Honors Program

If you will graduate in May 2026 or December 2026 and wish to apply for the Honors Program in Creative Writing or Playwriting for the 2025-26 academic year, please read the following guidelines carefully. The deadline for honors applications is 11:59pm, Thursday, April 24, 2025. Students applying for honors must have a minimum cumulative GPA of 3.7. Students who have a cumulative GPA of at least 3.45 may be eligible to petition Emory College’s Honors Program for a waiver. 

All applications must include the following: 

• A cover sheet with your full name (first, middle, last, and preferred name if different), student ID number, NetID, cumulative GPA, Emory email address, phone number, graduation month and year, major(s), and name(s) of faculty with whom you’ve discussed this project. 
• A résumé or CV, including your activities at Emory and the Creative Writing workshops you've taken, including semester, year, and name of the instructor. You may list your workshops on your cover sheet if you prefer. 
• A one-page (single-spaced) synopsis of your project. Include enough detail to demonstrate your current thinking about the project: its genre, the form (e.g., a novella), and what you know now about its possible content. Proposals are an important part of the application -- work to make yours compelling. 
• A sample of work in the genre in which you plan to do the thesis -- 15-25 double-spaced pages of fiction or nonfiction, a substantial group of poems, or 10-25 pages of a screenplay or play (in the standard format for those genres). You may submit a longer sample, but the selection committee may not read past the page limit.

If you propose a project in a genre of writing in which you have already taken workshops, and in which your writing sample demonstrates real proficiency, you increase your chances of acceptance into the Creative Writing Honors Program. Proposing a project in a genre in which you have not taken workshops substantially decreases your chances of acceptance. 

If you are accepted into Honors in Creative Writing, you will be assigned a faculty member to direct your project. Students seeking Honors in Playwriting may request a specific Theater Studies faculty member with whom they wish to work. Eligibility for honors does not guarantee that you will be able to do an honors project.

The strength of your application, and the faculty's appraisal of your readiness to undertake a sustained project, in addition to the availability and agreement of a faculty member, will be the major factors considered in this competitive selection process. 

If your cumulative GPA is below the required 3.7 and does not rise to 3.7 by the end of Spring or Summer 2025, but you have a GPA of at least 3.45, an exceptional record in the Program, and strong support from Creative Writing faculty, you may submit a petition for a waiver of the required GPA to the Emory College Honors Program by a deadline in August that will be announced later this Spring.

You would be allowed to do this only if one of the Creative Writing Honors spaces became available. You will need to discuss this possibility with Program faculty in Spring 2025. To secure the Program’s support for a waiver petition, students must be in touch with faculty by early August at the latest. 

Any member of the Creative Writing core faculty, including your advisor, is able to talk with you about your honors proposal. Making an appointment now to talk with a faculty member (or more than one faculty member) is an excellent way to begin the process of preparing your application. 

Please visit the Emory College Honors Program website for FAQs. 

You may read through past Honors theses in the Creative Writing Program office, Callaway N209; bound theses are also housed in the Woodruff Library. Honors theses are now submitted electronically via the library's Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) repository system and may be viewed via ETD -- use the keywords "Creative Writing" in the search function. 

Students who finish in the top 30% of Emory College graduates may now be awarded standard Latin designations: summa cum laude, magna cum laude, and cum laude. Honors in Course will take time to calculate and post to students' transcripts; these designations will not be recognized or announced at graduation. Creative Writing and Playwriting honors students are also eligible to receive the Honors in Course GPA distinction.

Please see the Honors Recognitions website for more details.