WMU Creative Writing

04/26/2021

our great and wonderful graduate director, Meghann Meeusen, made this beautiful program for our MFA/PhD festival this evening at 7 pm, via zoom--please join us to celebrate our spectacular graduate students! zoom link here (or see event listing): https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85417995943?pwd=L1p6SXMzODkySEU1MG9IU2laSnVuUT09

12/02/2020

4th year Western Michigan University Phd student, Author Kai Harris, will be in conversation TOMORROW NIGHT with Lambda Literary Award winner Nicole Dennis-Benn & writer Suzanne McFayden. Kai will be reading from her forthcoming novel "What the Fireflies Knew," and discussing Black girlhood and silence. Kai is AMAZING (and funny, too!) and this talk is a must-see for emerging writers!

Use this link to register: www.crowdcast.io/e/sing-the-truth

"BE" "THERE"!!! (or however one expresses such a thing in the time of covid...?)

Interested in submitting to Kweli's March 2021 Black Girlhood issue? Then join us for Sing the Truth! with Lambda Literary Award winner Nicole Dennis-Benn, Kai Harris & Suzanne McFayden on December 3, 7:30-8:30PM. Nicole edited our Black Girlhood issue. RSVP here:

https://www.crowdcast.io/e/sing-the-truth

04/25/2020

This week we will be celebrating the graduation of our 2020 class of MFA and PhD students! Today, please join me in celebrating and congratulating Bradford Kammin (PhD in Creative Writing Fiction)!

Bradford Kammin’s fiction has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Arts & Letters, the Cimarron Review, and elsewhere. His story, “Ernest Waltham Sells His Last Remaining Holstein,” was recognized in the 2015 Best American Short Stories anthology’s list of distinguished stories. Another story, “The One Good Thing About Las Vegas, Nevada,” was selected by judge and National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Adam Johnson for the Mary C. Mohr Prize, and was published in the Southern Indiana Review. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan’s MFA program in creative writing, where he won Hopwood Awards for his short fiction, novel, and nonfiction.

You can visit him at www.bradfordkammin.com.

04/24/2020

This week we will be celebrating the graduation of our 2020 class of MFA and PhD students! Today, please join me in celebrating and congratulating Amber Palmer (MFA Playwriting)!

Amber Palmer’s work has been seen at Activate Midwest: New Play Festival, Flint Repertory Theatre New Works Festival, Pegasus PlayLab, Tipping Point Theatre, and elsewhere. A monologue from her play “It’s a Small World (or The Robot Play)” is published in Best Men’s Monologues of 2019. Awards include City Theatre's National Award for Short Playwriting (finalist, 2019), Tipping Point Theatre’s Sandbox Play Festival (2nd place, 2019) and Gary Garrison 10 Minute Play Award (Region 3 finalist, 2018). She was Artist-in-Resident at The Mitten Lab in 2019. Amber will begin her PhD in Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies at The University of Wisconsin Madison in Fall 2020.

Amber would like to thank Steve Feffer, Scott Irelan, Meghann Meussen, and the WMU English Faculty for everything they’ve done to make the past three years as wonderful as they have been.

You can read Amber’s work at https://newplayexchange.org/users/3492/amber-palmer

04/23/2020

This week we will be celebrating the graduation of our 2020 class of MFA and PhD students! Today, please join me in celebrating and congratulating Abigail Goodhart (MFA Poetry)!

Abigail Goodhart has received her MFA at Western Michigan University. She has published poems in previous or forthcoming issues of Atlanta Review, Dunes Review, and Sugar House Review. She draws inspiration from the culture of the Midwest, the absurdism of the web, and the frenzy of playing roller derby. Next year, she will be living in Ann Arbor, (not a far drive from Kalamazoo!).

Read her poem “Preservation” here! https://www.passagesnorth.com/passagesnorthcom/2019/10/4/preservation-by-abigail-goodhart

04/22/2020

This week we will be celebrating the graduation of our 2020 class of MFA and PhD students! Today, please join me in celebrating and congratulating Sara Lupita Olivares (PhD in Creative Writing: Poetry)!

Sara Lupita Olivares is the author of Migratory Sound, winner of the 2020 CantoMundo Poetry Prize, forthcoming from the University of Arkansas Press, and the chapbook Field Things. Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast Magazine, Denver Quarterly, Salt Hill Journal, jubilat, and elsewhere.

You can read Sara's poems "Glimpse" and "Animalier: On Stasis" here! http://thediagram.com/19_1/olivares.html

04/21/2020

This week we will be celebrating the graduation of our 2020 class of MFA and PhD students! Today, please join me in celebrating and congratulating Mehgan Frostic (MFA in Creative Writing: Fiction)!

Mehgan Frostic is a writer and photographer from the suburbs of Detroit. In 2016 she graduated from Wayne State University with a B.A. in English. From there she worked as a writer and photographer for The D Profile before starting the MFA program at Western. In the future she hopes to obtain a creatively fulfilling job while continuing to pursue her passions. She'd like to thank Thisbe Nissen and Steve Feffer for all their creative guidance, Scott Slawinski for being a part of her committee, her friends and family, and everyone she's worked with at Western.

You can see Mehgan’s list of printed publications and her photography at mehganfrostic.com.

04/20/2020

This week we will be celebrating the graduation of our 2020 class of MFA and PhD students! Today, please join me in celebrating and congratulating Ariel Berry (PhD in Creative Writing: Fiction)!

Ariel Berry is associate prose editor for A-Minor. Her work has appeared in several literary journals, including American Short Fiction, 100 Word Story, Gone Lawn, and Southword. She lives in Albion, Michigan, where she surrounds herself with books and animals.

Read Ariel Berry’s “Useless Things” Here: http://www.100wordstory.org/useless-things/