The Milton Center

Welcome to the Milton Center at Image, a program dedicated to fostering excellence in creative writing by Christians.

Through workshops, fellowships, and other programs we aid writers who seek to animate the Christian imagination, promote intellectual integrity, and explore the human condition with honesty and compassion.

We seek out and encourage new writers of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction who will carry on and expand the tradition of Christian letters in our secularized culture.

Our goal is to build a community of writers, readers, publishers, and editors and to initiate and sustain dialogue in and about literature that transforms and redeems the time.

Mission: Sowing the Word

God gave us the Word in a man's life and in the story of that life. Jesus was fully human, fully divine. In the hands of poets and storytellers, this paradox is explicated, troubled, returned to and retold with elegance and beauty. Flannery O'Connor spoke of "gestures" of grace which, embedded in stories, can illuminate spiritual realities that would be difficult to convey in any other form. The dialogue arising from a work of excellence can seed ideas and images that take root in the most unlikely places.

The Milton Center continues to find ways to nourish the work of excellent Christian writers—writers whose solid, troubling, ecstatic, and revelatory work expresses their own encounters with the mystery of faith. The more Christian writing achieves literary excellence, the better its chances of offering a compelling vision of incarnation to the world.

Postgraduate Fellowships

The Milton Center Postgraduate Fellowships offer new writers of Christian commitment the opportunity to complete their first book-length manuscript of fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction. The Milton Center exists to encourage work by writers who seek to animate the Christian imagination, foster intellectual integrity and explore the human condition with honesty and compassion.

The Milton Center @ IMAGE is pleased to award its 2008-9 postgraduate fellowship in writing to Hannah Notess of Indiana.

The Milton Center @ Image is pleased to award its 2008-9 postgraduate fellowship in writing to Hannah Notess of Indiana.

Hannah Faith Notess attended Westmont College and recently received an MFA in Creative Writing from Indiana University, where she also taught composition and creative writing. Her poems have appeared in The Christian Century, Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, Relief, Ruminate, and Slate, and are forthcoming in 5 AM, Measure, and Mid-American Review.

In addition to writing poems and essays, she works as a freelance editor and is editing a collection of personal essays about growing up female and evangelical. She has moved around a lot but now calls Bloomington, Indiana, her hometown.

She will join us in September. While here she will teach one course per quarter in the Seattle Pacific University Department of English, and she will be working hard to complete her first collection of poetry.

For more information about the fellowships, including applications for the next academic year, click here.

The Milton Center: A Brief History

The Milton Center was founded in 1986 by the spiritual writer Richard Foster at Friends University in Wichita, Kansas. A weekly workshop for local Christian writers led to the establishment of the Center for Christian Writing. With a grant from Dr. Stanley Kardatzke and, later, another grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the center was renamed after the poet John Milton and moved to Newman University. Past directors of the Center have included Harold Fickett, Virginia Stem Owens, Essie Sappenfield, and Debra Seely.

One outgrowth of the Milton Center was the Chrysostom Society, a group of Christian writers which meets once a year. Members gather both for fellowship and to reflect on ways to promote excellence in writing and publishing by Christians. Members of the Society include such well-known Christian authors as Madeleine L'Engle, Eugene Peterson, Luci Shaw, and Philip Yancey.

For a brief period in the 1990s, the then fledgling journal Image came to the Milton Center, where it began publishing on a regular schedule. In 1994, The Milton Center and Image sponsored "Spanning the Gap," the first in a series of writing festivals, featuring Annie Dillard, winner of the 1994 Milton Center Prize for her contribution to Christian arts and letters. In 1995 the two organizations founded the Glen Workshop, which has brought aspiring writers and artists from all over the country to study with some of the leading contemporary writers and artists of Christian faith: Ron Hansen, Paul Mariani, Doris Betts, Makoto Fujimura, Jeanne Murray Walker, Emilie Griffin, Kate Daniels, Diane Glancy, Dan Wakefield, Julia Kasdorf, Edward Knippers, Erin McGraw, Theodore Prescott, and Mark Jarman. In 1995 poet Richard Wilbur received the Milton Center Prize at the Glen Workshop.

With the Center's move to Image in 2003, the programs are now reunited.

Click here for a fellowship application.