The English Department of Wayne State University offers a Master of Arts degree with a particular emphasis in creative writing, as well as a concentration in creative writing for undergraduate majors. The department regularly schedules classes at both the graduate and undergraduate levels in poetry, fiction, writing for the theater, interdisciplinary genres, and poetics. In association with The English Department, The Humanities Center, and Springfed Arts-Metro Detroit Writers, the department sponsors readings, performances and new media presentations by internationally recognized artists. In recent years, these have included  Russell Banks, Andrea Barrett, Giselle Beuigueleman, cris creek, Samuel R. Delany, Diane DiPrima, Mark Doty, Ed Hirsch, Lyn Hejinian, Ismael Reed, Adrienne Rich, Sapphire, and Edmund White. 

The English Department supports a student-run magazine, The Wayne Literary Review , and oversees several literary contests open to both graduates and undergraduates: the Bruenton and Tompkins Prizes, the John Clare and Judith Siegel Pearson Awards, and the Louise Heck-Rabi Scholarship for stage and screenwriting.  In the Loughead-Eldredge and the Stephen Tudor Memorial Scholarships, the department specifically directs considerable financial resources to the support of creative writing students, including a renewable grant for a student working on an extended piece of fiction.

During the past decade, Creative Writing within the English Department has built on the solid achievements of an innovative, diverse, nationally recognized faculty who maintain contacts not only with the literary community in the United States, but those in Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Latin America, Russia, and elsewhere.  A significant number of our students have continued their studies in prominent programs at other universities or entered careers in writing, publishing, and teaching.  Recent graduates have burnished the program's reputation by winning such national honors as The Nelson Algren Prize, the Jacob Javits Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant.  Alumni and student work has appeared in numerous distinguished literary journals.  Graduates include the new genre and performance poets Mike Peter and Franziska Ruprecht, the screenwriter Doris Runey, novelists Mitchell Bartoy, Nan Cappo, John Richards, and Michael Zadoorian, and the short story writer and editor C. Vincent Samarco.

Beyond the yearly workshops in fiction, poetry, and drama in introductory through advanced settings, the program has initiated courses in areas that have achieved prominence in the new century: writing for performance, writing on visual art and music, hypertext fiction and poetry, new media writing, and creative non-fiction.