The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor has received a $5 million gift from alumna Helen Zell ('64) to expand its creative writing program.

Half the gift will be used to expand the program's graduate student fellowships from eighteen to twenty-four and increase stipends for students in the program by 50 percent. The rest will support the program's visiting writers lecture series and endow a new director's position.

"Writing is core to everything we do," said Zell, an honorary co-chair of the university's $2.5 billion fundraising campaign. "Yet good writing is becoming a lost art, and a lost value. I am looking forward to watching Michigan invest in what it takes to create the best writing program in the country."