Welcome to St. Andrews Presbyterian College

Good writers and communicators are needed everywhere in the workplace now as never before. The demand increases as fewer individuals attend to the written word as a vital tool. As a vice president of a major insurance company recently said, "Send us people who can write well and are well-spoken-we can teach them the machines they need to know." St. Andrews was one of the first schools in the country to implement a BFA program in Creative Writing. Faculty sets us apart from all other schools; each professor posesses the highest degree in their field of interest. Dr. Ron Bayes, writer-in-residence here at St. Andrews, is highly regarded by his peers: "Ron Bayes is the best undergraduate Creative Writing teacher in the country." says Carolyn Kizer, Pulitzer Prize winner. The N.C. Writer's Network awarded Bayes its first Lifetime Achievement Award and named the annual honor for him.

Resident faculty in Creative Writing include prize winning fiction writers David Bell, Molly McCaffrey, and Ted Wojtasik -- all with doctorates in their field, plus Dr. Thomas Heffernan as well as Bayes in poetry. Playwriting and writing for film are shared by the Creating Writing program and the Communications and Theatre Department headed by Dr. Richard Brett. Visiting writers have included Carolyn Kizer, Robert Creeley, Romulus Lindey, Anthony Abbott, Donald Keene, Daphne Athas, Tom Wolfe, Reynolds Price, Fred Chapell and Theodore Enslin to name a few.

So there you have it. St. Andrews has a terrific undergraduate program in Creative Writing that meets all the requirements outlined in the Associated Writing Programs’ criteria for excellence. The AWP, an international organization for creative writing at colleges and universities, advocates the following for an excellent undergraduate program in Creative Writing:

“Because a writer must first become a voracious and expert reader before he or she can master a difficult art, a strong undergraduate program emphasizes a wide range of study in literature and other disciplines to provide students with the foundation they need to become resourceful writers - resourceful in techniques, styles, models, ideas, and subject matter.

“The goal of an undergraduate program is to teach students how to read critically as writers and to give students the practice of writing frequently so that, by creating their own works, they may apply what they have learned about the elements of literature…. A successful undergraduate program accomplishes all this through a rigorous and diverse curriculum, through excellent support for students, through the administration’s effective management, and through the institution’s extracurricular activities, general assets, and infrastructure.”

St. Andrews has all that and more including a weekly writers' forum featuring students reading their own work as well as professional writers from all over the country and beyond including India, Japan, England, Ireland, Scotland, Turkey, Germany and Italy. They are all available to be consulted by students one-on-one.

Many St. Andrews writing students travel, too. Some go to the competitive fall semester in Italy to study at Ezra Pound's castle (in the South Tirolian), some to the annual week-long Manteo writing retreat, and some independently.