MFA Alumni

In the once-great Midwestern city of Trude, ornate old buildings lie in ruins, shrouded in disappointment and nostalgia. Trude has become a place to "lose yourself," as one tourist brochure puts it: a treacherous maze of convoluted shopping malls, barricaded libraries, and elitist assisted-living homes.

One night at Trude's opera house, the theater's most celebrated mezzo-soprano vanishes during rehearsal. When the police come up empty-handed, her husband, a disconsolate legal clerk named Sven Norberg, takes up the quest on his own. To uncover the secret of his wife's disappearance, Norberg must descend into Trude's underworld and confront the menacing and bizarre citizens of his hometown: rebellious librarians, shifty music critics, a cop known as the Oracle, and the minister of an apocalyptic church who has recruited Norberg's teenage son. Faced with the loss of everything he loves, Norberg's investigation leads him to the heart of the city and through the buildings of a possibly insane modernist architect named Bernhard, whose elaborate vision offers him an astonishing revelation.

Written with boundless intelligence and razor-sharp wit, THE FACADES is a comic and existential mystery that unfolds at the urgent pace of a thriller.

It's a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn, dressed in a green dress and gold heels, carrying no bags and arriving alone. Mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding guests, Phoebe is actually the only person at the Cornwall not attending the big event. She has dreamed of coming here for years, hoping to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband. Instead, she's here alone, at rock bottom, determined to have one last indulgent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has meticulously planned every detail of the weekend, accounting for every possible disaster except for Phoebe and her unexpected plans. This makes it all the more surprising when the two women find themselves confiding in each other.

In Alison Espach’s The Wedding People, absurd humor and tender moments intertwine, offering a nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we take to places we never imagined, and the chance encounters that can reroute our lives.

In her lush, lyrical, and unflinching short fiction debut, JoAnna Novak examines the restless throb of desire amid the rote work of jobs and obligations, from the walk-ins of a New York banquet kitchen to the pier of Venice Beach. Fueled by jellyfish pad Thai and Necco wafers, Mountain Dew and Xiaolongbao, the characters in these stories defy boundaries and mores: In “MEMO 19,” a former anorectic, bored of recovery and her clerical job, invites an unparalleled act of sexual defilement and in “Rio Grande, Wisconsin,” a fleshly preteen fantasizes about Bill Murray on a family vacation to Wisconsin. Celebrating the grueling beauty of the shift and the ticking virtues of self-restraint, Meaningful Work is a pageant of formal experimentation, in fearless, glittering prose.
 

Meghan Lamb's "Coward" is an edgy and intense read, perfect for readers looking for something bold and different. The book explores themes of love and identity in a unique and thrilling way, blending elements of horror and romance. It's a vivid and daring story that pushes boundaries, offering a fresh perspective on coming-of-age tales. With a mix of zombies, intense relationships, and a gripping plot, "Coward" is a standout work that's both captivating and thought-provoking.

Conor O'Toole has never experienced anything like Cutters Neck, a gated community near Cape Cod. It's a sweet summer deal: in exchange for tennis lessons, he receives free lodging in a luxurious guest cottage, far from the cramped Yonkers apartment he shares with his diabetic mother.

In this oceanfront paradise, new clients are hard to come by, and Conor has bills to pay. When Catherine, a sharp-tongued divorcée, offers double his usual rate, he soon realizes she expects additional, off-court services for her money. Conor tumbles into a secret erotic affair unlike anything he's experienced before.

Despite his steamy flings with a woman twice his age, he simultaneously finds himself falling for an artsy, outspoken girl he meets on the beach. With cautious, strategic planning, Conor somehow manages this tangled web—until he makes one final, irreversible mistake.

A dark, explosive literary thriller that brilliantly skewers the elite, Teddy Wayne's unputdownable novel is cinematic, shocking, and a psychological masterpiece.

