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Creative Writing News
Alums! Current students! We want to hear from you. If you have news or announcements, don't forget to let us know. We're going to do our best to post your goings-on here on the News page. Please contact Director of Creative Writing
Porter Shreve and check here every few months for updates.
CURRENT NEWS
2010-2011 marked another excellent year for the
Creative Writing Program. In its annual ranking of MFA Programs, Poets &
Writers Magazine included Purdue in
the top ten among three year programs, the top ten in funding, and the top
twenty in selectivity, and Huffington
Post included the Purdue MFA among the top underrated programs in the
country.
Our faculty has continued to publish widely and win awards. Mary Leader published her third collection of poetry, Beyond the Fire (Shearsman 2010). Bich Minh Nguyen’s 2009 novel, Short Girls, published in paperback by Penguin in 2010, won a 2010 American Book Award and the 2010 Friends of American Writers Award. Donald Platt was awarded a second Individual Artists’ Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, gave nearly a dozen poetry readings, and published or has forthcoming work in nearly a dozen journals including American Poetry Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Green Mountains Review and Antioch Review.
Marianne Boruch
published excerpts from her forthcoming memoir, The Glimpse Traveler (Indiana University Press, 2011), in The New England Review and Ninth Letter; her poems came out in The New Yorker, Iowa Review, Rattle, The
Yale Review, and The Georgia Review (which
published her 32-poem sequence, “Cadaver, Speak.”) Marianne’s seventh poetry
collection, The Book of Hours (Copper
Canyon Press), will be out in fall 2011. And Patricia Henley also has a forthcoming book this fall, her fourth
short story collection, Other Heartbreaks
(Engine Books, September 2011).
Creative Writing alums and current MFAs have also been thriving. Elizabeth Stuckey-French’s (MA 1989) The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady, received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly and universal acclaim in newspapers and magazines across the country, including the New York Times. Gretchen Steele Pratt (MFA 2007) published her Anhinga Prize-winning debut poetry collection, One Island, and has a poem forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2011, edited by Kevin Young. Aaron Michael Morales’ (MFA 2003) first novel, Drowning Tucson, was chosen as a Top Five Fiction Debut of 2010 by Poets & Writers and was a Chicago Tribune Notable Book. Steve Edwards (MFA 2000), Henry Hughes (MA 1990), Kevin Honold (MFA 2004) and Brent Goodman (MFA 1995) also had books published or forthcoming in 2010-2011, and Mehdi Tavana Okasi (MFA 2009) won the $10,000 Life Career Short Story Award from the National Society of Arts and Letters and will be a Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellow this coming year.
Current MFAs are already publishing and receiving national attention. Michael Wang’s story “With Consideration and Care” won a 2010 AWP Intro Award and was published in Hayden’s Ferry Review. Josh Wild has forthcoming work in Poetry Magazine and has been selected for Best New Poets 2011. Chidelia Edochie, Jessica Jacobs, Dallas Woodburn, and Greg Allendorf are among those with published work this year. And Mario Chard, whose poems have recently appeared in Rattle, New Madrid, Indiana Review, Third Coast and Hayden’s Ferry Review, received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry and will be headed to Stanford University in the fall.
Our award-winning literary journal, Sycamore Review, published two more noteworthy issues of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, interviews and reviews. Winners of Sycamore’s Wabash Prize continue to publish first books of fiction and poetry, Jude Nutter’s poem “Word,” from the Winter/Spring 2010 issue, was chosen for Best American Poetry 2011, and Rachel Furey’s story, “Birth Act,” from the Summer/Fall 2009 issue, was selected as a distinguished story by the editors of Best American Short Stories 2010. Sycamore’s Looseleaf Writing Workshop Program continued its engagement efforts with the Greater Lafayette community, with workshops at Cary Home, New Community School, and the Tippecanoe County Public Library.
Once again the Creative Writing Program sponsored or co-sponsored multiple readings and colloquia by visiting writers, including fiction writers Samrat Upadhyay, Jessica Anthony, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, T.C. Boyle, Debra Spark, Jess Row and William Lychack, and poets Julia Story, Jean Valentine, Nicole Cooley, Bob Hicok and faculty members Dan Morris and Christian Knoeller.
For the Spring 2012 Purdue MFA Program Newsletter (in pdf format), click here.
