Chen Chen is an American poet. His book, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, was longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for Poetry. Chen serves on the poetry faculty for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College and Stonecoast. He served as Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence at Brandeis University from 2018-2022.
The Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, is a graduate-level creative writing program. At 87 years, it is the oldest writing program offering a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in the United States. Its acceptance rate is between 2.7% and 3.7%. On the university's behalf, the workshop administers the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism and the Iowa Short Fiction Award.
Justin Tussing is an American writer. Tussing was a graduate of the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop, where he held a Teaching/Writing Fellowship. He later became a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. His first published stories were "The Artificial Cloud," published in TriQuarterly, and "The Tiny Man," published in Third Coast; both stories appeared in the spring of 2000.
A low-residency program is a form of education, normally at the university level, which involves some amount of distance education and brief on-campus or specific-site residencies—residencies may be one weekend or several weeks. These programs are most frequently offered by colleges and universities that also teach standard full-time courses on campus. There are numerous master's degree programs in a wide range of content areas; one of the most popular limited residency degree programs is the Master of Fine Arts in creative writing. The first such program was developed by Evalyn Bates and launched in 1963 at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont.
Patricia Smith is an American poet, spoken-word performer, playwright, author, writing teacher, and former journalist. She has published poems in literary magazines and journals including TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Paris Review, Tin House, and in anthologies including American Voices and The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. She is on the faculties of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada University.
Lia Purpura is an American poet, writer and educator. She is the author of four collections of poems, four collections of essays and one collection of translations. Her poems and essays appear in AGNI, The Antioch Review, DoubleTake, FIELD, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Orion Magazine, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares. Southern Review, and many other magazines.
Xu Xi is an English language novelist from Hong Kong.
Aaron Hamburger is an American writer best known for his short story collection The View from Stalin's Head (2004) and novels Faith for Beginners (2005) and Nirvana Is Here (2019).
Lewis Robinson is an American author. His first book, Officer Friendly and Other Stories, was published by HarperCollins in 2003, and his second book, the novel Water Dogs, was published by Random House in 2009. A graduate of Middlebury College and the Iowa Writer's Workshop. Currently, he teaches creative writing at the University of Maine at Farmington.
K. L. Cook is an American writer from Texas. He is the author of Last Call (2004), a collection of linked stories spanning thirty-two years in the life of a West Texas family, the novel, The Girl From Charnelle (2006), and the short story collection, Love Songs for the Quarantined (2011). His most recent books are a collection of short stories, Marrying Kind (2019), a collection of poetry, Lost Soliloquies (2019), and The Art of Disobedience: Essays on Form, Fiction, and Influence (2020). He co-directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University and teaches in the low-residency MFA in Writing Program at Spalding University.
Rodney T. Smith is an American poet, fiction writer, and editor. The author of twelve poetry collections and a collection of short fiction, Smith is the editor of Shenandoah, a prestigious literary journal published by Washington and Lee University. His poetry and stories are identified with Southern literature and have been published in magazines and literary journals such as The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, and The Kenyon Review.
Sherwin Bitsui is a Navajo writer and poet. His book of poems, Flood Song (2009), won the American Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award.
The Texas State University Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing is a three-year graduate program at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, USA. Fiction writer Doug Dorst is the current director of the program.
Vermont College of Fine Arts (VCFA) is a private graduate-level art school in Montpelier, Vermont. It offers Master's degrees in a low-residency format. Its faculty includes Pulitzer Prize finalists, National Book Award winners, Newbery Medal honorees, Guggenheim Fellowship and Fulbright Program fellows, and Ford Foundation grant recipients. The literary magazine Hunger Mountain is operated by VCFA writing faculty and students.
Tim Seibles is an American poet, professor and the former Poet Laureate of Virginia. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently, Voodoo Libretto: New and Selected Poems. His honors include an Open Voice Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. In 2012 he was nominated for a National Book Award, for Fast Animal.
William Roorbach is an American novelist, short story and nature writer, memoirist, journalist, blogger and critic. He has authored fiction and nonfiction works including Big Bend, which won the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and the O. Henry Prize. Roorbach's memoir in nature, Temple Stream, won the Maine Literary Award for Nonfiction, 2005. His novel, Life Among Giants, won the 2013 Maine Literary Award for Fiction.[18] And The Remedy for Love, also a novel, was one of six finalists for the 2014 Kirkus Fiction Prize.. His book, The Girl of the Lake, is a short story collection published in June 2017. His most recent novel is Lucky Turtle, published in 2022.
Dzvinia Orlowsky is a Ukrainian American poet, translator, editor, and teacher. She received her BA from Oberlin College and her MFA from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She is author of six poetry collections including Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones for which she received a Sheila Motton Book Award, and Silvertone (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2013) for which she was named Ohio Poetry Day Association's 2014 Co-Poet of the Year. Her first collection, A Handful of Bees, was reprinted in 2009 as a Carnegie Mellon University Classic Contemporary. Her sixth, Bad Harvest, was published in fall of 2018 and was named a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry. Her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from the Ukrainian of selected poems by Natalka Bilotserkivets, "Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow" was published by Lost Horse Press in fall, 2021 and short-listed for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize the ALTA National Translation Award, and awarded the 2022 AAUS Translation Prize.
Theodore "Ted" Deppe is an American poet and professor, author of books of poetry. His most well-known collection is Orpheus on the Red Line, and he has had his poems published in many literary journals and magazines including The Kenyon Review, Harper’s Magazine, Poetry, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry Ireland Review. He was the Director of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing’s Stonecoast in Ireland program.
Geffrey Davis is an American poet and professor. He is the author of Revising the Storm (2014) and Night Angler (2019). He teaches in The Arkansas Programs in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas and lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He also serves on the poetry faculty at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
The Northwest Institute of Literary Arts (NILA) was a non-profit Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing low-residency program founded by the Whidbey Island Writers Association. It was in operation for twelve years, from 2005 to 2016. Beginning with an enrollment of nine students, the NILA MFA program grew to a peak enrollment of 62 students in 2014. Each semester began with intensive in-person residencies offering morning classes in craft, workshop, and directed reading, and afternoon sessions on the profession of writing. The three hours of afternoon classes were taught by guest faculty. At the end of residency, students returned home to complete the rest of the semester via online class forums.
