Episode 24: Wolfpack Writing, With Belle Boggs

On the Season 4 premiere of the NC State Philanthropy Podcast, we’re joined by Belle Boggs, a professor of English in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, University Faculty Scholar and former director of NC State’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, to discuss how private support powers the program forward.

The creative writing program is a two-year, fully-funded program consisting of workshops, interdisciplinary coursework and a final thesis of literary work. Distinguished by the one-on-one attention students receive from our faculty poets and writers, the program offers a strong, supportive start to a creative life in words. The program is a small one, accepting about a dozen students each year, with six or seven students in fiction and another six or seven in poetry. It also offers full funding in the form of a graduate teaching assistantship to all eligible admitted applicants.

Private support enables the program to go above and beyond what state funding provides, as this interview highlights, with the results helping NC State students and people all across North Carolina. An especially transformative, $1 million gift was made to the program in 2021 by the Tony Brown family; not only was it incredibly generous, it was also the largest gift ever received by a humanities department at NC State and one of the largest funded endowments in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

To learn more about NC State’s MFA in Creative Writing program and how you can be part of it — as a student or as a donor — please visit go.ncsu.edu/mfa. To hear even more stories of Wolfpack success, please subscribe to the NC State Philanthropy Podcast today through Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean or Stitcher. Be sure to leave a comment and rating as well to let us know how we’re doing. Thanks for listening, and as always, go Pack!

Transcript available here.