MFA Creative Writing
Fiction | Creative Nonfiction | Poetry
Director of the MFA Creative Writing Program, Adam Haslett is the author of Imagine Me Gone, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award; You Are Not a Stranger Here, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; Union Atlantic, winner of the Lambda Literary Award and shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize, and most recently, the national bestseller Mothers and Sons, published by Little, Brown. His books have been translated into thirty languages, and his journalism on culture and politics have appeared in The Financial Times, Esquire, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Der Spiegel, The Nation, and The Atlantic, among others. He has been awarded the Berlin Prize by the American Academy in Berlin, a Guggenheim fellowship, the PEN/Malamud Award, the PEN/Winship Award, and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Ayana Mathis is the author of The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (Knopf, 2012) and most recently, The Unsettled (Knopf, 2023), the inaugural winner of McSweeney's Gabe Hudson Prize. The book was named a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of 2023, a best of 2023 by The New Yorker, Publisher's Weekly, an Oprah Daily Best Novels of 2023, and a Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2023. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie was a New York Times Bestseller, the second selection for Oprah's Book Club 2.0, a 2013 New York Times Notable Book, NPR Best Book of 2013, and was long listed for the Dublin Literary Award and nominated for Hurston/Wright Foundation's Legacy Award. Mathis's essays and criticism have been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic, T Magazine, The Financial Times, Rolling Stone, Guernica and Glamour. Mathis's most recent nonfiction explores the intertwining of faith and American literature in her five-part New York Times essay series "Imprinted By Belief". Mathis is a finalist for the 2025 Dos Passos Prize and a 2025-26 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University's Lewis Center for the Arts. Her work has been supported by the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation. She was a 2024-25 American Academy in Berlin Prize Fellow. Mathis received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and went on to become the first African-American woman to serve as an Assistant Professor in that program.
Megha Majumdar is the author of the novel A Guardian and a Thief, which is a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award, and was the Oprah's Book Club pick for October 2025. Her first book, the New York Times bestselling novel A Burning, was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, and the American Library Association's Andrew Carnegie Medal. In India, it won a Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar. It was named one of the best books of the year by media including The Washington Post, The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, Vogue, and TIME Magazine. Her work has been supported by the Whiting, Civitella Ranieri, and Hawthornden foundations. Born and raised in Kolkata, India, she now lives in New York.
Visiting Faculty Fall 2025
Rajesh Parameswaran is the author of I Am an Executioner: Love Stories, which The Washington Post praised as "the advent of a genuinely distinctive voice in American fiction." Parameswaran's stories have appeared in McSweeney's, Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story, Five Chapters, and Fiction. "The Strange Career of Dr. Raju Gopalarajan" was one of three stories for which McSweeney's earned a National Magazine Award in 2007, and it was reprinted in The Best American Magazine Writing. He is a graduate of Yale Law School and lives in New York City.
Visiting Faculty Spring 2026
Angela Flournoy's new novel, The Wilderness, was released in fall 2025 by Mariner Books and longlisted for the National Book Award. Her debut novel, The Turner House, was also a finalist for the National Book Award. It won the VCU Cabell First Novel Prize, and was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and an NAACP Image Award. Her nonfiction has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times, and The New Yorker. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Flournoy has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, The New School, Columbia University, Princeton University, and the University of California at Los Angeles. She is a faculty member in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. Flournoy has received fellowships from the New York Public Library Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy in Berlin. She was raised in Southern California by a mother from Los Angeles and a father from Detroit.
First Semester Literature Course
Foundation of Modern is a popular course taught by the celebrated Roxana Robinson, who characterizes the course this way: "We explore the possibilities of empathy, compassion and the sympathetic character, from the reader's and the writer's point of view. How does compassion vivify the text? How does emotional engagement enlarge the work? How are these things achieved?" Robinson is the author of eleven books--seven novels, three collections of short stories, and the biography of Georgia O'Keeffe. Four of these were chosen as New York Times Notable Books, two as New York Times Editors' Choices. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, Best American Short Stories, The Southampton Review, Ep!phany and elsewhere. Her work has been widely anthologized and broadcast on NPR. Her books have been published in England, France, Germany, Holland and Spain. Robinson has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation and the MacDowell Colony, and she was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library. Robinson has served on the Boards of PEN and the Authors Guild, and was the president of the Authors Guild. She has received the Barnes and Noble "Writers for Writers Award," given by Poets and Writers, and the Award for Distinguished Service to the Literary Community from the Authors Guild.
Past Fiction Faculty