COMMUNITY: AROUND TOWN AND ACROSS THE WEB

Around Town

Our program is small, currently with a student to faculty ratio of 3.5 to 1. At the same time, the MFA Program is part of a large English Department, with multiple departmental areas and a dynamic faculty with a range of scholarly interests. Greater Lafayette, which comprises the towns of West Lafayette and Lafayette, is a community of around 100,000 people. That number does not include the 40,000 students at Purdue, one of the larger and more diverse research universities in the country. In 2009 Forbes Magazine ranked West Lafayette among the top ten smartest small cities in America.

Our graduate students have all the benefits of a small town (affordable rents, safe, quiet neighborhoods, and a sense of community) plus all the resources of a major University (libraries, state of the art technology, concerts and convocations, gymnasiums and the rah-rah of Big Ten sports). Greater Lafayette is also a college town, with espresso bars, live music, parks and bike trails, a downtown farmer's market, and one of the best independent bookstores in the Midwest. Two big cities are easy to reach, with Indianapolis just an hour south and Chicago two hours north.

Here are some links about the area:

Greater Lafayette Visitors and Convention Bureau
Lafayette/West Lafayette Downtown
Lafayette Journal and Courier
Purdue Exponent
Purdue Convocations

Across the Web

Purdue is home to a number of scholarly journals as well as the award-winning Sycamore Review, which is almost entirely staffed by MFA students. Here is a list of useful links for creative writing students and recent graduates. This is anything but comprehensive, but most of these sites have exhaustive links pages to other organizations, literary magazines, and information about contemporary fiction and poetry.

The Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP)
Poets & Writers
The American Poetry Review
PEN American Center
Academy of American Poets
The Writers' Center of Indiana