UNCW’s 3-Year MFA in Creative Writing
Environmental Writing at UNCW
Starting in Fall 2025, UNCW’s three-year MFA in Creative Writing program will offer students the ability to pursue an Environmental Writing Concentration, allowing writers of all genres to explore the influences of the natural world, the climate crisis, and the role of place in their writing.
Writers accepted into the Environmental Writing Concentration will develop the skills to effectively storytell with a focus on the natural world, and be empowered to do so in unique, collaborative and innovative ways. Nature writer David Gessner will lead a program of study that includes environmental writing workshops with UNCW professors and visiting place-based authors, themed electives, opportunities to work with the award-winning place-based Ecotone Magazine, field studies, and instruction in creative research. Students will be provided with an immersive and generative experience in the field of environmental writing.
The Environmental Writing Concentration will also include opportunities to visit barrier islands and western rivers, engage in intergenerational conversations about the planet’s future, and receive practical advice and mentorship in getting one’s work out in the world.
The oceans, islands and creeks of the Wilmington area will provide one of our primary classrooms. There have always been great benefits, and great challenges, to living on the edge of land and sea. In this time of powerful storms and rising oceans, University of North Carolina Wilmington is uniquely positioned, both academically and geographically, to address those challenges and to become a leader in writing about coastal resiliency, climate change, and sustainability.
The following courses are required for the Environmental Writing Concentration:
• 3-hrs environmental writing workshop
• 6-hrs environmental electives
• 3-hrs creative research course
• 3-hrs field study/internship
If you are interested in the Environmental Writing Concentration, or have any questions, please reach out to us at: [email protected]
Gessner is a professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the literary magazine, Ecotone. His own magazine publications include pieces in the New York Times Magazine, Outside, Sierra, Audubon, Orion, and many other magazines.
David Gessner is the author of fourteen books that blend a love of nature, humor, memoir, and environmentalism, including the New York Times bestselling, All the Wild That Remains, Return of the Osprey, Sick of Nature and Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt’s American Wilderness.
Gessner is the Thomas S. Kenan III Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of the literary magazine, Ecotone. His own magazine publications include pieces in the New York Times Magazine, Outside, Sierra, Audubon, Orion, and many other magazines, and his prizes include a Pushcart Prize and the John Burroughs Award for Best Nature Essay for his essay “Learning to Surf.” He has also won the Association for Study of Literature and the Environment’s award for best book of creative writing, and the Reed Award for Best Book on the Southern Environment. In 2017 he hosted the National Geographic Explorer show, “The Call of the Wild.”
He is married to the novelist Nina de Gramont, whose latest book is The Christie Affair.
“For nature-writing enthusiasts, Gessner needs no introduction. His books and essays have in many ways redefined what it means to write about the natural world, coaxing the genre from a staid, sometimes wonky practice to one that is lively and often raucous.”—Washington Post.
“A master essayist.” –Booklist
“David Gessner has been a font of creativity ever since the 1980s, when he published provocative political cartoons in that famous campus magazine, the Harvard Crimson. These days he’s a naturalist, a professor and a master of the art of telling humorous and thought-provoking narratives about unusual people in out-of-the way-places.”
–The San Francisco Chronicle