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.
Sigrid Nunez has published eight novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, Salvation City, The Friend, and, most recently, What Are You Going Through. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. The Friend, a New York Times bestseller, won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Her other honors and awards include a Whiting Writer's Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Nunez has contributed to The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, Threepenny Review, Harper's, andLondon Review of Books. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her work has been published in thirty countries.
Ayana Mathis's novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, was New York Times bestseller, a 2013 New York Times Notable Book of the Year, a Boston Globe Best Book of the Year, and an NPR Best Book of 2013. It was longlisted for the Impac Dublin International Literary Award, nominated for a 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and selected by Oprah Winfrey as the second selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0. Her nonfiction has been published in the The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Financial Times, Rolling Stone, Glamour, and Guernica. From 2014-2017, she was a New York Times Bookends columnist and her reviews frequently appear in The New York Times. Mathis has been the recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library's Cullman Center, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy, and the American Academy in Berlin. Mathis is a member of Black Artists for Freedom and is at work on the novel, A Violent Woman.
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 2023
Rivka Galchen is the author of the novels Atmospheric Disturbances, which was was a finalist for the Mercantile Library’s John Sargent, Sr., First Novel Prize, the Canadian Writers' Trust's Fiction Prize, and Governor General's Award; and Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch which was shortlisted for the 2021 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. She is also the author of the short story collection American Innovations, which was longlisted for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize and received the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. Her essay collection Little Labors is about motherhood. In 2010 she was named to The New Yorker's 20 under 40 list. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, New York Times Magazine. She contributes criticism and essays to The London Review of Books.