1999 Doctoral Program in Literature and Creative Writing
USC Dornsife is home to one of the first Ph.D. programs in literature and creative writing. Students, who are themselves accomplished writers, work with some of the brightest literary minds writing today. The program’s faculty — including Aimee Bender, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Percival Everett, Mark Irwin, Carol Muske-Dukes, David St. John, and Marianne Wiggins — are award-winning writers who are recipients of the PEN/Faulkner Award, Pushcart Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship and finalists for the National Book Award. Launched in 1999, the Ph.D. program provides a dual emphasis in literature and creative writing, culminating in a dissertation that combines critical analysis with creative originality. Doctoral candidates not only read and write texts as finished products of scholarship, but also consider the text as writers create it. Then they compose texts as writers, a process that goes to the source of the study of literature and of literature itself.