MFA Community News

• Raven Leilani (alum) won the Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize for her debut novel Luster

• John Murillo (alum and recent undergrad faculty) won the Poetry Society of America's 2021 Four Quartets Prize

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

• Mitchell S. Jackson (alum) won a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship and received a 2021 Creative Capital Grant, which will provide him with up to $50,000 in direct funding towards his next project of fiction, John of Watts.

• Current MFA candidate Sara Elkamel's debut poetry chapbook “Field of No Justice,” was selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, co-editors of the African Poetry Book Fund’s New-Generation African Poets series for publication as part of the forthcoming chapbook box set (Nane).

• Alum Rio Cortez signed a two-book deal with Penguin Books.

• Current MFA candidate Robert Wood Lynn's manuscript Mothman Apologia was selected by Rae Armantrout as the winner the 2021 Yale Series of Younger Poets

• Senior faculty member and alum Darin Strauss was shortlisted for the 2021 Joyce Carol Oates Prize

• Current MFA candidate Kamelya Omayma Youssef's manuscript A book with a hole in it won the 2020 Carolyn Bush Award from Wendy's Subway

• Current MFA candidate Hafizah Geter's debut nonfiction The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin will be published by Random House in 2022. Geter's debut poetry collection Un-American was also a finalist for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award

• Alum John Murillo's Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry was named the winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was also a finalist for the 2021 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection and longlisted for the 2021 Believer Book Award in Poetry

• Ocean Vuong (alum and faculty member) was named a 2021 United States Artists Fellow

• Raven Leilani (alum) was named a finalist for the 2021 PEN/Hemmingway Award for Debut Novel and the Gotham Book Prize and longlisted for the 2021 Dylan Thomas Prize. Leilani won the 2020 Kirkus Prize for Fiction, the Center for Fiction 2020 First Novel Prize, and the 2020 John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle for her debut novel Luster

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

• Gregory Pardlo (alum) was named codirector of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Rutgers Unversity-Camden, alongside Patrick Rosal

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

• Raven Leilani won the Swansea University Dylan Thomas prize for her debut novel Luster

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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.

• 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, 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. 

• 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 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

• 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.

• 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."

• 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.

• Sara Elkamel's debut poetry chapbook “Field of No Justice,” was selected by Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani, co-editors of the African Poetry Book Fund’s New-Generation African Poets series for publication as part of the forthcoming chapbook box set (Nane).

• Robert Wood Lynn's manuscript Mothman Apologia was selected by Rae Armantrout as the winner the 2021 Yale Series of Younger Poets

• Kamelya Omayma Youssef's manuscript A book with a hole in it won the 2020 Carolyn Bush Award from Wendy's Subway

• Hafizah Geter's debut nonfiction The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin will be published by Random House in 2022

• Hafizah Geter's Un-American was a finalist for the 2021 PEN Open Book Award

• Sara Elkamel's poem "Buried at Sea" was selected for inclusion in the 2020 Best of the Net anthology

• 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." 

• Devon Walker-Figueroa was selected by Sally Keith as a 2020 winner of the National Poetry Series. Walker-Figueroa's debut collection Philomath will be published by Milkweed Editions in Fall 2021.

• Charleen McClure won a 2020 Rona Jaffe Writers' Award

• Desiree C. Bailey and Sara Elkamel were named finalists for the Best New Poets 2020 anthology.

• 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.

• Hafizah Geter's debut collection of poems, Un-American, was recently published with Wesleyan University Press (September 2020). Un-American has been endorsed by Claudia Rankine as a "gorgeous debut [that] troubles and reshapes notions of belonging against the backdrop of a country obsessed with its own exclusions, erasures, borders, institutions, and violence."

• 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.”

•Sara Elkamel was named a 2020 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry through The Adroit Journal. 

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

•Selected by Danez Smith, Marissa Davis is 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 will be published by Jai-Alai Books in spring 2020. Smith notes that Davis’ manuscript “exist brightly in the canon of Black femme poets.”