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Creative Writing Program

News

Scott Cairns' (Director of the Creative Writing Program) book, The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in our Pain, was named by Publishers' Weekly as one of the top 100 books of 2009, and among the top 10 in the religion category.

Meagan Ciesla's novella submission, “Me, Them, Us,” is the first place winner of Iron Horse Literary Review's 2009 Novella Competition. Of her novella, the judge, Ron Carlson, writes: “…this is a small, aching wonder, an utterly capturing story of a woman in the most trying season of her life in which she is tested hard by illness, but even more by the double-edged promises of family and of love. This story is both spare and elegant in its caring depiction of the consequences of the choices we make.” Me, Them, Us was just published (as a single author book) by the Iron Horse Literary Review Press.

Marc McKee's (PhD Student) poetry collection, Fuse, (a top contender for the Hudson Prize) will be published by Black Lawrence Press in 2011.

Melissa Range, (PhD student) has won the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry for her manuscript, Horse and Rider. Texas Tech University Press will publish her book this coming spring (2010).

Tina May Hall, a graduate of the creative writing program, won the 2008 Caketrain Chapbook Competition for her novella All the Day's Sad Stories. The novella was published in May, 2009.

Katy Didden (PhD student) has been awarded one of the top prizes in in the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg poetry contest for her poems Perito Merino Glacier; String Theory: Pyramus and Thisbe; “Embrace Them All”. Visit http://www.dorothyprizes.org/ for additional information.

Jessica Garratt's (PhD student) manuscript, Fire Pond, was selected by Medbh McGuckian as the 2008 winner of the Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize. The book was published in Spring 2009 by the University of Utah Press.

Joanna Luloff's (PhD student) story collection I Love You, Come Home Soon will appear this fall from Algonquin Books.

Sarah Barber's (PhD student) poetry collection, The Kissing Party, was selected by C.J. Sage for publication by The National Poetry Review Press, and the book is expected to appear in 2010.

Marc McKee's (PhD student) chapbook, What Apocalypse?, recipient of the New Michigan Press DIAGRAM Prize, was published in 2008.

John Estes (PhD student) was awarded the National Chapbook Fellowship from the Poetry Society of America for his collection, Swerve. The competition was judged by C.K. Williams.

Rob Foreman's (PhD student) essay, "Speak, Walking Stick", originally published in the Massachusetts Review, has been listed as a "Notable Essay of 2007" in Best American Essays 2008 (Houghton Mifflin).

Jason Koo's (PhD, 2007)'s book, Man on Extremely Small Island, was selected by Denise Duhamel as the winner of the 2008 De Novo Prize and will be published in the late summer or early fall of 2009 by C&R Press. Jason has also been awarded a 2009 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry. Other graduates of our program who have received NEA fellowships (since 2002) include Scott Kaukonen, Nicky Beer, Steve Gehrke, Rebecca Dunham, Averill Curdy, James Kimbrell, Jeffrey Thomson, Christie Hodgen and Anthony Varallo.

Joanie Mackowski's (PhD, 2005) second book, View from a Temporary Window, is forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her first book, The Zoo, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize, was published when she was a PhD student in creative writing at MU.

Nicky Beer (PhD 2007) has been awarded the Ruth Lily Fellowship from Poetry Magazine. Her book, The Diminishing House, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press.

Anthony Varallo's (PhD, 2005) second book, Out Loud, was awarded the 2008 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. His first book, This Day in History, was awarded the Iowa Short Fiction Award.

Bern Mulvey's (PhD, 2004) book, The Fat Sheep Everyone Wants, was selected by Claudia Rankine as the 2007 winner of Cleveland State University Poetry Center's First Book Contest.

Emily Rosko's (PhD student) book, raw goods inventory, has been awarded the Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers given by Shenandoah and Washington and Lee University. This book previously won the Iowa Poetry Prize.

Chad Parmenter’s (PhD student) poem, "A Tech's Ode to the Genome Computer," was selected for inclusion in the 2007 Best American Poetry. Two of our alums, Nicky Beer and Joanie Mackowski also have poems in this same publication.