MFA Community News

• Poetry alum Javier Zamora's memoir, Solito, was featured in the New York Times and on the Today Show, for which it was selected by Jenna Bush Hager for her September book club

• Alum Tess Gunty's The Rabbit Hutch won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize

• Alum Simi Juneja was selected to be a Visiting Artist and Scholar at the American Academy in Rome.

• Current MFA candidate Omer Friedlander's collection The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land was chosen as the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish community's One Bay One Book selection for the year

• Fiction alum Devon Walker-Figueroa was awarded the 25th Annual Levis Reading Prize for her debut poetry collection Philomath

• Alum Isabel Kaplan's NSFW was longlisted for The Center for Fiction's 2022 First Novel Prize

• Alum Sahar Romani's chapbook manuscript The Opening was selected by Kazim Ali (also an alum) for The Poetry Society of America's 2022 Chapbook Fellowship

• Alum Ada Limón was named the nation's 24th Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress

• Visiting graduate faculty members Idra Novey and Brandon Taylor won 2022 Pushcart Prizes for respective work published in The Yale Review
• Current MFA candidate Emma Zimmerman was selected as a 2022 Nonfiction Fellow for the Lighthouse Writers Workshop Lit Fest

• Alum Alisha Kaplan's debut book of poetry Qorbanot won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award from The League of Canadian Poets

• Alum Diannely Antigua was named Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH

• Alum Amanda Larson's debut poetry collection GUT was selected by Mark Bibbins as the winner of the Poetry Society of America Norma Farber Book Award

• Current MFA candidate Sasha Burshteyn was named a 2022 winner of the 92Y Discovery Prize. Current MFA candidate Jenna Lanzaro and alum JinJin Xu were also named semi-finalists for the prize.

• Alum Clare Sestanovich was selected as a 2022 5 under 35 Honoree by the National Book Foundation

• Alum Maaza Mengiste was awarded a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship

• Visiting graduate faculty member Brandon Taylor's collection Filthy Animals was named a 2021/22 finalist for The Story Prize and was shortlisted for the 2022 Dylan Thomas Prize

• Alum Kazim Ali was named a finalist in LGBTQ Nonfiction for the 2022 Lammy Awards

• Alum Raven Leilani won the 2021 Clark Fiction Prize for her debut novel Luster

• Faculty member Katie Kitamura was named a finalist for the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize and was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award

• Alum Desiree C. Bailey's What Noise Against the Cane was named a finalist for the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award

• Current MFA candidate Téa Mutonji was selected as a 2022 Writers' Trust Rising Star

• Fiction alum Devon Walker-Figueroa was awarded the 25th Annual Levis Reading Prize for her debut poetry collection Philomath. The prize is awarded annually for the best debut or second book of poetry published in the previous calendar year and chosen by the MFA in Creative Writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University.

• Isabel Kaplan's NSFW was longlisted for The Center for Fiction's 2022 First Novel Prize

• Sahar Romani's chapbook manuscript The Opening was selected by Kazim Ali (also an alum) for The Poetry Society of America's 2022 Chapbook Fellowship

• Tess Gunty's debut novel The Rabbit Hutch was shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize

• Alisha Kaplan's debut book of poetry Qorbanot won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award from The League of Canadian Poets

• Diannely Antigua was named Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH

• Clare Sestanovich was selected as a 2022 5 under 35 Honoree by the National Book Foundation

• Maaza Mengiste was awarded a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship

• Danielle Blau's debut full-length peep was selected by Vijay Seshadri as the winner of the sixteenth Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize from The Waywise Press

• Desiree C. Bailey's What Noise Against the Cane was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize

• Samantha Facciolo had two recent bylines in The New York Times, one, in Modern Love's Tiny Love Stories, "Constancy in Candy," and the other in Solver Stories, "Progress Only Comes with Practice"

• Gina Isabel Rodriguez was selected as a fellow for LitUp, a mentorship program run by Reese’s Book Club

• Alum Emily Wallis Hughes, alongside Jason Zuzga, was named Co-Editorial Director of Fence Books. Their new positions, leading the independent nonprofit publisher, began on January 1, 2022.

• Jude Russo's thesis novel, "Unreal City," was a finalist for the 2021 UNO Lab Prize

• Clare Sestanovich's Objects of Desire was longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection

• Desiree C. Bailey was featured in Poets & Writers seventeeth annual look at Debut Poets

• Raven Leilani was named the Spring 2022 Grisham Writer-in-Residency at The University of Mississippi

• Desiree C. Bailey's What Noise Against the Cane was named a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award in Poetry

• Kyle Carrero Lopez, Marissa Davis, April Freely, Karisma Price, and JinJin Xu were named finalists for the 2021 Best New Poets anthology 

• Maaza Mengiste (also recent visiting grad faculty member) was named a finalist for the 2021 John Dos Passos Prize for Literature

• Toi Derricotte was awarded the 2021 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets , which is given annually to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Established in 1994, the award carries a stipend of $100,000.

• Natasha Rao was named a 2021 Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow

• Ada Limón was announced as the new host of the Slowdown podcast, previously hosted by U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith. Limón also signed a three-book deal with Milkweed Editions for a new collection, The Hurting Kind (2022), Beast: An Anthology of Animal Poems (2024), and a New and Selected Poems (2025).

• Elaine Hsieh Chou's "In Which Ms. Swan Suffers Clarity" won the 2020 Black Warrior Review flash contest

• Laura Cresté was named a 2021-2022 Fine Arts Works Center Writing Fellow

• Mitchell S. Jackson won a Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing

• Raven Leilani won the Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize for her debut novel Luster and was named a finalist for the 2021 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award

• Alexandra Zuckerman was named a winner of the 2021 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. Each winner receives a reading at 92Y, publication in The Paris Review Daily, a stay at the Ace Hotel in Manhattan and $500. Alum JinJin Xu was also a runner-up, and alums Laura Creste, Marissa Davis, Maggie Millner, Sahar Romani, and imogen xtian smith were also semi-finalists for the prize.

• Megan Harlan's memoir in essays MOBILE HOME won the Gold Independent Publisher (IPPY) Book Award in Creative Nonfiction

• Hannah Seidlitz's nonfiction piece “Notes from Underground” was selected by Jia Tolentino for Columbia Journal’s annual Winter Prize

• Rachel Mannheimer's debut poetry manuscript was selected by Louise Glück as the winner of 2021 Bergman Prize from Changes Press

• John Murillo won the Poetry Society of America's 2021 Four Quartets Prize for his poem “A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn” from his collection Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books, 2020)

• Mitchell S. Jackson won a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship

• John Murillo's Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry was named the winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award

• Rio Cortez signed a two-book deal with Penguin Books. The first title, Golden Ax, is a poetry collection that will be released under the Penguin Poets line in 2022. The second, to be released by Viking, is nonfiction and will explore the author's family tree to "reveal a history of Afro-pioneerism."

• Jameson Fitzpatrick's debut poetry collection Pricks in the Tapestry (Birds LLC) was a finalist for the 2021 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from The Publishing Triangle

• Sarah M. Sala's debut poetry collection Devil's Lake (Tolsun Books) was a finalist for 2021 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry from The Publishing Triangle

• Jacquelyn Stolos' debut novel Edendale was named as a finalist for the 2020 Forward INDIES Book of the Year Awards in their literary (adult fiction) category

• Matthew Wimberley's poetry collection All the Great Territories (SIU, 2020), won the Weatherford Award for Poetry from the Appalachian Studies Association

•  Alden Jones' memoir The Wanting Was a Wilderness: Cheryl Strayed's Wild and the Art of Memoir (Fiction Advocate) was a finalist for the 2021 Lambda Literary Awards in Bisexual Nonfiction

• Sarah M. Sala's debut poetry collection Devil's Lake (Tolsun Books) was a finalist for the 33rd Annual Lambda Literary Awards in Lesbian Poetry and a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Medal Provocateur Award presented to "the best on the frontier of poetry-- the experimental, the innovative, the daring and stunning, the impromptu in technique and voice." 

• Ama Codjoe won a 2021-2022 Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship

• Ocean Vuong was named a 2021 United States Artists Fellow

• Raven Leilani's Luster was a finalist for the 2021 PEN/Hemmingway Award for Debut Novel

• John Murillo's Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry was a finalist for the 2021 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection

• Poems by Diannely Antigua ("I'm Almost Thirty") and Kyle Carrero Lopez ("From An Agnostic") were selected for inclusion in the 2020 Best of the Net anthology

• imogen xtian smith's manuscript stemmy things and Wo Chan's Togetherness were selected for Nightboat Books' 2021 Poetry Prize

• Nicole Sealey and Christopher (Loma) Soto were awarded 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships

• Gregory Pardlo was named codirector, alongside Patrick Rosal, of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Rutgers Unversity-Camden by The Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers (ISGRJ)

• Sahar Romani and Madeleine Mori (also CWP staff) were named 2021 Margins Fellows through the Asian American Writers' Workshop (AAWW)

• Francisco Márquez's poem "Provincetown" was selected by Tracy K. Smith for inclusion in the 2021 Best American Poetry anthology

• Raven Leilani (alum) was named a finalist for the Gotham Book Prize and longlisted for the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize

• John Murillo's Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry was longlisted for the 2021 Believer Book Award in Poetry

• Heidi Seaborn won the 2020 [PANK] Poetry Prize for her collection An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe and the Comstock Review 2020 Chapbook Prize for Bite Marks

• Kyle Carrero Lopez's Muscle Memory won the 2020 [PANK] Little Books Contest

• Kirk Walsh published an essay in The New York Times about his experience in E.L. Doctorow's Craft of Fiction class

• JinJin Xu won the Radix Media Own Voices Chapbook Prize for her collection There is Still Singing in the Afterlife, which judge and MFA poetry alum Aria Aber described as "a demanding, deeply felt and formally inventive constellation of poems.”

• Ethan Stebbins' chapbook manuscript Dear God was selected by Kim Addonizio as a winnter of the 2020 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Dear God will be published in Spring 2021. 

• Mitchell S. Jackson received a a 2021 Creative Capital Grant, which will provide him with up to $50,000 in direct funding towards his project, John of Watts.

• Raven Leilani's Luster was longlisted for the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award

• Natasha Rao was awarded the 2021 APR/Honickman First Book Prize for her manuscript Latitude, chosen by guest judge Ada Limón

• Raven Leilani won the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and the Center for Fiction 2020 First Novel Prize for her debut novel Luster 

•Raven Leilani's debut novel Luster was longlisted for a 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

• JinJin Xu won the 2020 George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. Judge Carrie Fountain selected Xu's series "To Red Dust (II)" to be published in The Common, admiring the poems as "powerful" and "propulsive." 

• Richard Scott Larson (Paris MFA program), Emily Raboteau, Ama Codjoe, Omotara James, Joseph O. Legaspi (also current undergraduate faculty), Nicole Sealey, John Murillo, and Jenny Xie won 2020 NYSCA/NYFA fellowships

• Peng Shepherd was awarded a 2020 NEA Creative Writing Fellowship in Prose

• Raven Leilani's debut novel Luster was short-listed for the 2020 First Novel Prize from The Center for Fiction

• Maggie Millner was named a 2020–2021 Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Poetry at Colgate University

• Gbenga Adesina won the 2020 Narrative Prize for his poem “Across the Sea: A Sequence,” and for previously published work in Narrative that includes “I Carried My Father Across the Sea” and “Ode to What I Do Not Know.”

• Karisma Price was awarded the Poetry Foundation's J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize for her poem "My Phone Autocorrects 'Nigga' to 'Night' ," which appeared in the June 2020 issue of POETRY Magazine

• Raven Leilani was named a National Book Award 5 under 35 Honoree

• Alisa Koyrakh was named a finalist for the 2020 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing

• Elisa Gonzalez won a 2020 Rona Jaffe Writers' Award

• Mary Block's poem "After Rebmann and the Safari Collection Brochure" was selected by Brian Teare for inclusion in the Best New Poets 2020 anthology

• Raven Leilani's debut novel Luster was announced as a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and was featured in the New York Times

•Desiree C. Bailey won the 2020 Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her collection What Noise Against the Cane was published by Yale University Press in April 2021. 

•Selected by Danez Smith, Marissa Davis was the 2019 winner of the Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize for her manuscript My Name & Other Languages I Am Learning How to Speak, which was published by Jai-Alai Books in Spring 2020. Smith notes that Davis’ manuscript “exist brightly in the canon of Black femme poets.”

• Silvina López Medin's Poem That Never Ends won the 2019 Essay Press Book Contest

• MFA alum Ada Limón and recent visiting faculty members Valeria Luiselli and Garth Greenwell were awarded 2020 Guggenheim Fellowships.

• Rebecca Dinerstein Knight's novel Hex was named a "Best Book of 2020" by Vanity Fair

• Asiya Gaildon and Aria Aber were awarded Stegner Fellowships

• Aria Aber and Diannely Antigua won 2020 Whiting Awards for their respective collections, Hard Damage (University of Nebraska Press, 2019) and Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019).

• Morgan Parker was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for her latest collection Magical Negro.

• Julie Buntin won the Ellen Levine Fund for Writers Award for her novel-in-progress

• Laura Cresté was a winner of the 2019 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Contest. Selected by Stephanie Burt, Cresté's chapbook, You Should Feel Bad, was published in Spring 2020. 

• Jihyun Yun won the 2019 Raz-Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her debut collection of poems, SOME ARE ALWAYS HUNGRY, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in September 2020.

• Ocean Vuong was named a 2019 MacArthur Fellow. The MacArthur Fellowship is a $625,000, no-strings-attached grant for individuals who have shown exceptional creativity in their work and the promise to do more. 

• Mitchell S. Jackson's nonfiction book Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family was  named a best book of 2019 by fifteen publications, including NPR, Time Magazine, The Paris Review, The Root, Kirkus Reviews, and Buzzfeed.

• Alexandria Hall was selected by Rosanna Warren as a 2019 winner of the National Poetry Series. Her debut collection of poems Field Music was published by Ecco Books in 2020.  

• Nicole Sealey was awarded a 2019-20 Rome Prize.

• Ada Limón won the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Awards in Poetry

• Julie Buntin's debut novel MARLENA was named a Michigan Notable Book 2018 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize 

• Isabella Hammad was profiled in The New York Times for her debut novel, The Parisian.

• Jenny Xie's debut collection, Eye Level (Graywolf Press), was shortlisted for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry. 

• Nicole Sealey was named a 2019-2020 Hodder Fellow at Princeton. The Hodder Fellowship was created to provide artists and humanists in the early stages of their careers an opportunity to undertake significant new work.

• Low-Residency MFA alum Will Weitzel received a O. Henry Prize for his story "Lion," originally published in Prairie Schooner.

• Matthew Lansburgh's collection of linked short stories, Outside Is the Ocean, was a finalist for the 30th Annual Lambda Literary Award and the 2018 Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction. It was also the winner of the 2017 Iowa Short Fiction Award.

• Visiting graduate faculty members Idra Novey and Brandon Taylor won 2022 Pushcart Prizes for respective work published in The Yale Review

• Visiting graduate faculty member Brandon Taylor's collection Filthy Animals was named a 2021/22 finalist for The Story Prize and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize

• Katie Kitamura was named a finalist for the 2022 Joyce Carol Oates Prize and was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award

• Julia Guez (undergrad faculty member) was awarded a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Translation

• Senior faculty member Sharon Olds was named the 2022 recipient of the Poetry Society of America's Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry

• Recent visiting grad faculty member Phillip B. Williams' Mutiny was longlisted for both the 2022 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection 

• Maaza Mengiste (also alum) and senior grad faculty member Nathan Englander were named finalists for the 2021 John Dos Passos Prize for Literature

• Katie Kitamura's Intimacies was longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award in Fiction

• Katie Kitamura's latest novel Intimacies (Riverhead, 2021) was featured on Barack Obama's 2021 summer reading list, and received rave reviews in the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, among others

• Craig Morgan Teicher (undergrad faculty member) won a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship

• Darin Strauss (also alum) was shortlisted for the 2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize from The Simpson Literary Project

• Recent visiting faculty member Idra Novey's (and Ahmad Nadalizadeh's) translation of Lean Against This Late Hour by Garous Abdolmalekian was a finalist for the 2021 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation

• John Freeman has joined Knopf as an Executive Editor

• Darin Strauss (also alum) and recent visiting faculty member Marie-Helene Bertino were longlisted for the 2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize from The Simpson Literary Project

• Terrance Hayes's recent collection American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress

• Nathan Englander's novel Dinner at the Center of the Earth will be turned into a series for Showtime with Homeland's architects Howard Gordon & Alex Gansa as executive producers and NYU Tisch's Professor Sameh Zoabi

• Recent visiting faculty member and alum Maaza Mengiste's novel The Shadow King was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize

• Recent undergraduate faculty member Fatima Farheen Mirza was named a National Book Award 5 under 35 honoree

• Faculty member and alum Robin Coste Lewis was named a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow.

• Soft Targets by program director Deborah Landau was selected as the winner of the 2019 Believer Book Award for Poetry

 • Senior faculty member Matthew Rohrer's new poetry collection The Sky Contains the Plans received a starred review in Publishers Weekly

• LitHub's Most Anticipated Books of 2020 includes books by facutly members Marie-Helene Bertino, Mark Bibbins, Anne Carson, Edward Hirsch, John Freeman, Major Jackson, Hari Kunzru, Raven Leilani, John Murillo, Joyce Carol Oates, and Darin Strauss. 

• Senior faculty member Sharon Olds was named a 2020 United States Artists Fellow. 

• Arias by senior faculty member Sharon Olds was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize

• Human Hours by senior faculty member Catherine Barnett was selected as the winner of the 2018 Believer Book Award for Poetry and a finalist for the 2019 Four Quartets Prize

• American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by senior faculty member Terrance Hayes and Eye Level by Jenny Xie were shortlisted for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry

• Feel Free by senior faculty member Zadie Smith was named a New York Times Notable Book and was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay

• Visiting faculty member Mira Jacob was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography for her book Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations.

• Zadie Smith won the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Awards in criticism

• Visiting faculty member Sharon Mesmer's essay and four poems appeared in Volume 48 of the American Poetry Review.

• Terrance Hayes was named finalist for the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Awards in poetry

• Low-Residency MFA faculty member and alum Ishion Hutchinson won a 2019 Windham-Campbell Prize in Poetry.

• The New York Times published "New York Today: Our State Poet, Yusef Komunyakaa" 

• Senior faculty member Sharon Olds was awarded the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award for her lifetime achievement in poetry.

• Omer Friedlander's collection The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land was chosen as the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish community's One Bay One Book selection for the year

• Téa Mutonji (fiction) was selected as a 2022 Writers' Trust Rising Star

• (Poetry) DeeSoul Carson and Yi Wei were guests on a podcast and article produced by the Pulse (based out of WHYY, an NPR station) talking about feedback in the MFA program

• Ron Huett (fiction) was the recipient of a 2022 grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation

• Current MFA candidates from CWP faculty member Hari Kunzru's nonfiction seminar in fall 2021 participated in an art-critical project in collaboration with Pace Gallery and the artists Elmgreen & Dragset. Having received some 20 submissions from MFA candidates at New York University, the artists selected one winner, Michelle Canales Butcher, and three finalists, Robert Franklin, Sarah Lieberman, and August Thompson. Along with the students, writers Garth Greenwell, Katie Kitamura, and Hari Kunzru have composed new work informed by Elmgreen & Dragset’s exhibition, which can be read here. 

• Omer Friedlander signed a two-book deal with Robin Desser at Random House for The Man Who Sold Air in the Holy Land, a short story collection, and The Glass Golem, a novel. Friedlander is represented by Janet Silver at Aevitas Creative Management.