Mark McGurl on Fiction-Writing Programs

Mark McGurl is a professor in the Department of English at Stanford, where he teaches postwar and contemporary American literature. He has taught at Stanford since 2011, having previously taught at UCLA. He received his BA from Harvard and his PhD from Johns Hopkins in 1998. He has held fellowships from the Office of the President of the University of California and from the Stanford Humanities Center, and has been a visiting professor at Washington University at St. Louis. He is the author of The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction Since Henry James (Princeton UP) and has published many articles in venues such as Critical Inquiry, Representations, American Literary History, and New Literary History. His most recent book is The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard UP), which received the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in 2011 and has been widely reviewed and widely praised. He is currently the Director of the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel and also works with the Stanford Literary Lab. For more information, visit his website http://www.markmcgurl.com