The English Department at Penn State Brandywine offers a Creative Writing concentration for English majors interested in pursuing careers in writing and nurturing their love of writing. 

The Brandywine campus provides an ideal space to develop your creative talents and share your work. You could submit creative work to Penn in Hand, the campus literary and arts journal, and get experience editing and producing a literary journal by joining the Penn in Hand student club. The annual Brandywine Literary Arts Festival (formerly Litapalooza) also gives you the chance to share your work alongside invited professional writers from the greater Philadelphia region.

A Creative Writing concentration provides numerous marketable skills when you graduate. Publishing, editing, and digital content management continue to be areas of job growth and sustainability. The wild popularity of gaming has created a demand for imaginative writers who can design rich, dynamic, interactive narratives for the demographically diverse gaming audience. Other areas attracting English majors and creative writers include:

  • Advertising copywriter
  • Arts administrator
  • Creative director
  • Digital copywriter
  • Editorial assistant
  • Magazine journalist
  • Marketing and Public Relations
  • Newspaper journalist
  • Web content manager

The Creative Writing concentration allows you to explore the different forms of creative writing (fiction, poetry, and nonfiction), to choose a primary focus among those forms, and/or to develop a specific, marketable focus in fact-based writing through courses in biography, science writing, article writing, and editing. To fulfill the Creative Writing concentration, a student must take at least four classes from the courses listed under an individual concentration. The four courses required for a concentration may also fulfill four of the five prescribed electives for the major.

Brandywine faculty regularly offer the following courses for the Creative Writing Concentration:

ENGL 50: Introduction to Creative Writing (GA) 
ENGL 209: Journal or Magazine Practicum (1-6)  
ENGL 212: Introduction to Fiction Writing   
ENGL 213: Introduction to Poetry Writing 
ENGL 414: Biographical Writing
ENGL 416: Science Writing     
ENGL 420: Writing for the Web 
ENGL 495L Internship (3 credits only)

For more information, contact Maureen Fielding, [email protected].