Tom Grimes is an American novelist, playwright, and creative writing instructor. He currently teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University in San Marcos, and served as the program's director from 1996 to 2015.
Grimes was a promising student at the famed Iowa Writers' Workshop while it was under the direction of Frank Conroy, author of the memoir Stop-Time . Grimes’ own memoir, Mentor: A Memoir (Tin House), is largely concerned with his time in Iowa and his friendship with Conroy, who Grimes first met while writing and working as a waiter in Key West. Grimes has described Mentor as the autobiography of a “failed novelist.” [1] Grimes’ chronicle of failing to realize high expectations of him as a writer has arguably proven to be his greatest literary success thus far. [2] This book was well received with one mentioning 'couldn't put "Mentor" down' in his review. [3]
After Iowa Grimes was recruited to head the (then) fledgling MFA program at Texas State (the college was known as Southwest Texas State University at the time). Grimes’ stewardship has elevated the program to national prominence, [4] and has attracted visiting writers and faculty such as Tim O’Brien, ZZ Packer, Robert Stone, Dagoberto Gilb, and Debra Monroe. Texas State's MFA program broke into the Top Fifty in Poets & Writers' rankings of graduate writing programs for the application year 2012. [5]
Grimes was also instrumental in organizing and raising funds for the restoration of the historic Katherine Anne Porter House in Kyle, Texas (the childhood home of Pulitzer Prize–winning author Katherine Anne Porter), as well as the development of the KAP Literary Center, [4] which is affiliated with the writing program at Texas State. The Katherine Anne Porter House has since hosted workshops, craft talks, and public readings by writers and poets such as Robert Creeley, Percival Everett, Richard Ford, Mary Gaitskill, Annie Proulx, and George Saunders.
James Alan McPherson was an American essayist and short-story writer. He was the first African-American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was included among the first group of artists who received a MacArthur Fellowship. At the time of his death, McPherson was a professor emeritus of fiction at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
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.
Creative writing is any writing that goes outside the bounds of normal professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms of literature, typically identified by an emphasis on narrative craft, character development, and the use of literary tropes or with various traditions of poetry and poetics. Due to the looseness of the definition, it is possible for writing such as feature stories to be considered creative writing, even though it falls under journalism, because the content of features is specifically focused on narrative and character development. Both fictional and non-fictional works fall into this category, including such forms as novels, biographies, short stories, and poems. In the academic setting, creative writing is typically separated into fiction and poetry classes, with a focus on writing in an original style, as opposed to imitating pre-existing genres such as crime or horror. Writing for the screen and stage—screenwriting and playwriting—are often taught separately, but fit under the creative writing category as well.
The Columbia University School of the Arts is the fine arts graduate school of Columbia University in Morningside Heights, New York. It offers Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degrees in Film, Visual Arts, Theatre and Writing, as well as the Master of Arts (MA) degree in Film Studies. It also works closely with the Arts Initiative at Columbia University (CUArts) and organizes the Columbia University Film Festival (CUFF), a week-long program of screenings, screenplay, and teleplay readings.
Founded in 1969 the Community of Writers is a writers' conference held each summer in Olympic Valley, California. The Community of Writers is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization and has a governing Board of Directors.
Frank Conroy was an American author. He published five books, including the highly acclaimed memoir Stop-Time. Published in 1967, this ultimately made Conroy a noted figure in the literary world. The book was nominated for the National Book Award.
Paul Hamilton Engle, was an American poet, editor, teacher, literary critic, novelist, and playwright. He is remembered as the long-time director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and as co-founder of the International Writing Program (IWP), both at the University of Iowa.
Nathan Englander is an American short story writer and novelist. His debut short story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, was published by Alfred A. Knopf, in 1999. His second collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, won the 2012 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Paul Lisicky is an American novelist and memoirist. He is an associate professor in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden, and the author of several books.
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.
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.
Leslie Ullman is an American poet and professor. She is the author of four poetry collections, most recently, Progress on the Subject of Immensity. Her third book, Slow Work Through Sand, was co-winner of the 1997 Iowa Poetry Prize. Other honors include winning the 1978 Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition for her first book, Natural Histories, and two NEA fellowships. Her poems have been published in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry,The Kenyon Review, Puerto Del Sol, Blue Mesa Review, and in anthologies including Five Missouri Poets.
Texas literature is literature about the history and culture of Texas. It ranges broadly in literary genres and dates from the time of the first European contact. Representative authors include Mary Austin Holley and Katherine Anne Porter.
Jane Vandenburgh is an American novelist and memoirist.
The Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing is a graduate program in creative writing based at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, Maine, United States. Stonecoast is one of the oldest low-residency creative writing programs in the United States and is notable for being one of only two such programs in the country to offer a degree in popular fiction. The Stonecoast MFA program is a low-residency program. Ten-day residencies for students, faculty, and visiting writers are held each January and June. The rest of a student's academic work during the two-year program is pursued on a one-on-one basis under the leadership of a faculty mentor.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar is a Belgian-American poet, translator, professor, and former poet laureate of Santa Barbara, California. She is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently, These Many Rooms. Her collection, Small Gods of Grief, won the 2001 Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry. A New Hunger, was an American Library Association Notable Book in 2008. She is the author of Artémis, a collection of French poems, published in Belgium. Her chapbook Rooms Remembered appeared from Sungold Editions in 2018.
The Katherine Anne Porter House is a historic house located in Kyle, Texas. It was built in 1890 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004. The house is the childhood home of writer Katherine Anne Porter. It was restored and turned into a short-lived museum at the instigation of Bill Johnson, executive director of the Burdine Johnson Foundation, and Tom Grimes, then-director of the Texas State University MFA program.
Albert Flynn DeSilver is an American poet, memoirist, novelist, meditation teacher, speaker, and workshop leader. He received a BFA in photography from the University of Colorado in 1991 and an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1995. DeSilver served as Marin County California's very first Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010. His work has appeared in more than one hundred literary journals worldwide including ZYZZYVA, New American Writing, Hanging Loose, Jubilat, Exquisite Corpse, Jacket (Australia), Poetry Kanto (Japan), Van Gogh’s Ear (France), and many others. DeSilver has taught for many years in the Teen and Family Program at Spirit Rock Meditation Center. He is the author of several books of poems and the memoir Beamish Boy, (2012) which Kirkus Reviews called "a beautifully written memoir, poignant and inspirational".
Doug Dorst is an American novelist, short story writer, and creative writing instructor. Dorst is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. He is the current director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Texas State University in San Marcos.