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This course booklet is a crucial tool in planning your Spring 2026 classes. Inside, you will find descriptions for course offerings in all English/Creative Writing graduate programs.

Just over a year ago, three English Department professors—fiction writers Michael Don and Billy Howell and poet and essayist Liz Paul—joined local poet Erika Ostergaard to launch a new literary series in downtown Fairfax. Fox City Lit hosts quarterly readings as well as weekly writing get-togethers—both celebrating and encouraging literary talent from the local area and throughout the DMV region. 

The College of Humanities and Social Sciences is proud to honor Michael Carrigan, BA English '98, with the 2025 Distinguished Alumni Award in English. Carrigan serves as branch chief for the Ending the HIV Epidemic in the U.S. initiative at the Health Resources and Services Administration’s HIV/AIDS Bureau. He leads a team supporting jurisdictions across the country in delivering innovative care and treatment for people with HIV. 

Three recent MFA alums—Jessika Bouvier, Kara Crawford, and Connor Harding, all class of ’25—have recently debuted an online literary journal, Chatterbox, dedicated to short fiction on the longer side.

The College of Humanities and Social Sciences is proud to honor Steve Gladis, MA English '84, PhD Education '95, with the 2025 CHSS alumni service award. A leadership speaker and executive coach, Steve Gladis is an authority on the topic of leadership.

English major Amaiyah-Monet Parker and Integrative Studies major Alessaundra Shallal presented posters in OSCAR's Celebration of Student Research and Impact. Shallal expressed gratitude for Manuel-Scott’s “unwavering” support over nearly two years, crediting her mentorship for enabling her to pursue her research across semesters and “maintain faith in the progression of inclusion in academia.”

The English Honors seminar “The Witches of American Literature,” taught by Professor Samaine Lockwood, studied representations of the witch in American culture from the Civil War to the 21st century, particularly in the long shadow of the Salem Witch Trials.

The year-long series seeks to foster cross-disciplinary AI literacy, explore how AI shapes and is shaped by culture, ethics, history, and society, and provide opportunities for research incubation and exchange.

"When Eloise tells Kofi she wants a divorce, he sits naked on the kitchen floor skinning an ox tongue to prepare Eloise’s favorite dish." So begins Brian Gyamfi's poem, 'The Almost Love Poem of Eloise and Kofi'.

The barn could be neither more plain nor less imposing.        Little cared for, seeming underappreciated. Unpainted wood. Board-and-batten sides, roof of tin. Long and narrow, yet, in the whole length of it, only six windows, arranged in two blocks of three each, high up on one wall. Not much light gets in except through the holes and cracks in the walls.        There probably was not much light to come through those windows anyway in the middle of the night or even in the early morning that time in 1955 when 14-year-old Emmett Till was tortured and murdered in that barn near Drew, Mississippi. But it had to be tough for a lone Black youth facing a squad of White men, in the dark, those men seeming intent on life-ending torture.