‘Our job is to help their voice come into being’: Teaching and learning creative writing at Yale

Yale’s Creative Writing program is home to about two dozen faculty writing within and across genres. They write—and teach—the craft of writing fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays, screenplays, and dramatic work for a variety of media.

Housed within Yale’s English department, the program offers students intensive workshops, a senior concentration, and one-on-one conferences with faculty who are celebrated writers—poets and playwrights, journalists and novelists, essayists and translators.

“That’s where the excitement happens: where it feels like one writer talking to another writer,” said Richard Deming, Senior Lecturer in English who was the director of the Creative Writing program through fall 2025. “That’s where we try to begin from and perpetually get back to, because that’s the most productive and generative for both the students and the teachers.”  

Yale’s Creative Writing faculty is stacked with working writers who are also dedicated teachers and advisors: novelist Amity Gaige, poet and critic Danielle Chapman, renowned translator and poet Peter Cole, and award-winning authors Caryl Phillips and Michael Cunningham (to name just a few).

Other influential writers regularly visit Yale to teach within the Creative Writing program. They offer unique courses and mentorship to students, creating more opportunities for young writers to learn how to establish their own writing practices and how other writers work. 

The ever-evolving program has also expanded beyond traditional modes of writing. Faculty teach classes in writing drama for television, graphic novels, and even narrative podcasting, embracing “new platforms and modalities for writing that still require craft and rigor,” said Deming.

Creative writing courses are open to Yale College students from any discipline. As a result, there are many creative writing classes in which future authors, scientists, artists, and engineers practice the craft of writing side by side.  

Here, six faculty members and five undergraduate students offer a glimpse into Yale’s Creative Writing program in their own words: its intimate workshops, emphasis on reading for craft, and the unexpected places the program takes many young writers.  

On the first day of a creative writing course…  

Anne Fadiman (Professor in the Practice of English): The first thing you’d notice is that the table in my classroom is round, not rectangular, and during the first class it would probably feel a little cramped. I always request a small room with a small table in order to foster intimacy. After my students get to know each other well, our cozy table feels just right.

On that first day, you’d find out that you should call me by my first name because I’m not interested in hierarchy; that I’d be assigning you a daunting amount of reading and writing; that you’d be meeting with me every other week for an hour for an “editing conference” in which we’d go over your writing together; and that I would be encouraging, though not require, you to take the class Cr/D/DFail rather than for a grade, since I believe grades can inhibit good writers from taking risks, trying things they’re not already good at, and experiencing reading and writing as a pleasure rather than an obligation.  

Derek Green (Lecturer in English and Director of Creative Writing): I promise students that for the duration of the term I will consider their work with the same level of seriousness and respect I afford any writer, professional or otherwise. We also work hard to create a collaborative writers’ room, in which students participate together to read and strengthen each other’s work. They will get one-on-one attention from me, too, but in a creative writing class, one of the greatest resources for the students is each other.  

Donald Margulies (Professor in the Practice of English): What I tell my students on the first day of class is that I can’t teach them how to write a play, but what I can do is share work that has inspired me to write plays and hope that I am able to convey that sense of wonder.  

We will take apart these plays (admittedly, plays I love to talk about) to see how they work (and how they don’t). I believe in the importance of structure, of understanding the building blocks of playwriting. We will explore subtext, event, objective, conflict: the tenets of dramatic writing, whether it’s intended for stage or screen.  

What we’re really teaching in creative writing is thinking. 

—Cynthia Zarin, 
Senior Lecturer in English 

How being a better reader makes one a better writer  

Richard Deming (Senior Lecturer in English): Generally speaking, at Yale, our interest is in combining close attention to the craft of writing and close attention to the craft of reading. Our idea is that good readers make the foundation for good writing. From that close attention to the mechanisms of how something works, we can build our own texts, our own poems, our own stories, our own essays.

Anne Fadiman: My colleague and friend Richard Deming is right about this, as he is about most things! In the same vein, a student of mine recently shared this wonderful quote by Cormac McCarthy: “Books are made out of books.” So they are—and essays, the genre my students write, are made out of books and essays and letters and everything else they read.

Marie-Helene Bertino (Lecturer in English and Ritvo-Slifka Writer in Residence): In creative writing classes we guide students as they learn how to read like writers, that is to say, to mine the work for craft lessons so we can build our own stories and book-length projects. There is a particular attention to how the thing is made from the inside out, in addition to a focus on what decisions were not made to help determine how the writer succeeded or failed in accurately and empathetically rendering life.

Why workshops are the program’s most important tool

Cynthia Zarin (Senior Lecturer in English and Co-Director of the Senior Concentration in Creative Writing): In the workshop, in any piece of writing, what I’m really looking for is: what is the spine of this piece? One thing that beginning writers do quite often is that they scaffold their work; there’s a lot of explaining and not relying on what are often wonderful images. And I try to get them to rely on those.

Richard Deming: Artists, like anybody else, love praise. But what they really crave is the truth. What we can get in a workshop experience is twelve other people’s truthful reading process.

Daniella Sanchez ‘25: The main thing I’ve learned [in the program] is to look at words, writing, and sentences with a three-dimensional quality. These classes have allowed me to ask: What if you push the limits? Have you rotated the line this way, or have you moved this clause before that clause? It’s allowed me to see that writing is truly malleable and transformative. When I was starting to write, I would write something and I couldn’t really see how it could be changed or pushed past any limit. I think the workshops do a really good job of doing that because you hear feedback from your peers and have one-on-one readings with professors.

Yuen Ning Chang ‘25: When I took a playwriting course with Deb Margolin, we would bring in scenes from our plays and cast the class—including Deb—to read for our characters. Especially for a living medium like theater, it’s extremely important to hear your writing read aloud. That is how you get to know your characters. You immediately get a sense of what and whom they should sound like, which characters are underdeveloped or lack dimension. You may even find yourself preferring a classmate’s interpretation of your character to your own.  

After two decades at Yale, teaching never feels dull or repetitive, because each class is different—both the twelve unique individuals and the unique chemistry of the group.

—Anne Fadiman, 
Professor in the Practice of English

On the benefits of welcoming a mix of majors into a workshop

Donald Margulies: I was a visual arts major in college when I wrote my first play and discovered I loved the form. So I know first-hand how a creative writing class can change the course of one’s life. Perhaps that is why I try to assemble an eclectic group, not just English or theater majors, who lend perspectives from other disciplines. It is exciting when a student who assumed they were on a certain track finds themselves drawn to another.  

Richard Deming: One of the things I love most about Yale students, and I know a lot of my colleagues feel this way, is that everybody here is hyphenate: they are novelist-ballet-dancer-microbiologist, all in one. And they bring all of that into the workshop.

I would say the main reason that we can attract such terrific faculty is the students. The students are, of course, really talented, but it’s something more than talent. I would say there’s a passionate openness. They want to learn, to go beyond their boundaries. They want to go to a new place that they hadn’t imagined was possible in them, and our job is to help guide them to that new place.  

Anne Fadiman: The smart, warm, generous, idealistic young people I work with are a constant source of energy and renewal. After two decades at Yale, teaching never feels dull or repetitive, because each class is different—both the twelve unique individuals and the unique chemistry of the group.

Cynthia Zarin: The wonderful thing about Yale students is they always throw the ball back. They always have something to say.

On the intimacy of the creative writing program

Lucy Ton That ‘26: One exciting thing about Yale creative writing classes is that there are a lot of really accomplished poets here who teach and who are in my classes. You’re getting access to people who are writing poetry, and you have the immediacy of reading their poetry and asking them about it. I think that’s true of Richard Deming, and of Cynthia Zarin, and of Natalie Diaz, who I’ve taken classes with, and Maggie Millner, who recently published Couplets. You can read their work and then grab coffee with them, or stay after class, which is a totally different access.  

Cal Barton '25: Michael Cunningham has been my most influential teacher at Yale. I consider myself wildly lucky to have spent so much time with Michael—I took two of his classes, and he advised my senior project. I love how he speaks about writing; he has a respect for the magic of it. We’ll talk about a story, and at a certain point, if we’re trying to dissect it too much, he’ll say, “Dissection is useful, but we don’t want to ruin our love for the story by dissecting it to death.” I think that’s helpful to hear.

Yuen Ning Chang ‘25: The reason I’ve become so close with Richard Deming is that he was one of the professors who really emphasized the importance of office hours. He would say, “Office hours are the time when I can tailor my teaching to you.” He also said in the very first class, “I am not easily impressed, and I am not impressed quickly.” And so, I went to office hours every week. We talked about everything from rearranging lines in my poems to the melancholy of Vienna. Richard Deming helped me rediscover my love for theater and encouraged me to take Deb Margolin’s advanced playwriting class, where I wrote my first full-length play. Almost all my writing professors took the time to see my production. These are the kinds of relationships you build with professors in office hours. These are experiences that have given my college experience the most meaning.

Richard Deming: It’s important to us to have a really close, one-on-one relationship with students—not even necessarily mentor-mentee, but someone who can hear ahead of the student what their voice is. We listen in a way that isn’t self-conscious, that isn’t trying to please somebody. We hear the voice underneath the voice, and then our job is to help that come into being.

The students are, of course, really talented, but it’s something more than talent. I would say there’s a passionate openness. 

—Richard Deming, 
Senior Lecturer in English

Students on their favorite writing wisdom shared by Yale’s creative writers  

Cristian Pereira '25: It’s really encouraging to have the writer of a Pulitzer Prize-winning work of fiction telling you that your terrible fiction is a natural part of the young writer’s process, and that everyone’s writing was bad at some point. Professor [Michael] Cunningham has this great line where he says, “I wish there was a folder somewhere that had all of the first drafts of every great work ever written, because then you could read how terrible it was at the start, and how much better it got through the revision process.”

Lucy Ton That ‘26: My time in workshops with Cynthia Zarin has really taught me about legibility, because a lot of poetry involves the strange or the illogical, the surreal. And I think her first instinct is: does this narratively make sense? Which isn’t to iron out the creases of the strangeness, but if the reader doesn’t believe, how can we follow this? And that has really changed the way I approach things.  

Daniella Sanchez ‘25: I’m taking poetry writing with Professor Cynthia Zarin, and she describes poetry as a “gesture.” To me, that gesture is an internal movement and stirring that happens within, that is reaching outwards and calling you to notice the world around you and your own humanity.  I think that is impactful because it sparks action. It’s why poetry has been used for so many years to communicate, as a form of activism, and as a part of oral culture. I’m really interested in the ways poetry causes both internal changes but also in how it can call a reader or a listener to this act of change.  

Cal Barton ‘25: I took a course with Anne Fadiman over the summer as part of Yale in London. The main assignment for her London class, which was an adapted version of what she does in New Haven, involved finding a person in the Yellow Pages and writing a profile about their profession. I profiled a fortune teller.

And the biggest thing I learned—I actually have notecards of little phrases Anne would toss out, and one of her favorite catchphrases was [a quote attributed to Isaac Bashevis Singer]: “I only write what only I can write.” That was her mantra for us. She would say, “You’re writing a profile of this person, but you’re writing it in a way that only you can write it.”

I wrote a profile of this tarot reader who was deeply suspicious of my intentions, and I was deeply suspicious of him, so the amount of access he offered me was pretty limited. I got one day with this guy, where I sat in his little booth and he talked to me about reading the tarot. Anne helped me think of the limitations as an asset. She said, “Well, because you didn’t really get to talk with him, it’s going to force you to look into the history of tarot and dramatize the one interaction you had with him.” And it was actually great, because I had to lean on my skills as a writer to make something of this one interaction. I ended up writing what reads more like a short story than a reported piece. My profile had its virtues and its flaws, but it was, above all else, something only I could have written.

Yuen Ning Chang ‘25: Writing bravely. That is perhaps the most important lesson I learned in Anne Fadiman’s class. For my final “Identity” project, I wrote an essay about my experiences at the gynecologist’s. In the initial drafts, I omitted crucial details out of shame. But Anne pushed me to be vulnerable and to write with courage. Who’s really going to shame you for being honest? Nobody. In fact, I made many new friends because of this essay—especially women who felt alone in their experiences because they, too, were afraid to talk about them. Don’t be. As William Zinsser says, “Nobody wants a cautious writer.”

Never make a shrine out of your writing space. Verlyn Klinkenborg says, learn to write anywhere, with anything, at any given time. Learn to write in your head—edit your sentences as you’re doing laundry, on the subway, or walking to class. That way, you’ll always have time to write.

Why creative writing is valuable for everyone—even for students that don’t plan to become professional writers

Cristian Pereira '25: I think the ability to communicate what you’re feeling effectively is important no matter what you do. Connecting your thoughts to a text is a really great way to understand your thoughts for yourself, too. Even if writing is not something you really want to focus on, especially creative writing—because it’s difficult and it’s probably not for everyone—I think that everyone should have some relationship with a creative art. Everyone should have at least one avenue they use to express things that are traditionally inexpressible.  

Cal Barton ‘25: Sometimes I’ve had creative writing classes where it seems the people who got the most out of it were people who didn’t have ambitions to be writers. They were taking the class because they really loved reading, and the class unlocked ways to love reading even more. [...] I had a creative writing class once with someone who wanted to be a doctor, who knew she was going to med school, who said “I think being a better storyteller is going to make me a better doctor.” It was the most admirable perspective to take on the class, and I'm sure she enjoyed discussing the short stories just as much as I did.

Cynthia Zarin: What we’re really teaching in creative writing is thinking. How do you take a thought and develop it? How do you best express a thought? How does that thought lead to another thought?  

It’s serious business. Teaching people how to think, how to imagine, how to follow through on a thought, and how to communicate is vital. […] What we teach—clear thinking and imagination—are essential to scientific discovery, to philosophy, to economics, to statecraft, and in mathematics: in every discipline, attention and imagination are vital.

For more perspectives on what it’s like to teach and learn writing at Yale, watch our videos featuring some of Yale’s outstanding Professors in the Practice: renowned comic artist and writer Alison Bechdel and Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.