Writer’s Resolution: Start or Update Your CV

This post is primarily for my MFA students, though it is a good new year’s resolution for any writer: start or update your CV. Curriculum Vitae is a fancy term for resumé, though the difference is that the focus of your CV is broader, and you will use it for applying for academic jobs, grants, awards, residencies, etc. A CV allows you to give a fuller representation of your life’s work, not just your employment and job skills.

As with a resumé, format it as a series of lists with headings. Start with your basic contact info: name, address, phone number, email. Follow this with Education, listing your college and grad school degrees and including any thesis or dissertation titles and directors. Include a degree program you a currently enrolled in before you get your degree, and list your expected graduation date.

For all your lists, start with the most recent accomplishments first, then you can add to the top of each list as you update it with new entries.

Next list your relevant Employment. You don’t have to list every job, though it’s good to list your recent jobs going back to college. What you want to avoid is he appearance of a long gap without employment or education, so if you worked at a temp agency to support yourself in grad school, you could leave that out and rely on your education listing as the most important activity in those years. On the other hand, if you waited tables for a couple of years after college while you wrote your first novel, you may want to include that job to account for those years.

After those two mandatory sections, you have some choice about the order of sections and what you want to label them. Writers will always list their Publications, though many of us break this into subcategories by genre: scholarly articles, poetry, fiction, etc. It is also common to have separate categories for Books and Anthologies. Readings or Presentations are good categories to include, as are Writers’ Residencies, Workshops or other professional activities you have attended or led. A section on Grants and Awards is also good to include, once you have one or more.

There is a good article on writing an Artist’s CV on The Practical Art World and another on CVs in general at The Interview Guys. These sites give examples that will give you ideas on how to format, and you’ll see that the typical CV is for academic jobs, so it highlights scholarly publications and achievements, while the artist’s CV highlights creative achievements. A writer’s CV is often a combination of these two approaches and can be rearranged and revised for the situation you want to use it in. You might highlight scholarship when applying to academic jobs and publications when applying for a grant, for example.

Once you have your CV started, add new accomplishments as you learn about them. List work accepted for publication as “forthcoming” and update with the full publication information once the it appears. Starting a CV may be the hardest part, so do it now when there isn’t a rush and when your lists aren’t too long. Then add to it periodically and take advantage of the new year to review it and make sure you haven’t missed anything from the past year (or more).