Alumni News

The Kaduna Books and Arts Festival has honored Mason creative writing professor Helon Habila with the KabaFest Lifetime Achievement Award, which will be presented at the festival's opening ceremonies on Thursday, April 25.

The winner of the 2023 Grayson Books Poetry Contest is Emily Tuszynska for her collection Surfacing, judged by Brad Davis.

The Burning of the World: The Great Chicago Fire and The War for a City’s Soul, the latest book from English Professor Scott Berg, MFA ’97, was released September 26 by Pantheon Publishing.

Melanie McCabe, a Mason MFA alum, was named a finalist for the Virginia Literary Awards for her latest poetry collection, The Night Divers.

MFA poetry student Arpita Roy has been selected as the winner of the Bread Loaf Katharine Bakeless Nason Contributor Award in Poetry for the 2023 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. For this highly competitive award, she was chosen out of a pool of 2,500 applicants.

MFA alumnus and former Watershed Lit GPA Tommy Sheffield (Poetry, '21) met poet Latif Askia Ba, acquired and helped develop his book project, and successfully published The Machine Code of a Bleeding Moon in 2022 under the Stillhouse Press imprint. Ba had two poems published in the June 2023 issue of Poetry Magazine.

Dong Li, author of The Orange Tree and inaugural winner of the Phoenix Emerging Poet Book Prize, closes the Creative Writing Program's Spring Visiting Writers Series.

Robbie Maakestad, MFA ’17, has launched a Creative Writing M.A. program at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California.

Lawrence Weschler, longtime New Yorker staff writer and author of Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative, speaks in Fenwick Library as part of the Creative Writing Program's Visiting Writers Series.