Award-winning authors Joyce Carol Oates and Kentucky native Chris Offutt will be among the nine visiting writers at the winter residency segment of Eastern Kentucky University’s Creative Writing Program.

EKU’s brief-residency Master’s of Fine Arts program is in the midst of its second year and has grown from four students to 25. In order to meet the demands of students tied to jobs and/or families, the program blends online courses and two intensive 11- to 30-day residencies each year – one in the winter in Kentucky and another in the summer in Mexico.

During the upcoming winter residency, to be held at the Hilton Lexington/Downtown Jan. 1-10, students will benefit from lectures, panel discussions, hands-on writing workshops and extensive informal interaction with the visiting writers as well as the permanent program faculty from EKU.

“It’s basically a semester’s worth of work pressed into 10 days,” said Dr. Young Smith, program director and award-winning poet. Each residency is worth three credit hours toward the 48 required for degree completion.

Oates “has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time,” Smith said. These include national bestsellers “We Were the Mulvaneys” and “Blonde,” a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, as well as New York Times bestsellers “The Falls” and “The Gravedigger’s Daughter.”

Offutt, who grew up in rural eastern Kentucky, is currently the head writer and co-producer of the Showtime series “Weeds.” His books include two collections of stories, “Kentucky Straight” and “Out of the Woods,” as well as a novel, “The Good Brother,” and two memoirs, “The Same River Twice” and “No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home.” Offutt’s work has earned numerous awards, and he was named one of the 20 best young American fiction writers by Granta magazine.

Other visiting writers at the January residency are: authors Steve Almond, Christopher Cokinos, Lee Durkee, Kathe Lison, Margaret McMullan, and poets Charles Rafferty and Cecilia Woloch. Students will be able to take online courses from Durkee and Rafferty in the spring semester.

“I can’t think of anything else that could duplicate this experience for our students other than a large national writing conference, such as the annual Bread Loaf or Sewanee writers’ conferences,” Smith said. “This is a rare opportunity to meet with this number of writers of this caliber.”

In addition to Smith, permanent EKU faculty members who teach in the program include Derek Nikitas, author of “Pyres,” nominated for an Edgar Award in 2008; Julie Hensley, a Pushcart Prize nominee whose stories and poems have appeared in many journals and winner of the 2007 Everett Southwest Literature Award; and R Dean Johnson, also a Pushcart Prize nominee whose essays and stories have appeared in many national literary journals.

Smith is the author of “In A City You Will Never Visit,” a collection of poems, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kentucky Arts Council, as well as a Tennessee Williams Scholarship for Poetry from the Sewanee Writers Conference.

In addition to their coursework, students in EKU’s Creative Writing Program edit and produce Jelly Bucket, a national literary journal. The first issue is due out later this fall.

“Besides being one of the most affordable brief-residency programs in the nation,” Smith said, the EKU program “is also a small and very intimate writing community, devoted to the creative and professional success of each of our students.”

Applications for the program are accepted year-round, and students may enter the program during any fall or spring semester. For more information, call 859-622-5861, e-mail mfa@eku.edu, or visit www.english.eku.edu/mfa.