Welcome to College Confidential, @SuperBravo45! It sounds like you have done well in high school and are prepared to be successful at just about any college.
With your background, and applying as an in-state applicant during the EA round, I think you’ll get an admittance to UMD-College Park and that is a great option and will be very hard to beat.
Unless you family qualifies for need-based aid (run the Net Price Calculator at schools of interest to find out), it will be very challenging for “better” schools to meet that price (though of course, how is one defining better?).
That said, below are a few schools that you might want to investigate. They would all require generous merit aid, but I don’t think it’s impossible for them to meet budget:
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James Madison (VA): About 21k undergrads with a popular writing major.
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Marquette (WI): About 7700 undergrads at this Jesuit school in Milwaukee. It has a writing-intensive concentration within its English major.
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Miami U. (OH): About 16k undergrads at this “public Ivy.” It offers a major in both professional writing as well as in creative writing.
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U. of Pittsburgh (PA ): About 25k undergrads at this well-regarded school. Two majors that could be of interest are the English Writing major (with a focus on fiction, poetry, and nonfiction) or the Public & Professional Writing major.