Western’s literary and art journal, Nomad; its weekly newspaper, Western Carolinian; the magazine and E-zine put out by program students, the radio station, and the yearbook all offer creative outlets - and real-world skills - for writing majors. 

Learn Tomorrow’s Skills Today

Students design and publish web pages, manuals, and brochures for real clients using state-of-the-art software and computer classrooms.  Chancellor John Bardo has observed, “Western’s English faculty is literally working on the national ‘cutting edge’” in computers and writing. 

Cooperative Learning

Western’s writing majors get school credit for working in businesses and publishing firms. Supervisors of recent “co-ops” at such places as Lark Books, McIntyre Photography, and the Social Security administration have praised the strong writing, editing, and computer skills of our students. 

Show Employers your Work

Majors in Professional Writing assemble a portfolio, presented in senior seminar, which documents their group communication, writing and editing, computer, analytical, and foreign language skills through their best creative writing, brochures, web pages, presentations, business letters, and resume.  Graduates tell us that this portfolio gives them the edge they need in today’s job market. 

Meet Today’s Most Acclaimed Writers

Pulitzer Prize winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa, Poet Eavan Boland, Poet Li-Young Lee, fiction writer Robert Conley, novelist Rosellen Brown, and Clifton Taulbert, author of the memoir Once Upon a Time When We were Colored, are just a few of the leading writers who have guest lectured at Western in the past few years. Coming Soon to WCU...