Thorpe Moeckel, associate professor of English, directs the center. His most recent book is Down by the Eno, Down by the Haw: A Wonder Almanac. His poetry books include Arcadia Road, Venison, Odd Botany, and Making a Map of the River. Chapbooks include Meltlines, The Guessing Land, and Off Owl’s Head. Watershed Days: Adventures (a Little Thorny & Familiar) in the Home Range, a work of nonfiction, was published in 2015. His writings appear regularly in journals, and selections are featured in several anthologies. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and Jacob K. Javits, Sustainable Arts, and Henry Hoyns fellowships, and was awarded the George Garrett New Writing Award from The Fellowship of Southern Writers. Forthcoming this winter is True as True Can Be, a middle grade novel, and his next collection of poems will be released in fall 2022.
Jackson Center for Creative Writing
The Jackson Center for Creative Writing is home to Hollins’ undergraduate and graduate writing programs, which have produced dozens of writers of national and international acclaim.
Programs offered
Major in Creative Writing
Students will be challenged to improve their control of the English language and will be prepared for graduate study in literature, creative writing, and related fields, or for entering a career in which their communication skills will be prized.
View the Courses and Requirements for the Creative Writing Major
English Major with Concentration in Creative Writing
With the opportunity to pursue a yearlong self-designed honors thesis in creative writing in consultation with a faculty advisor
View the English Major with Concentration in Creative Writing
Minor in Creative Writing
Undergraduate students who major in English can minor in creative writing, taking classes from Hollins faculty members, who are themselves published writers in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.
M.F.A. in Creative Writing
This two-year Master of Fine Arts program offers an individualized approach in an atmosphere of cooperation and encouragement.
People to Know
The Center's Director
The Center’s Benefactors
In 2008, Susan Gager Jackson ’68 and her husband, John Jackson, gave Hollins $5 million to found the center. Susan Jackson is the author of Through a Gate of Trees: Poems (2007) and the chapbook, All The Light In Between (2013).
Award-Winning Writers
Lee Smith ’67; Pulitzer Prize winners Annie Dillard ’67, M.A. ’68; Henry Taylor M.A. ’66; and Natasha Trethewey M.A. ’91 (shown in photo). Trethewey served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014. Kiran Desai M.A. ’94 won both the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The fiction of Madison Smartt Bell M.A. ’81 has been recognized by a Strauss Living Award.