In 1996, the unnamed narrator of Teddy Wayne's novel is attending Columbia's MFA writing program, funded by his father, and living in an illegal sublet of a rent-stabilized apartment. Feeling guilty about his good fortune, he offers his spare bedroom—rent-free—to Billy, a talented and charismatic classmate from the Midwest struggling to make ends meet in Manhattan.

It's 1930, the midst of the Great Depression. After her mysterious role in a family tragedy, passionate, strong-willed Thea Atwell, age fifteen, is cast out of her Florida home and exiled to an equestrienne boarding school for Southern debutantes. High in the Blue Ridge Mountains, the school's complex social strata are ordered by money, beauty, and girls’ friendships. The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls is a far cry from the free-roaming, dreamlike childhood Thea shared with her twin brother on their family’s citrus farm—a world now partially shattered. As Thea grapples with her responsibility for the events of the past year that led her here, she finds herself enmeshed in a new order, one that will change her sense of what is possible for herself, her family, and her country.

Weaving provocatively between home and school, the narrative powerfully unfurls the true story behind Thea’s expulsion from her family. But it isn’t long before the mystery of her past is rivaled by the question of how it will shape her future. Part scandalous love story, part heartbreaking family drama, this is an immersive, transporting page-turner—a vivid, propulsive novel about sex, love, family, money, class, home, and horses, all set against the ominous threat of the Depression—and the major debut of an important new writer.

From the acclaimed author of The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls comes a tale of enduring female friendship—full of its intense struggles and delights—set against a backdrop of affluence, elegance, and high expectations.

Joan Fortier personifies Texas glamour, reigning supreme over the 1950s Houston social scene. With her tall, blonde beauty and commanding presence, she captivates both the men who desire her and the women who envy her. Cece Buchanan, Joan's lifelong friend, is seen as either her loyal companion or her accomplice, depending on who you ask. But when Joan's reckless behavior intensifies during the summer they turn twenty-five, Cece feels compelled to rein her in, leading to a single, consequential decision.

The After Party offers a mesmerizing glimpse into the world of the rich and glamorous during a memorable era, revealing a friendship as passionate, exhilarating, consuming, and complex as any romance.

Starting work at just fourteen, Lydia Paar has held an impressive array of jobs—twenty-seven in total—across twenty-five homes in eight states. This collection of essays delves into her efforts to navigate and redefine the lower-middle-class American experience across a variety of urban and rural settings. From the bustling streets of Portland to the barren deserts, from Army basic training to long-distance bus rides, and even to the somber St. Louis funeral homes, Paar's journey is one of seeking peace, connection, and freedom.

Each essay examines the internal emotional labor involved in her journey: the work of love and friendship, learning, movement, maintenance, and faith in the potential for positive change. Traversing diverse interior and exterior landscapes, Paar reflects on subcultures, agendas, violence, alliances, and the interplay between the natural world and human endeavors. Ultimately, she contemplates how our attempts at transformation often lead to our own transformation.

A compelling and inspiring tale of how the vibrant world of roller derby enabled a young woman to overcome her fears and self-doubt, embracing a life filled with courage, kindness, and adventure.

In his debut collection, Aaron Coleman crafts an American anthem for the 21st century, a powerful lyric infused with pain, faith, lust, and vulnerability. Coleman’s poems explore and question the meaning of home and identity for a Black man in America, both past and present. Guided by a belief system featuring an eclectic array of invented saints—Trigger, Seduction, Doubt, and Who—Coleman's journey uncovers new ways of being in the natural world, where “[t]he trees teach me how to break and keep on living.”

"This gorgeous debut is a 'debut' in chronology only. . . . Need is everywhere--in the unforgiving images, in lines so delicate they seem to break apart in the hands, and in the reader who will enter these poems and never want to leave."--Adrian Matejka

Phillip B. Williams investigates the dangers of desire, balancing narratives of addiction, murders, and hate crimes with passionate, uncompromising depth. Formal poems entrenched in urban landscapes crack open dialogues of racism and homophobia rampant in our culture. Multitudinous voices explore one's ability to harm and be harmed, which uniquely juxtaposes the capacity to revel in both experiences.

