Alumni News

Over the last decade, Ellen Weeren, BA ’90 and MFA ’19, has been run­ning the Facebook group A Reason to Write, serving a community of more than 750 writers at all stages of their careers with news, opportunities, and regular doses of motivation—and more recently, she’s taken that mission from the virtual world into the real one.

Each year, the George Mason University Alumni Association celebrates the achievements of alumni at the annual Celebration of Distinction awards program. The Alumni Association recognizes alumni for their outstanding professional achievements and service to the university, and honors the achievements of alumni from each school, college, and affinity chapter.

Nadirah Muhammad (BA, Writing and Rhetoric '20) recently published an interview with Kari Miller, founder and CEO of International Neighbors, an organization that supports refugee and immigrant families building new lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Mason MFA alum Chrissy Widmayer is the director of Community Powered, a program through the Wisconsin Humanities that helps participating communities to “experience new ways to unearth and tell stories of their communities while taking concrete steps toward making their hometowns better places to live.”

Mako Yoshikawa is the author of the memoir, Secrets of the Sun, published in 2024 and called “incandescent…gorgeous” by Booklist and “deeply felt, eloquent” by Michiko Kakutani.

The College of Humanities and Social Sciences is proud to honor Bradford Vivian, BA English '96, with the 2024 Distinguished Alumni award in English. Vivian is a professor in the department of communication arts and sciences and former director of the Center for Democratic Deliberation at Penn State University.

Mason Creative Writing alum Jessica Anthony (MFA ’04) has recently been longlisted for the National Book Award for her newest novel, The Most.

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.