All the above is the nuts and bolts of the program and the application process.  I'd like to say a little more about the faculty here.  Like every other writing program, we sometimes bring in visitors to lead the workshops; unlike many other programs, our visiting faculty teach for at least an entire semester and then remain available to help direct and read the students' theses.  Perhaps the most remarkable poetry workshop in America occurred when Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and George Starbuck gathered for instruction by Robert Lowell (gathered as often as not at the Ritz Bar, by the way).  Other poets and writers over the last few years have included Charles Simic, C.K. Williams, David Ferry, Maureen Howard, Tom Lux, Stephen Dobyns, John Cheever, John Barth, Jayne Anne Phillips, Donald Barthelme, Rosellen Brown, Penelope Mortimer, Stanley Elkin, Richard Yates, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Susanna Kaysen, Gloria Naylor, Ralph Lombreglia, Margot Livesey, and Amos Oz.

Occasionally visitors come for a semester to do something a bit unusual. Geoffrey Wolff once offered a course in biography and Joseph Kanon, the winner of the prestigious Roger Klein Memorial Award for Editorial Excellence, and then director of the trade division at Houghton-Mifflin here in Boston, led a brilliant workshop in editorial techniques; now of course he is a best-selling novelist himself.  When Aharon Appelfeld, the world-famous Israeli novelist, teaches here, it is often as much a course in the Old Testament as in prose style or content. Still and all, it is the regular faculty who make up the heart of the program.  Here are ours: