MFA Program for Poets and Writers

The MFA Program for Poets & Writers at The University of Massachusetts at Amherst has long been considered one of the top graduate creative writing programs in the United States. Approximately 20 poets and fiction writers are admitted to the program each year out of an admissions pool of roughly 500 applicants.

The faculty at this graduate creative writing program have received countless awards and honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Pushcart Prize, and the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets. MFA faculty have also received many fellowships from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Contents 1 About the Program - History & Regular Events 2 Current Faculty & Staff 3 Current Creative Writing MFA Students 4 Program Alumni 5 Periodical publications 6 Program Traditions/MFA Territories 7 External Links and Related Projects

[edit] About the Program - History & Regular Events

The MFA Program for Poets & Writers is a graduate creative writing program. It was founded in the 1960s, making it one of the oldest MFA creative writing programs in the world. It is located in Bartlett Hall at The University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Graduates of this graduate creative writing program have recently received the following honors: National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowships, PEN/New England Poetry Award, Iowa Poetry Prize, Copper Canyon Press Hayden Carruth Award, Fence Editors Choice Award, and the Tupelo Press Poetry Competition, among many others. Journals and presses affiliated with alumni—including Conduit, Crazyhorse, jubilat, Paragraph, Rain Taxi, Slope, Slope Editions, Terminus, Turnrow, Verse, Verse Press (now Wave Books, and Volt—continue at the vanguard of independent publishing.

The MFA Program for Poets & Writers runs The Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action.

The program also hosts The Annual Juniper Literary Festival. Recent festival particants include Charles Simic, Zoe Heller, James Wood, Simon Armitage, John Ashbery and Mark Ford. The Juniper Festival is co-sponsored by The Valley Advocate and the Council of Literary Magazines & Presses, with cooperation from Bard College's Ashbery Resource Center, a project of The Flow Chart Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. It is also supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Humanities and Fine Arts, Vice Provost for Research, Department of English, Arts Council, and Alumni Association.

It is also in charge of The Juniper Summer Writing Institute and The Institute for Young Writers. Recent summer institute participants include Grace Paley, Dean Young, Matthew Zapruder, Padgett Powell, Mark Doty, James Tate, Dara Wier, Amy Hempel, Christine Schutt, Kelly Link, Brian Evenson, Kate Bernheimer, Srikanth Reddy and Matthea Harvey.

The MFA Program for Poets & Writers sponsors the annual Juniper Prizes.

MFA students in the graduate creative writing program have the opportunity to participate in both the Mohawk Trail Writers in the Schools program and the Literary Arts and Outreach Internship program.

The MFA Program for Poets & Writers and the programs it runs has recently benefitted from several grants awarded by the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The program sponsors regular readings by creative writers and poets through its Visiting Writers Series. Recent visitors to the program include Russell Edson, George Saunders, Tomaz Salamun, Eleni Sikelianos, Thomas Sayers Ellis, William H. Gass and David Ohle.

[edit] Current Faculty & Staff

• Noy Holland's first book, The Spectacle of the Body (Knopf), was nominated for the National Book Award. She is also the author of the book, What Begins With Bird (FC2). Her short stories have appeared in Story Quarterly, Glimmer Train, Conjunctions, Noon, Black Warrior Review, Open City and The Quarterly. Noy Holland is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the National Endowments for the Arts. In addition to being an Associate Professor in the The MFA Program for Poets & Writers, she is the director of the Writers in the Schools Project and co-directs The University of Massachusetts' Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action. She is married to fellow writer Sam Michel, who also teaches in the graduate creative writing program at The University of Massachusetts' MFA Program for Poets & Writers. Padgett Powell on Noy Holland: "If you could breed a writer out of Faulkner by John Hawkes, and put it in a female frame, you might have Noy Holland."

• Sabina Murray is the author of Slow Burn (Ballantine, 1990), A Carnivore's Inquiry (Grove/Atlantic, 2004) and The Caprices (Houghton Mifflin, 2002), which won the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction). She has held several important fellowships, including the Michener Fellowship at The University of Texas and the Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University. Her stories have appeared in The New England Review, Ontario Review, and Ploughshares. Sabina Murray is the author of the screenplay Beautiful Country, which stars Nick Nolte. Terrence Malick commissioned the Beautiful Country project. She is married to the poet John Hennessey.

• James Tate's books of poetry include Return to the City of White Donkeys (Harper Collins, 2004); Memoir of the Hawk (Ecco Press, 2001); Shroud of the Gnome (1997); Worshipful Company of Fletchers (1994); Selected Poems (1991); Distance from Loved Ones (1990); Reckoner (1986); Constant Defender (1983); Riven Doggeries (1979); Viper Jazz (1976); Absences (1972); Hints to Pilgrims (1971); The Oblivion Ha-Ha (1970); and his first book, The Lost Pilot (1967), which was selected by Dudley Fitts for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He is also the author of prose works: Lucky Darryl (1977), Hottentot Ossuary (1974), Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee (2001) and The Route as Briefed (1999). He has received the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Poetry, the Wallace Stevens Award, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. James Tate edited The Best American Poetry 1997 and is a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.

• Dara Wier is the author of several books of poetry, including Reverse Rapture (2005), Blue for the Plough (1992), Hat on a Pond (2002), Voyages in English (2001), Our Master Plan (1998), The Book of Knowledge, (1988), All You Have in Common (1984), The 8-Step Grapevine (1980) and Blood, Hook & Eye (1977). Her tenth book of poetry, "Remnants of Hannah", is due out by Wave Books in 2006. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has received the Jerome Shestack Prize, the Pushcart Prize and was a Phi Beta Kappa award finalist. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry and The Pushcart Prize Anthology. Dara Wier is the director of The MFA Program for Poets & Writers at The University of Massachusetts at Amherst and co-directs The University of Massachusetts' Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts and Action. John Vernon on Dara Wier: "A Sappho of decomposition, Dara Wier will not provide the solace for which you may have been looking but within my American reading she is one of the most original female poets since Sylvia Plath." John Ashbery on Dara Wier: “It may not be for the faint of heart—most intense experiences aren’t—but those who stay with it will find themselves face to face with a world whose eerily sharp focus suggests recent satellite photographs of Mars. And they will never be the same again.”

• Chris Bachelder is the author of Bear v. Shark: The Novel and U.S.! (Bloomsbury Press). He is a a contributor to McSweeney's and The Believer. His e-book, Lessons in Large-Market Freelance Virtual Tour Photography, was published by Future Profits Now, the business and technology publication line of McSweeney's Books. Michael Chabon on Chris Bachelder: "Like the wonderful Bear vs. Shark, U.S.! is a mad contraption of a novel, an encyclopedia of all our rich American armamentarium of bullshit, cant, ad copy and hyperbole (including the blurbs on book jackets). But this one carries secret reserves of heartbreak and ruefulness that propel it farther and deeper into the reader's imagination. We need novelists like Chris Bachelder who can, with a microfine sense of humor and a tragic sense of history, almost make it all make sense. We're lucky to have him." Chris Bachelder will join the creative writing faculty at The University of Massachusetts in Fall of 2006.

• Peter Gizzi is the author of Some Values of Landscape and Weather, Artificial Heart, and Periplum and other poems 1987-92. He has published several limited-edition chapbooks, folios, and artist books. His work has been translated into several languages. Peter Gizzi's honors include the Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets (1994) and fellowships from the Howard Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, and The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. He has held residencies at The MacDowell Colony, The Foundation of French Literature at Royaumont, Un Bureau Sur L'Atlantique, and the Centre International de Poesie Marseille (cipM). His editing projects have included o•blék: a journal of language arts, The Exact Change Yearbook, and The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. .

• Anthony Giardina] is the author of Men With Debts, A Boy's Pretensions and The Country of Marriage. His plays have been produced at, among other places, the Manhattan Theater Club in New York, the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven and the Arena Stage in Washington D.C. He is a regular contributor to Harper's, Esquire, GQ and The New York Times Magazine. Anthony Giardina's latest novel, "White Guys", was recently published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He is currently on tour. He has been interviewed and reviewed by, among others, Beatrice, Robert Birnbaum, and The New York Times.

[edit] Current Creative Writing MFA Students

• Heather Christle has published poems in Octopus Magazine, Verse, LIT and The Pebble Lake Review.

• Tony Friedhoff won the Daniel and Merrily Glosband MFA Fellowship in Poetry.

• Sara Jaffe's work has been featured in Encyclopedia, Instant City, Fort Necessity and Pocket Myths: Orpheus. She is also a musician who has recorded several albums and toured internationally as guitarist for the rock band Erase Errata. Jaffe is proprietor of Inconvenient Press and Recordings, which produces a diverse array of handmade book-objects and musical offerings. She is also a Production Associate for Quale Press.

• Natalie Lyalin edits GlitterPony Magazine. Her work has appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Crate and Skein Magazine.

• Kevin Meek

• Seth Parker edits Skein Magazine.

• Yasotha Sriharan is a recipient of the Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award. Her work has appeared in Nepo.

• Penni Vaget

• Mike Young co-edits NOÖ Journal. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Backwards City Review, Pindeldyboz, Juked, MiPOesias, elimae and elsewhere. He is the author of a forthcoming poetry chapbook from Transmission Press.

[edit] Program Alumni

• Natasha Trethewey was born in Mississippi. Natasha has won numerous awards ranging from the Lillian Smith Award for Poetry to Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize. Most recently she has won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for her recent collection Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin). She currently teaches at Emory College.

• Lisa Beskin was born in Holland, raised in New Jersey, and educated in Ohio. She has taught creative writing at Yale and Mt. Holyoke College. she also reviews movies about monkeys and limbless harridans for DVD Advance. her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Denver Quarterly, LIT, Fence, Slope, and Jubilat. Her work has been a finalist for the Walt Whitman Awards and a semi-finalist for the Alice James Press’s Beatrice Hawley Awards.

• Tom Breidenbach's poems have appeared in College English, The Mississippi Review, The Denver Quarterly, and Lingo. He lives in New York City.

• Debra Carney is a Writing Counselor in the Smith College School for Social Work, as well as a Lecturer in the Smith College English Department.

• Sean Casey writes about local arts at his blog, Pioneer Valley Arts, and contributes to the Kenyon Review Blog. He runs The Chuckwagon, a small press. His fiction has appeared in Fence and McSweeney's; his poetry has appeared in Vanitas, GlitterPony Magazine, Skein, and Origin. He lives in Southampton, MA.

• Robert Casper's poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Fence, and Green Mountain Review. Casper co-founded the literary journal, jubilat, and the jubilat/Jones Library Reading Series. He is Membership Manager for the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, the nation's only nonprofit dedicated to supporting independent journals and presses. Casper also directs the annual publishers' conference within a conference at the Associated Writing Programs annual meeting.

• Paul Fattaruso's novel, Travel in the Mouth of the Wolf, was published in 2004 by Soft Skull Press. His poems have appeared in Fence, Jubilat, Black Warrior Review, Cranky, Versal, and Volt.

• Joseph Fletcher is the winner of the Academy of American Poets' Joseph Langland Prize.

• Kevin Goodan received his BA from the University of Montana. His poems have been published in Ploughshares and he teaches at Holyoke Community College. He is the author of In the Ghost–House Acquainted (Alice James Books).

• Noah Eli Gordon's forthcoming books include: Novel Pictorial Noise (selected by John Ashbery for the 2006 National Poetry Series); A Fiddle Pulled from the Throat of a Sparrow (New Issues, 2007, winner of the Green Rose Prize); Figures for a Darkroom Voice, a book-length collaboration with Joshua Marie Wilkinson (Tarpaulin Sky Press); and Inbox (Blazevox). He is the author of The Area of Sound Called the Subtone (Ahsahta Press, 2004, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Sawtooth Prize); and The Frequencies (Tougher Disguises, 2003). Ugly Duckling Presse recently published That We Come To A Consensus, a chapbook written in collaboration with Sara Veglahn. His reviews and essays have appeared in dozens of journals, including Boston Review, The Poker, 26, Jacket, and The St. Marks Poetry Project Newsletter. He writes a chapbook review column for Rain Taxi: Review of Books, teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado at Denver, and publishes the Braincase chapbook series.

• Leo Hwang's work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, Glimmer Train Stories, Rivendell, Can We Have Our Ball Back?, Fiction, Three Candles, Gulf Coast, The Vermont Literary Review, and The Dickinson Review. He was the recipient of the Rosselli/de Filippis Scholarship at the 2002 Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and has been awarded three work-study scholarships to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Mr. Hwang is currently the Associate Dean of Humanities at Greenfield Community College. He can also be seen playing bass for The Ambiguities and guitar for the Warblers.

• Jay Ladin, PhD, directs the Writing Center at Stern College. He received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and a PhD from Princeton. He has taught at The University of Massachusetts, Princeton, and Reed College, at Tel Aviv University as a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence, and at the Emily Dickinson Homestead, where he taught a series of seminars on Dickinson’s poetry at her birthplace.

• Kelly Le Fave's poems have appeared in Tin House, Image, The Notre Dame Review, Painted Bride Quarterly and The Massachusetts Review. and other journals. Her book manuscript, Me Comma You, won the 2002 Gibbs-Smith Poetry Prize, and was published by Gibbs Smith. Le Fave is a founding editor of the jubilat. She has taught writing at Syracuse University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the University of Utah.

• Craig Lesley lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and two daughters. He graduated from Whitman College, where he also received a Doctorate of Human Letters. He holds an M.A. in English from the University of Kansas. Lesley is the author of four novels, including Winterkill (Picador) and The Sky Fisherman (Picador). Excerpts from reviews of The Sky Fisherman: "City boy though I am, I fell into Craig's Lesley's wonderfully told story as though it were my own. . . . It reminded me once again of just how welcome you can feel in the midst of a novel."--Alan Cheuse, National Public Radio; "An accomplished book. Lesley's biblical, metaphoric invocations of fire and water are powerfully drawn . . . Unsentimental, vigorous and compassionate."--Valerie Miner, The Boston Sunday Globe; "An exquisite novel that holds the voices of the river and its people in perfect balance. It is a story that stays with you and grows between silences. Mr. Lesley is an empathetic force in fiction."--Terry Tempest Williams; "A complex and vivid and surprisingly funny book, a book I greatly admire."--Robert Olen Butler; "An exquisitely delineated map of America. All of our history is encompassed in its pages. The author retells the ancient struggle between whites and Native Americans for cherished territory. And as in any great American novel, a young man comes to terms with his own flawed heritage." --Carolyn See; "Craig Lesley leaves crimes unresolved in The Sky Fisherman and concentrates on something larger - the joy and tragedy of human endeavor. His well-defined characters pull us quickly into small-town life . . . and through them we discover another character, a wild river that runs through this wonderful novel like a great shudder."--Barry Lopez.

• Jon Link edits GlitterPony Magazine, his work has appeared in Pleiades, Weird Deer, Jubilat, Black Warrior Review, and Skein.

• Eric Lorberer has published poems in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Conduit, Denver Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, Mudfish, and Volt. He lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he edits the Rain Taxi Review of Books.

• Karen A. Malley's stories have been published in The Iowa Review, Kansas Quarterly, Arkansas Review, Sonora Review, and Bottomfish Magazine. She resides in Greenfield, Massachusetts and working on a novel.

• Bronwyn Mills, is a lecturer in Caribbean and World literature, fiction writer, and poet. She is Senior Editor of Frigate, an online magazine of arts and culture, and is currently working on a magical realist novel, Beastly.

• Patricia O'Donnell is a professor of English at the University of Maine at Farmington, where she teaches fiction writing and other courses. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The North American Review, Agni Review, Prairie Schooner, and The American Literary Review.

• Ethan Paquin earned a Bachelor's degree from Plymouth State College. He is the author of three books of poetry: The Violence (Ahsahta Press, 2005); Accumulus (Salt, 2003); and The Makeshift (UK: Stride, 2002). Paquin's poetry has appeared in The Colorado Review, Fence, The Boston Review, Quarterly West, Jacket (Australia), and Meanjin (Australia). His book reviews have appeared in The Boston Review, Verse, Canadian Review of Books, and Contemporary Poetry Review. He is the editor of Slope and the small poetry press, Slope Editions.

• Carol Potter's third book of poems, Short History of Pets , won the 1999 Cleveland State University Poetry Center award, and the Balcones Prize from Austin Community College. Most recently, she won the dA center for the Arts Poetry Award. Her latest book, Otherwise Obedient, was published by Red HenPress in December 2005. She is also the author of Before We Were Born (1990), and Upside Down in the Dark (1995) from Alice James Books. Her poems have appeared in Pushcart XXVI , Poetry Magazine, Field, The Massachusetts Review, The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, The Women's Review of Books, Prairie Schooner , and many other journals. Other awards include: The Pushcart Prize, The Tom McAfee Discovery Award from The Missouri Review (1986), the New Letters Award for Poetry (1990), and three time finalist for Massachusetts Cultural Council awards. She has been awarded residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Fundacion Valparaiso, Villa Montalvo, Centrum and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Of Short History of Pets , Naomi Shihab Nye wrote: "Short History of Pets is a knock-out punch from the get-go. With captivating power, it reminds us that what claims or appears to be short may also be profound, deep and enduring. Carol Potter writes with a magnetically potent instinct for pacing and a stunning originality of style." Potter was Writer-in-Residence at the Thurber House in Columbus, Ohio, in April, 2003, and was the Visiting Poet in the MFA program at Indiana University in 2003-2004.

