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Biography

Johnny Payne is the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing and teaches Novel Writing, Playwriting, and Poetics. He also co-directs the MFA in Screenwriting.  His novels include Confessions of a Gentleman Killer and The Hard Side of the River. He writes essays on poetry and poetics for Merion West magazine.  Johnny Payne directs theater and is the author the recent plays Los Feliz, Touchstone, and Cannibals. Payne has published four books of poetry, the two most recent being Ostraca and Midnight Sutra. He is currently writing a critical study, Fierce Lyric: 21st Century Poetics.

Teaching Statement

Every student who enters our program is capable of performing at a professional level by graduation. My classroom is an objective space in which students are free to take risks, using “technique as discovery.” I value both the role of the intellect and that of intuition. As a teacher, I am method-driven, a lover of precision, of passionate, close reading that leads to a mastery of form. My courses are as much about process as product. It is essential to be a voyager in literary history to understand what to write now.