Three high-profile authors have put their heads and their networks together to dream up a university program tailor-made for children’s and YA creators. Martha Brockenbrough, A.S. King, and David Macinnis Gill are launching a low-residency Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Young Readers, headquartered at the University of San Francisco. The first cohort will begin their studies in June 2026, and the application portal is open.

In addition to the three co-founders, inaugural faculty include Tracey Baptiste, Ann Dávila Cardinal, Erin Entrada Kelly, An Na, and Dashka Slater, with additional faculty coming on board in the future. Students and faculty will meet in person each June and January on the University of San Francisco campus. The rest of the time, students will work from home to complete coursework in craft and criticism. Once their two years of courses are complete, they’ll finish their degrees with a fifth residency where they present their work and co-lead a workshop with a faculty member.

“Our agenda will be to make room for all sorts and shapes of stories,” program director Brockenbrough told PW. “I have had so many exciting conversations with people about building something truly epic, and we’re raising scholarship funds to ensure students have every possibility to attend.” The program will actively recruit students from marginalized communities and will nurture inclusive stories, and the co-founders will fundraise with industry partners to reduce students’ financial burdens and defray the $48,000 program cost. Literary agent Barry Goldblatt was the first to step up as a sponsor, pledging $10,000.

The co-founders decided to build their own MFA after teaching in low-residency writing programs at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Hamline University, and Lesley University. They envisioned an MFA whose faculty practiced many forms of writing for young people, where students could develop manuscripts, read widely across kids’ categories, and learn practical tasks like leading workshops and working with bookstores and libraries. Appropriate compensation and benefits for faculty were priorities as well. “The University of San Francisco has embraced a call to change the world, and this is one way they’re doing it,” Brockenbrough said. “It’s possible to pay fair wages and offer benefits for faculty, and I’m hoping that this changes the game for everyone involved.”

Michael Goldman, associate dean for graduate programs and strategic initiatives in USF’s College of Arts and Sciences, told PW that the new MFA aligns with the university’s commitment to the liberal arts and its 1925–2025 centennial goals. “Given our Jesuit educational philosophy, we thought this program would make a strong contribution” to the curriculum, he said, because of its “focus on action for the common good and the [literary] content available for young people.”

Goldman said the university expects to enroll 20 students every six months, so that about 80 students would be cycling through the four-semester program at any given time. The low-residency MFA will operate separately from USF’s long-established, in-person MFA in Writing, Goldman said, but there will be potential for joint activities. Both programs are part of the interdisciplinary Ann Getty Institute of Art and Design, which supports creative events. A promotional launch is planned for USF’s upcoming alumni and faculty weekend this October, and the authors intend to get the word out to organizations including the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.

An Incubator for Creative Work

Running an MFA program threatens to overlap with sacred writing time, but the founding authors are eager to get into the classroom. “Residencies fuel creativity,” Macinnis Gill said. “They’re so powerful and enriching. When I leave residencies, I can’t wait to start writing, because they’re incubators” for invention. Macinnis Gill, an associate professor of English Education at the University of North Carolina–Wilmington, is looking forward to the publication of his YA survival thriller, Three Sisters (Greenwillow, Mar. 2026). Brockenbrough's latest, a wilderness adventure titled At the Edge of Lost (Scholastic), pubs in October.

King is likewise stoked to connect with rising authors and “talk about heady topics,” she said. The classroom “is a space for me to be my wacky surrealist-brained self.” She loves manuscripts that push literary boundaries, and she recalls taking artistic risks that paid off in her 2020 Printz Award-winning novel, Dig. “If you look at my books, I’ve broken most of the rules,” she said. “That’s kind of what I want to pass on to students. I want good books for young readers out there, and in this [political] climate we’re in, I don’t want any restrictions on them.”

Course assignments and one-on-one time with mentors will help students hone their craft, realize their creative visions, and get to know the business of publishing too. “A focus on [creative] rigor sometimes is connected with ‘we don’t talk about the business here,’ ” King said, but “having agents, editors, coming in is part of the education.” A self-taught writer, she studied Poets & Writers to decode the vagaries of the industry on her own, a slow process of trial and error.

Industry colleagues have been responding to rumors of the MFA in recent months, the founders noted. “The clearest indication that the publishing community will be behind this is that we’ve had agents and editors volunteering to be part of the residency,” Macinnis Gill said. “There’s kind of a whisper network” developing, and “published authors who are our former students are asking how they can be part of this.”

Special guests will be part of every semester’s lineup, from agents and editors offering insider tips to audiobook narrators sharing suggestions for read-aloud impact. The creators of the MFA want it to be a community-builder, acquainting people across the industry. “This business runs in part on relationships,” Brockenbrough said. “And at the end of the day, we do this work to provide the best possible books for kids.”