WashU Creative Practice Workshop

The WashU Creative Practice Workshop is an interdisciplinary workshop that provides an opportunity for WashU creative practice faculty across various fields to collaborate, produce, and share work. By drawing from diverse disciplines, the Workshop offers its members a unique community of fellow creative practitioners that can support and challenge each other’s ideas and ambitions, while also providing a semester leave and dedicated workspace for individual scholars in creative practice to complete particular projects.

Purpose of the WU Creative Practice Workshop

  • To provide greater support for WU faculty who create work in the literary arts or related creative practice fields. The WU Creative Practice Workshop will be open to tenure-track faculty at the University whose creative literary practice is meaningfully connected to their teaching or research, including, but not limited to creative writers, translators, and other creative artists working with text (in visual arts, performing arts, music, etc). 
  • To enable the CLA to become an important contributor to this sense of community by providing both a physical and intellectual environment for literary arts and creative practice activities.
  • To make known to the broader (both WU and non-WU) academic community, as well as the literary community outside of the University (across St. Louis, the US, and the world) both the work of WU faculty more generally through interaction between members of the WU Creative Practice Workshop, as well as external writers and scholars connected to the CLA.

Call for Applications

The WU Creative Practice Workshop is an interdisciplinary workshop that provides an opportunity for WashU creative practice faculty across various fields to collaborate, produce, and share work, while also providing a semester leave and dedicated workspace for individual scholars in creative practice to work on particular projects.

The WU Center for the Literary Arts in Arts & Sciences is pleased to offer a number of opportunities to become members of the WU Creative Practice Workshop during the fall and spring of each academic year.

Those accepted into the WU Creative Practice Workshop will be in residence at the Center for the Literary Arts for the designated semester and will be relieved of all teaching and administrative duties for that semester.

Benefits of WU Creative Practice Workshop

  • One full semester of relief from teaching and service so that the members of the WU Creative Practice Workshop can devote their time to an extensive creative project
  • Funds for teaching replacement to the home department/s of the members of the WU Creative Practice Workshop
  • An intensive, interdisciplinary intellectual/creative environment in which the members of the WU Creative Practice Workshop can share their work in a collaborative, supportive, and enriching intellectual/creative/academic space
  • An office at the center equipped with a computer and office supplies during the residency at the CLA as part of the WU Creative Practice Workshop

Requirements

Members of the WU Creative Practice Workshop, during the course of their semester of residency, must:

  • be in residence at the university and make use of an office provided by the CLA
  • actively participate in the WU Creative Practice Workshop and share their creative work
  • attend public workshops of other fellows and at least one other public event sponsored by the CLA
  • submit a short report giving an account of their activities at the end of their semester of residency

Eligibility

All tenured and tenure-track faculty of Arts & Sciences at Washington University are eligible to apply to the WU Creative Practice Workshop.

How to Apply

Applications must include:

  • Faculty Fellow Application Cover Sheet 
  • A project proposal containing the following information:         
    • A description not to exceed 800 words of the applicant’s creative project, which should discuss what the project entails, and what the applicant hopes to accomplish during the semester of residency at the WU Creative Practice Workshop
    • A statement not to exceed 500 words that explains the project’s relevance to the larger community of creative practitioners at Washington University, impact of the project, and its potential contributions to the WU Creative Practice Workshop and the collective life at the Center for the Literary Arts
  • A current CV
  • One letter of recommendation by a faculty member in support of the application
    • This letter can be from either a member of the WU faculty or from an external faculty person familiar with the applicant’s creative work. Letters can be sent by email to literaryarts@wustl.edu. 

The entire application can be submitted via email to literaryarts@wustl.edu. 

Winners will be chosen by a selection committee consisting of members of the Advisory Committee of the Center for the Literary Arts.