8-week ONLINE MFA Application Prep Workshop (fiction & nonfiction) - begins 9.15.26
Dates: begins September 15, 2026
Instructor: Keija Parssinen
Location: Meetings via video Tues 7-9pm ET
Fee: $950 | $900 for returning Sackett writers
A writing sample is required for this class. Please fill out an application with your contact info and a sample of your writing.
Open to fiction and creative nonfiction writers.
Our MFA Application Prep Workshop has helped thousands of writers find acceptance at top graduate programs in Creative Writing. This informative and supportive class, open to fiction and nonfiction writers, is a great way to finalize your list of MFA programs, polish your writing sample, and write and revise your statement of purpose — all in an MFA-level workshop full of writers going through the same process.
Writers have two opportunities to share work from their application writing sample with the class and receive detailed feedback and a class discussion dedicated to their writing. Class includes access to our online platform where writers will find information specific to the creative writing application process, weekly craft lessons, recommended readings and optional writing exercises. Writers will also receive feedback on their statement of purpose.
A conference with the instructor is included.
Keija Parssinen’s second novel, The Unraveling of Mercy Louis, won an Alex Award from the American Library Association, was chosen as Book of the Month by Emily St. John Mandel, and was selected as a Best Book of the Year by the Kansas City Star, Lone Star Literary Life, Missouri Life, Vox Magazine, and Brazos Bookstore.
She graduated cum laude from Princeton University, where she studied English literature and received a certificate from the Program for the Study of Women and Gender. She earned her MFA at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote fellow, a Teaching and Writing fellow, and the student editor of the Iowa Short Fiction contest. After finishing the program, she won a Michener-Copernicus award for her debut novel, The Ruins of Us, which was published in the US (HarperCollins), UK (Faber& Faber), Ireland, Australia, South Africa, Italy (Newton Compton Editori) and around the Middle East.
Her short fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in the New York Review of Books Daily, Gulf Coast, The Southern Review, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Review of Books, the Lonely Planet travel-writing anthologies, World Literature Today, Slate, The Arkansas International, The Brooklyn Quarterly, Slice Magazine, Salon, Five Chapters, the New Delta Review, Marie Claire, Off Assignment, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by fellowships and residencies from Hedgebrook, the Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Ragdale, the Vermont Studio Center, Playa Summer Lake, the Oklahoma Center for the Humanities, and the Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow, where she was a My Time Fellow.
Keija was born in Saudi Arabia and lived there for twelve years before her family moved to Austin, Texas. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College and lives in Ohio with her family.