Humanities & Teacher Education

Creative Writing Program Overview

For three decades Creative Writing has been an integral part of the literary arts community at Pepperdine University. Today the Creative Writing program is at the center of a large and active community on campus and is one from among a select number of universities that offer the Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing. During our sequential course of study, students develop their talents in fiction, poetry, and writing for screen and television. In addition, our students sharpen their verbal and critical skills and develop a professional attitude about their writing.

Our proximity to Los Angeles offers a unique and impressive combination of opportunities for our majors, including internships at major talent agencies, major movie production studios, national television shows, and a variety of independent and commercial publishers. In addition to these outside opportunities, Pepperdine offers its creative writing students the chance to work on two university publications: Expressionists, the student-run literary magazine, and Christianity & Literature, a national scholarly journal that explores how literature engages Christian thought, experience, and practice.

Each year our students meet and talk with nationally known writers who offer experience and insight. Recent Visiting Writers have included:

Maya Angelou
Carlos Fuentes
Tobias Wolff
Kay Ryan
Donald Hall
Robert Bly
Dana Gioia
Jorie Graham
W. D. Snodgrass
Kathleen Norris
Luci Shaw

With the development of our MFA in Writing for Screen and Television, we have brought celebrated screenwriters, directors, and actors to speak and teach courses at Pepperdine. These industry professionals have included:

Robert Altman (A Prairie Home Companion, Gosford Park)
Morgan Freeman (Dark Knight, Million Dollar Baby)
Tom Shadyac (Bruce Almighty, Evan Almighty, Ace Ventura)
Patricia Heaton (Everybody Loves Raymond)
Randall Wallace (Braveheart, Man in the Iron Mask)
Dick Van Dyke (Dick Van Dyke Show, Diagnosis Murder)
Amy Ephron (A Little Princess)
Garry Marshall (Princess Diaries, Happy Days)
Dean Batali (That 70s Show)
Lester Holt (NBC Nightly News, Today Show)
Chuck Slocum (Writers Guild of America, West)

The Creative Writing program director is Dr. John Struloeff, a former Wallace Stegner Writing Fellow at Stanford University and an award-winning poet and fiction writer.

Download our Creative Writing brochure.

For more information contact: