• 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
• Raven Leilani's debut novel Luster was short-listed for the 2020 First Novel Prize from The Center for Fiction
• 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
• 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.
• 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.
• 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, will be 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, will be 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.
• Alexandria Hall was selected by Rosanna Warren as a 2019 winner of the National Poetry Series. Her debut collection of poems Field Music will be 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
• 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.
• Juan Felipe Herrera selected Jenny Xie as the recipient of the the Academy of American Poets 2017 Walt Whitman Award, the nation’s most valuable first-book prize for a poet. As the winner of the Whitman Award, Xie’s manuscript, Eye Level, was published by Graywolf Press in April 2018.
• Robin Coste Lewis received an Art of Change fellowship from the Ford Foundation. This fellowship supports twenty-five "visionary artists and cultural leaders in creating powerful works of art that help advance freedom, justice, and inclusion, and strengthen our democracy." Her poetry collection Voyage of the Sable Venus was awarded the 2015 National Book Award.
• Tyehimba Jess's book of poetry Olio (Wave Books) was awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
• Javier Zamora was featured in The New Yorker in advance of his debut poetry collection, Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press, 2017).
• Visiting faculty member and MFA alum Ishion Hutchinson was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for his collection House of Lords and Commons. He was called "Jamaica's best new poet" in the New York Times Book Review.
• Kanishk Tharoor's story collection, Swimmer Among the Stars (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2017), was called a "remarkably crafted and imaginative debut in the New York Times and was named one of April's twenty best books by Oprah.com.
• Gabe Habash's debut novel was published in June 2017 by Coffee House Press. An NPR review stated "Stephen Florida is brash and audacious; it's not just one of the best novels of the year, it's one of the best sports books to come along in quite a while. It's an accomplishment that's made all the more stunning by Habash's status as a debut novelist: It's his first time on the mat, and he puts on a clinic."
