Writers produce the art that critics wrangle over. Randall Jarrell once attended a conference where critics were discussing Wordsworth. In the last decade the department has attracted one of the strongest graduate faculties in the country. It offers courses, from Beowulf to deconstruction, that encourage the necessary exercise of a writer's critical skill. What skill is most finely demanded in the workshop, where the writer offers work in an atmosphere of rigor and respect, criticism and sympathy.
Writers learn as much from their fellows as they do from their teachers.
Each year the writing faculty accepts a diverse group of students who have already displayed their talent as writers and provides them with a serious and provocative set of courses. Florida possesses a climate conducive to a writer's warm temperament, and flora and fauna shockingly unfamiliar to those from out of state.