This year, the English Department at Queens College welcomed the new Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation. Ours is the first MFA program in the borough of Queens and offers areas of study in poetry, fiction, playwriting and literary translation. We have twenty-three students in our first class of graduate students. As MFA program director, I am thrilled to be part of this wonderful collaborative venture that has brought faculty throughout the English Department, and the college, into conversation about writing and literature.

All of us on the faculty have been talking a great deal about how creative writing intersects with language and culture. This, I believe, is what makes our new MFA unique. Throughout the United States, there are many MFA programs. Since the 1930s when the first creative writing program, the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was founded, interest in creative writing at the graduate level has continued to rise. In fact, in the past twenty-five years, the number of MFA programs has grown from 15 to well over a hundred. (And this statistic does not even include creative writing MA and PhD degrees.)

Yet, typically, most of these MFA programs are cast very narrowly. Most programs still offer degrees only in poetry and fiction. Many do not focus on the study of literature. And almost none offer a track in translation. With more than 160 languages spoken in Queens, whose population we serve, our new MFA is ideally situated to offer a diverse population of students training in creative writing and to nurture an important generation of writers. Our program is groundbreaking not only because it is the first in the most multicultural county in the United States, but because it is one of the first creative writing programs to raise questions about the writing and translating of multinational literatures.

As one of the authors of the proposal that helped to launch the MFA, I was able to imagine what shape our MFA might take. As I reflected, I kept returning to an experience I had when I began teaching undergraduate creative writing at Queens College. My first semester here, I employed a pedagogical strategy—the anonymous creative writing workshop—that I’d used effectively in another liberal arts college with a homogeneous student body. Student texts circulated in my creative writing classes with no name on them—only I, the teacher, knew who had written the work. I explained to my students that this strategy emphasizes that we are discussing the writing, not the writer, and ensures that the writer can’t defend his or her work.

At first, this teaching method seemed, again, to work well. But something troubled me: In this class, composed primarily of students who were recent immigrants from the Philippines, several Soviet breakaway Republics and Afghanistan, there was a curious lack of character and setting in the students’ work. Places, people, landmarks were not named. There was a flatness in the stories the students wrote, and even an odd similarity in their narratives.

To understand the problem, I invited students to come to my office hours to talk about their work. Over and over, they told me they had left out all references to place and time so that no one could identify them as the author. They explained: If they named their native countries, or used words from their native languages, everyone would have known they wrote the story. If they told a story located in the worlds they knew, derived from their own experience, they told me they would have done the assignment wrong.

I realized that a crucial part of becoming a writer is believing that your own experience, your own background, has value and can be written about. For my students, whose voices had already been disenfranchised and silenced, anonymous workshop invalidated their experience. The students in my class believed that they should erase individual difference—language, culture—in favor of the creation of a “universal” narrative in order to be good writers.

This experience forever changed my thinking about creative writing pedagogy and has played a large part in my hopes for our new MFA. The teaching of writing, I learned firsthand, is inflected by language and culture in complex ways. A single, universal narrative is not the goal of a creative writing class. And thus, the inclusion of translation and the focus on serious literary study in our MFA program became central. Training our students in creative writing and multiple literatures and languages, using our campus-wide interdisciplinary resources, is a way to give our students the freedom to write their own stories and to show them that their stories matter.

Thus, our program seeks to bring together the translation and creative writing tracks of our MFA. Student translators will take workshops in their genres and attend readings, but the other students in poetry, fiction and playwriting will try their hand at translation exercises, attend our “Trends in Translation” series of talks, and participate in this lively aspect of our writing community.

Finally, for all of us in the MFA program, translation is not simply the transformation of one language to another but a way of thinking about language. Our MFA focuses on translation across cultures, between continents, between and among theoretical approaches to literary texts, between and among various cultures that make up the diverse and varied landscape of Queens.