American magazine. “What portion of the populace was waiting for the next installment of ‘Ulysses’?” Yes, literati and critics touted Joyce, “but who was listening to them?”

Carr’s NEA grant supported her writing projects titled “Think Tank” and “Rag.”

Like Sheffield, Carr contends that good writing is neither in decline nor disfavor. “Why would literature be of any less use to us now? If anything, we need poetry and other forms of literature more now than ever,” Carr says.

The political, economic and ethical crises facing the nation and world demand that individuals think critically about and respond creatively to the cultural environment, Carr adds. “This is very general statement, but I believe that where pressures are acute, art is most needed.”

Like Sheffield, Carr rejects the notion that social media necessarily erode the quality of intellectual discourse.

“Social media provide avenues for writers and readers to connect and to share work and ideas,” Carr says. “The time we all spend online can be used meaningfully or not; that’s up to each of us. As teachers, we help to guide students toward meaningful engagements with their world. Art is meaningful engagement.”

“Our Creative Writing Program is, in my humble opinion, one of the best programs in the country for students who are interested in more innovative ways of writing,” Carr adds. “We are a very active group of writers, publishing at an almost alarming rate!”

The program offers courses in publishing via its onsite press, Subito. Students are asked to learn modern and contemporary literature, and often study theory and the other arts as well.

The program has “a lively and exciting reading series,” Carr says. The program conducts outreach through which students can work in the public schools teaching creative writing.

Carr and her husband are co-publishers of Counterpath Press and co-own small bookstore/gallery/performance space in Denver called Counterpath: 

Assistant Professor Gordon runs a small press called Letter Machine: 

For more information about CU-Boulder’s Creative Writing Program, see: