Key Issues in Creative Writing

Dr. Dianne Donnelly is the associate director of the CCCC-Award winning composition program at the University of South Florida. In addition to her interests in rhetoric & composition and writing program administration, she is a creative writer and craft critic who addresses the theory and pedagogy of creative writing. Her pedagogical works include Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? (2010), The Emergence of Creative Writing Studies as an Academic Discipline (2011), and Key Issues in Creative Writing (with Graeme Harper, 2012). She is a frequent presenter at the creative writing pedagogy forums at CCCC and AWP; reviewer for Pedagogy, TEXT, and multiple presses; senior creative writing editor for Writing Commons; and editorial board member for New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing.

Graeme Harper is a Professor of Creative Writing and Dean of The Honors College at Oakland University in Michigan, USA. An award-winning fiction writer, and former Commonwealth scholar in Creative Writing, he has published widely on Creative Writing and its development as an academic discipline. He is Editor of the journal New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing and is Editor-In-Chief of the book series New Writing Viewpoints. His latest work of fiction is The Japanese Cook (Parlor, 2017). In 2015 he edited Creative Writing and Education (Multilingual Matters).

Dianne Donnelly, PhD, is the author of Establishing Creative Writing Studies as an Academic Discipline (2011) and the editor of Does the Writing Workshop Still Work? (2010). She is a regular contributor to the theory and pedagogy of creative writing and a frequent presenter at CCCC and AWP on creative writing pedagogy. She is on the editorial board for New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing and Writing Commons, referees for the online peer-reviewed journal TEXT, and teaches writing at the University of South Florida.

Graeme Harper, DCA PhD, is Professor and Director of The Honors College at Oakland University, Michigan. He has held professorships in the UK, USA and Australia, is an honorary professor in the UK and the Editor-in-Chief of New Writing: the International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. He recently also published On Creative Writing (2010), and is currently working on Creative Writing Challenges. A winner of the National Book Council Award for New Fiction (Aust.), and a Commonwealth Scholarship, he is Editor of the New Writing Viewpoints book series.

More than any other book currently available, Key Issues in Creative Writing maps out the possibilities and problems that confront creative writing in the academy in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Refusing to isolate creative writing from the complex and turbulent worlds it must inhabit, the contributors to this volume provide an absolutely indispensable overview of the issues facing the field. If you are interested in the future of creative writing as an academic enterprise, you simply must read this book.

Philip Gross, Glamorgan University, UK:

Creative writers studying, researching and teaching in universities are facing deep unsettling change, as are universities themselves and the economies in which they are embedded. Writers as individuals know about the creative value of uncertainty, experiment, bold thinking and embracing contradictions; this provocative collection points to ways of doing this for the discipline as a whole. With perspectives from the US, the UK and Australia, this is globalized thinking in the good sense – not homogenized but expanded by considering their deep differences as well as their shared interests. Here is an array of possibilities by which creative writing may not simply survive but positively evolve.