MFA Creative Writing
Fiction | Creative Nonfiction | Poetry
Adam Haslett, Director of the MFA Creative Writing Program, is the author of Imagine Me Gone, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award; You Are Not a Stranger Here, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; and Union Atlantic, winner of the Lambda Literary Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize. His books have been translated into thirty languages, and his journalism on culture and politics have appeared in The Financial Times, Esquire, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The Nation, and The Atlantic, among others. He has been awarded the Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin, a Guggenheim fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Winship Award, and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Ayana Mathis's first novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Knopf, 2012), was a New York Times Bestseller, second selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0, a 2013 New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and was long listed for the Dublin Literary Award and nominated for Hurston/Wright Foundation's Legacy Award. Mathis's nonfiction has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, Rolling Stone, Guernica and Glamour. Her work has been supported by the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. She was a 2020-2021 American Academy in Berlin Prize Fellow. Mathis received her MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and went on to become the first African-American woman to serve as an assistant professor in that program. Her new novel, The Unsettled is out now from Penguin Random House.
One of these people will also be your thesis advisor, which means close work one-on-one for a whole semester during your final year.
Visiting Spring 2024
Megha Majumdar is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel A Burning (Knopf, 2020), which was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association's Andrew Carnegie Medal. It was named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, Vogue, and TIME Magazine. A 2022 Whiting Award winner, she was born and raised in Kolkata, India, and holds degrees in anthropology from Harvard and Johns Hopkins. Majumdar also studied Creative Writing in Hunter's MFA program and is the former editor in chief of Catapult books.
Christine Schutt is the author of three short story collections, Nightwork; A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer; and most recently, Pure Hollywood. Her first novel, Florida, was a National Book Award finalist; her second novel, All Souls, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. A third novel, Prosperous Friends, was noted in The New Yorker as one of the best books of 2012. Her stories have appeared in NOON, Granta, Harper's, Oxford American, Fence, and other publications. Schutt has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and New York Foundation of the Arts grant. She has twice won the O.Henry Short Story Prize, and her stories have been anthologized. In 2020, she was awarded the Katherine Anne Porter Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Schutt has taught in many MFA programs as a visiting writer, among them Washington University, Syracuse University, and UC Irvine.
Past Fiction Faculty