February 2007: An Anniversary

Ten years. It’s been ten years since Vermont College’s Master of Fine Arts program in Writing for Children and Young Adults met with its first class. Thirty students and six faculty. The faculty members were Jacqueline Woodson, Chris Lynch, Louise Hawes, Jack Gantos, Graham Salisbury, and I.

We were all as green as grass, trying to figure out what we had to offer one another, why we were there, what this program was going to mean.

The Vermont College MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults was the first program of its kind in the country...in the world, if you want to be more expansive about the whole thing. It is a low-residency program. Faculty and students come from all over the country...again, even from all over the world. We spend ten days together on the beautiful Montpelier campus in January and again in July. Then in the intervening five and a half months, students deliver a packet of creative and critical work to their faculty advisor once a month and receive a carefully edited response. And we all came back together again for another residency of lectures and workshops and readings, of discovery.