Recent Alumni News & Achievements
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Malik Abduh‘s debut All the Stars Aflame, a collection of poems that relates the brutal legacy of U.S. racial violence alongside his own life experience, was released from Get Fresh Books in 2022.
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Malik Abdul-Jabaar received tenure and was promoted to Assistant Professor at Rowan College at Burlington County.
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Katie Bennett was a resident at Yaddo in Spring 2023.
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Isaac Blum‘s book, The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen, was published in November 2022 by Penguin Random House. The novel was longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award in Young Adult Literature and won the National Library’s William C. Morris Award for Debut Young Adult Literature.
- Jacob Camacho received an Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative (NAISI) Artist Fellowship at Brown University.
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National Magazine Award for Fiction winner Michael Deagler published a novel, Early Sobrieties, from Astra House in May 2024. It follows one narrator across linked stories as he returns to Philadelphia for his first alcohol-free summer, and explores the specters of guilt and exile that haunt even a “successful” recovery. Early Sobrieties was recently longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Award for Excellence in Fiction.
- Mary Anna Evans won the Oklahoma Book Award in fiction for her novel The Physicists’ Daughter. Her most recent novel The Traitor Beside Her, was reviewed alongside Isabel Allende, Lisa See, and others on May 21, 2023 in The Washington Post.
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Ru Freeman’s Bon Courage, a collection of essays that bring global perspectives to subjects as diverse as Bowie and Dylan, Palestine, 9/11, hairstyles, personal and cultural identity, and #MeToo, is forthcoming from Etruscan Press in August 2023.
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Cherita Harrell was promoted to Senior Lecturer at Rowan University.
- Oluwabambi (Abimbola) Ige was a finalist for a Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown Fellowship in Fiction. He has published new work in Joyland, Agni, and Story.
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Micaiah Johnson’s novel The Space Between Worlds has been translated into multiple languages, including Korean, Turkish, Czech, and German. The book won the Compton Crook Award. Her forthcoming novel is Ashtown, an examination of police brutality and state violence set in The Space Between Worlds multiverse, where a woman reckons with her past while investigating a series of sudden and inexplicable deaths. It will be published by Del Rey Books.
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Shawn R. Jones, winner of the Lexi Rudnitzy First Book Prize in Poetry, published Date of Birth in April 2023.
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Brook Lee’s A Dictionary of Modern Consternation won the 2022 Permafrost Nonfiction prize (with guest judge Joy Castro) and will be published by University of Alaska Press.
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Davon Loeb published his memoir The In-Betweens, the story of a biracial boy becoming a man, while trying to come to terms with his white family, with West Virginia University Press in February 2023.
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Brook McClurg, winner of 2022 Fulbright Fellowship, successfully defended his PhD in Creative Writing at Texas Tech University. He’ll be joining the tenure-track faculty at San Jose State University in Fall 2024.
- Susan Muaddi Darraj will publish her debut novel, Behind You Is the Sea, which gives voice to the diverse residents of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore, with HarperCollins in January 2024. Behind You Is the Sea has received starred reviews from Booklist and Kirkus.
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andie millares was named an ISGRJ Fellow, for which she’ll receive a $60,000 stipend and teach a class on the Rutgers-Camden campus in the Spring of 2024.
- Juliana Roth was a 2022-2023 The Center for Fiction/Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow. She was also a VIDA Fellow with the Sundress Academy for the Arts. Her web series, The University, was nominated by the International Academy of Web Television for Best Drama. Currently, she teaches writing at NYU.
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Nina St. Pierre’s memoir Love is a Burning Thing, about growing up with a single mother who self-immolated at age 20 and later burned down her rural California home, and whose mysticism veiled the likely truth that she had paranoid schizophrenia, was published from Dutton in May 2024. Nina was also named a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Nonfiction Literature.
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Adam Straus-Goldfarb’s story “Motorcycle Pope” was a finalist for the Iowa Review’s Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award for Veterans.
- Tjizembua Tjikuzu‘s poetry chapbook “Bantustan Blues” will be published in 2025 with the African Poetry Book Fund in collaboration with the University of Nebraska Press.
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Anise Vance‘s book, Hush Harbor, was published in September 2023 by Harper Collins. It is also in development as a Hulu Series.
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Martin Wiley’s “novel in poetic form” When Did We Stop Being Cute? was published by CavanKerry Press in April 2023.
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Sienna Zeilinger won the 2024 Florida Review Editors’ Prize in Creative Nonfiction and the 2024 Walter Rumsey Marvin Grant from the Ohioana Library Association.
Alumni Books
Malik Abduh
All the Stars Aflame (Get Fresh Books, 2022)
Isaac Blum
The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen (Penguin Random House, 2022)
The Judgment of Yoyo Gold (forthcoming fall 2024)
Barbara Daniels
The Woman Who Tries to Believe
Rose Fever
Michael Deagler
Early Sobrieties (Astra House, 2024)
Maya Deane
Wrath Goddess Sing (William Morrow, 2022)
Susan Muaddi Darraj
Behind You Is the Sea (HarperCollins, 2024)
A Curious Land: Stories from Home – winner of AWP’s 2014 Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction
Inheritance of Exile
Scheherazade’s Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing
Nabina Das
Into the Migrant City – nominated as one of the Best of 2012 in Indian Poetry
The House of Twining Roses: Stories of the Mapped and Unmapped
Footprints in the Bajra – long-listed for the 2011 Vodafone Crossword Book Award
Ru Freeman
Sleeping Alone (Graywolf Press, 2022)
Barry Graham
Nothing or Next to Nothing
The National Virginity Pledge
Not a Speck of Light is Showing
Michael Haeflinger
Love Poem for the Everyday
Therese Halscheid
Frozen Latitudes
Uncommon Geography — finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize
Greatest Hits 1993-2006
Without Home
Powertalk
Brian Heston
If You Find Yourself – winner of Main Street Rag’s Annual Poetry Book Award
Micaiah Johnson
The Space Between Worlds (Del Rey, 2020)
Ashtown (forthcoming)
Shawn R. Jones
Date of Birth (Persea Books, 2023. Winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize)
Violet LeVoit
I am Genghis Cum
I’ll Fuck Anything That Moves and Stephen Hawking
Hotel Butterfly
Love Poems
Davon Loeb
The In-Betweens (reissued West Virginia University Press, 2022)
Keri Mikulski (writing as Nicole Leigh Shepard)
Head Games
Stealing Bases
Making Waves
Fifteen Love
Lisa Nikolidakis
No One Crosses the Wolf (Little A, 2022)
Chinelo Okparanta
Under the Udala Trees – winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction
Happiness, Like Water – winner of the O. Henry Award
Gregory Pardlo
Spectral Evidence (forthcoming)
Totem
Digest – winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Air Traffic
Carol Plum-Ucci
The Night My Sister Went Missing
The Body of Christopher Creed
The She
Robert Pulcini
American Splendor
The Nanny Diaries
Leslie Rapparlie
Writing and Experiential Education: Practical Activities and Lesson Plans to Enrich Learning
Agnes Rossi
Split Skirt
The Houseguest
The Quick and Athletes and Artists
Nina St. Pierre
Love Is a Burning Thing (Dutton, 2024)
Lisa Trace
Muddy Waters: The Legacy of Katrina and Ritan
The Gradual Vegetarian
Objects Of Our Affection
Anise Vance
Hush Harbor (Hanover Square Press, 2023)
Kathleen Volk Miller & Marion Wrenn
Painted Bride Quarterly (editors)
Martin Wiley
Just/More (Finishing Line Press, 2022)
Brad Windhauser
The Intersection