Mutiny: a rebellion, a subversion, an onslaught. In these poems, Phillip B. Williams rebukes classical mythos and Western canonical figures while embracing Afro-Diasporic folk and spiritual imagery. He conjures the hell of being erased, exploited, and ill-imagined, and through a powerful and generous vision, propels himself into life, selfhood, and a path forward. Intimate, bold, and sonically mesmerizing, Mutiny addresses loneliness, desire, doubt, memory, and the border between beauty and tragedy. With a ferocity that belies the tenderness and vulnerability at the heart of this remarkable collection, Williams honors the transformative power of anger and the clarity that comes from allowing that anger to burn clean.

Poems merge queer ecopoetics with religious disposition, speaking through a pantheon of mythic figures—from Jesus to Aphrodite—to commune or contend with reality. What emerges is a cumulative awareness of being a physical, energetic body in a fractured world, attempting to heal some part of it while exploring and embracing the gray areas of identity and ambiguity.

Indecency is boldly and meticulously crafted, perfectly capturing a raw edge. In these poems, Justin Phillip Reed experiments with language to explore inequity and injustice, critiquing and lamenting the culture of white supremacy and the dominant social order. Political and personal, tender, daring, and insightful, Reed unpacks his intimacies, using poetry as a weapon to confront masculinity, sexuality, exploitation, and the prison industrial complex, revealing the failures of the societal structures that confine us.

The Malevolent Volume explores the myths and transformations of Black being, ranging from the monstrous to the sublime.

National Book Award winner Justin Phillip Reed subverts celebrated classics of poetry and mythology while examining horrors from contemporary film and cultural realities. He engages darkness as an aesthetic to conjure the revenant animus lurking beneath the exploited civilities of marginalized people. In these poems, Reed finds agency in the other-than-human identities assigned to those brutalized by state savagery. By doing so, he summons a retaliatory, counterviolent Black spirit to revolt and to inhabit the revolting.

A profound reflection on physical, emotional, and psychological transformation in the wake of imperial violence and personal abuse, from a poet described as both “tender and unflinching” (Khadijah Queen).

Paul Tran's debut poetry collection, All the Flowers Kneeling, is visceral and astonishing. It delves into intergenerational trauma, sexual violence, and U.S. imperialism, fundamentally reshaping our perceptions of freedom, power, and control. Through poems exploring desire, gender, bodies, legacies, and imagined futures, Tran illuminates the intricate and harrowing processes of reckoning and recovery. Their innovative poetic forms echo the nonlinear emotional and psychological journeys of trauma survivors. At once grand and intimate, commanding and deeply vulnerable, All the Flowers Kneeling is a celebration of rediscovering and reconfiguring the self, ultimately standing as a powerful testament to human resilience, endurance, and love

This collection serves as a mirror to the self, reflecting themes of elegy and ecology, as seen in lines like "how much of enjoying a place / is destroying it?" It explores both domestic and natural worlds, capturing moments such as "when the redbird strikes the window, it is me / who takes blame." The work portrays a daughter's fragmented experience, yet retains humor: "I can feel it coming on, my season of lavish suffering, the why me why me why me why me / that leaves me snowblind in the asking." Through concisely crafted and unfolding sequences, The Last Unkillable Thing navigates landscapes of mourning with tenderness.

THE MALEVOLENT VOLUME EXPLORES THE MYTHS AND TRANSFORMATIONS OF BLACK BEING, ON A CONTINUUM BETWEEN THE MONSTROUS AND THE SUBLIME.

Subverting celebrated classics of poetry and mythology and examining horrors from contemporary film and cultural fact, National Book Award winner Justin Phillip Reed engages darkness as an aesthetic to conjure the revenant animus that lurks beneath the exploited civilities of marginalized people. In these poems, Reed finds agency in the other-than-human identities assigned to those assaulted by savageries of the state. In doing so, he summons a retaliatory, counterviolent Black spirit to revolt and to inhabit the revolting.