• Nancy Reisman is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. Her stories have appeared in Lilith, Glimmer Train, Press, Kenyon Review and American Fiction. She was the winner of the 1996 Raymond Carver Award. For several years she taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and directed the RISD's Writing Center. Reisman's collection, House Fires, (University of Iowa Press), won the 1999 Iowa Short Fiction Award

• Luivette Resto-Ometeotl was born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico and raised in the Bronx. She has a BA from Cornell University. Her poetry has appeared in The Furnace Review.

Andrew Michael Roberts lives in Seattle. He is the author of Dear Wild Abandon, winner of a 2007 PSA National Chapbook Award; You Were Right About Everything, winner of the 2007 Cranky Literary Journal Chapbook Award; and Give Up, a chapbook from Tarpaulin Sky Press. He studied at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he was a Juniper Fellow and received the Distinguished Teaching Award. His work can be found in journals such as Tin House, Iowa Review, LIT, Colorado Review, Mississippi Review and Gulf Coast.

• Pallavi Sharma is the recipient of the 2005 Harvey Swados Fiction Prize.

• Susan Straight won the Milkweed National Fiction Prize for Aquaboogie, a collection of short stories. She is also the author of The Gettin’ Place, I Been in Sorrow’s Kitchen & Licked Out All the Pots, A Million Nightingales, Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights, and Highwire Moon (which was a finalist for the National Book Award). She is a writer for Salon, the online magazine, and her essays on motherhood appear in the best-selling collection Mothers Who Think. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation and Harper's Magazine. Staight is the director of the creative writing department at The University of California, Riverside.

• Michelle Valois's work has appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, The Larcom Review, Faultline, Fourth Genre, and other journals. She is the recipient of a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.

• Sara Veglahn is a recipient of the Delaney Fellowship in Fiction. She is the author of the chapbooks Another Random Heart (Margin to Margin, 2002) and Falling Forward (Braincase Press, 2003), and her work has appeared in 580 Split, 26, Word for/Word, Fence, castagraf, and Art New England.

• Tim Westmoreland is the author of the acclaimed short story collection Good as Any and is currently working on a novel entitled Gathering. He has taught at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Amherst College, and Hampshire College. Westmoreland’s work was featured in the 1998 anthology of Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Workshops and in Best American Short Stories in 2001. He is also a winner of the Dobie Paisano Writing Fellowship.

• David Wright grew up in Borger, Texas. He holds a B.A. from Carleton College. His first book, Fire on the Beach, was described by the Washington Post as “adding significantly to our understanding of the many essential ways in which African Americans have served their country.” His fiction has appeared in Shenandoah.

• Xu Xi is the author of The Unwalled City (2001), Hong Kong Rose (1997), Chinese Walls (1994), Overleaf Hong Kong (2004), History's Fiction (2001) and Daughters of Hui (1996). She is also the Hong Kong regional editor of Routledge's Encyclopedia of Post-colonial Literature (second edition, 2005). Her work has been an O. Henry story selection and a South China Morning Post story contest winner. The New York Times named her a pioneer writer from Asia in English and the Voice of America featured her on their Chinese TV documentary series "Cultural Odyssey." She has received a New York State Arts Foundation fiction fellowship, as well as several writer-in-residence positions at Kulturhuset USF in Bergen, Norway and the Jack Kerouac Project in Orlando, Florida. In 2004, she received the distinguished alumni award from her undergraduate alma mater, the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. She is on the MFA fiction faculty at Vermont College in Montpelier and was a featured reader in the recent Hong Kong International Literary Festival.

[edit] Periodical publications

• jubilat
• The Massachusetts Review
• Crate[1]

[edit] Program Traditions/MFA Territories

• Amherst Brewing Company
• Vets' Club
• Fall BBQ
• LiveLit
• Bartlett Hall

[edit] External Links and Related Projects

Publications & Websites Run By Current & Former Graduate Students in the MFA Program for Poets & Writers at The University of Massachusetts at Amherst:

Glitter Pony Magazine

Skein Magazine

Audio Blog

Verse Magazine

Kulture Vulture

Slope

Conduit

Wave Poetry

Brain Case Press

Crate: The MFA Journal