MFA Creative Nonfiction Writing

Your Time to Write

Enrolling now for the January 16, 2025 start.

Creative nonfiction blends the writer’s craft with truth, fact, and authenticity.  As a genre, it is expansive, finding expression in memoirs, essays, profiles, journalistic pieces, and narrative nonfiction.

Have you always known there was a story inside you? Or are you compelled by the stories of others, yearning to figure out just what makes people tick? The online MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Bay Path University will help you reveal, unravel, and give expression to the stories you already know–and the stories you yearn to uncover. Here, you will find your voice, develop your style, hone your craft, and master the art of storytelling.

What Makes Our Online MFA Stand Out? 

We have a steadfast commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging, demonstrated in the wide range of identity, culture, and lived experience of our faculty and students–and in the rich variety of stories that emerge from our writers. Our dynamic student body includes women, men, and non-binary writers; writers who are in their twenties, and writers who will graduate with their MFA in their seventies; writers from a variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds; writers who are mid-career, and writers who are “finally” ready to create the space to write their stories. In the Bay Path MFA, we all share a passion for writing and literature, and we believe in the integrity and meaning of the bonds that form when we support each other and our creative work.

In our online MFA, ideas and curiosity are encouraged in a safe and respectful space. Every writer matters and every student has a voice. 

• Classes are small and intimate. Faculty get to know you and your writing well–and you get to know your fellow students. 
• Guided feedback helps you improve the quality of your work with constructive, insightful feedback from faculty and writing peers.
• Lively online discussions foster connection and learning.
• Structure, pacing and deadlines will help you establish your own best writing practice. 

Our graduates have been published in literary and commercial magazines, newspapers, and anthologies. Some have published books that began in our program. Others are teaching creative writing, working in publishing, or in educational, institutional, and corporate communications. To see a sampling of what our alumni are doing, Turn the Page, or you can also visit BPU's library webpage - Friends of Hatch, which highlights unique events and past recordings throughout the year to bring attention to local authors, artists, and publishers (some are BPU MFA alumni!)

What Makes Our MFA in Creative Nonfiction Program Distinctive 

• Our faculty of established writers, editors, and literary citizens, and active practitioners are generous with their knowledge and experience in the worlds of writing, publishing, and teaching.
• Our curriculum is unique. Our MFA began online, and our courses are expertly designed to foster community and engagement in the online space.
• You’ll read and write in all of your courses, broadening the concept of your work in our foundational courses, and experimenting in new areas of interest in our many electives.
• You’ll select a professional track in publishing, teaching creative writing, or narrative medicine. Each track offers you an opportunity for classroom learning and real-world practice. 
• The pinnacle of your MFA learning is demonstrated in your capstone project, a 100-120-page thesis that is all your own. You’ll work closely over two semesters with your faculty mentor and a small group of peers as you move from concept to draft, through revisions and editing, to produce a final project that, for many of our grads, is the cornerstone of your post-MFA writing career.