UNM's MFA Program in Creative Writing is designed for graduate students committed to pursuing the writing life. This three-year degree combines studio-based workshops in fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction with craft seminars and coursework in literature, pedagogy, and professional writing. The MFA faculty is committed to supporting its graduate students with teaching assistantships for the full three years it takes most students to complete the program, offering them the opportunity to teach not only Freshman Composition and Expository Writing but Introduction to Creative Writing as well. At UNM, we believe that MFA students should not go wildly into debt while completing their degrees. For this reason we encourage all applicants to our program to apply for teaching assistantships. Our program is small by national standards, but with a relatively small student-faculty ratio and competitive teaching stipends for three years, we believe we offer our MFA students the chance to fully immerse themselves in writing without the exorbitant price tags attached to some other MFA programs. In the same spirit, UNM's MFA Program prepares graduate students for professional lives outside the program, offering coursework not only in creative writing pedagogy, teaching composition, writing theory for teachers, and teaching literature and literary studies, but also electives in editing, proposal and grant writing, publishing, technical writing, documentation, and scientific, environmental, and medical writing. Additionally, we offer our students practical internships in editing and arts administration through Blue Mesa Review, UNM Press, and two highly popular reading series. MFA students have taught students at local high schools and through program affiliations with such illustrious nonprofit organizations as the Lannan Foundation and the National Hispanic Cultural Center. Through internships at the Taos Summer Writers' Conference, MFA students have studied craft with such luminaries as Wally Lamb, Elizabeth Strout, Dorothy Allison, Pam Houston, Antonya Nelson, Robert Boswell, and John Dufresne. Recent visiting writers include Sherman Alexie, Augusten Burroughs, Emily Rapp, Charles McLeod, Richard Garcia, and Luis J. Rodriguez.