Alumni Books and Achievements – Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing

Recent Alumni News & Achievements

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.
Malik Abdul-Jabaar received tenure and was promoted to Assistant Professor at Rowan College at Burlington County.
Katie Bennett was a resident at Yaddo in Spring 2023.
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.
Sarah Browning‘s third book of poems, Call Me Yes, is forthcoming from FlowerSong Press in 2026. Sarah also launched a new monthly poetry reading series in Philadelphia with the poet Raina León called Wild Indigo.
Catherine Buck won the CRAFT Literary 2024 Dialogue Challenge. You can read her winning piece here.
Jacob Camacho received an Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative (NAISI) Artist Fellowship at Brown University.
Michael Deagler‘s debut novel Early Sobrieties, which 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, was published by Astra House in May 2024, won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, and was longlisted for the 2025 Andrew Carnegie Award for Excellence in Fiction. In addition, his story “The Pleasure of a Working Life,” published in the June 2024 issue of Harpers, won an 2025 O. Henry Prize for Short Fiction.
Deena ElGenaidi‘s debut novel Dust Settles North is forthcoming from Bindery Books in August 2025.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Shawn R. Jones, winner of the Lexi Rudnitzy First Book Prize in Poetry, published Date of Birth in April 2023.
Dennis Lawson was named a 2025 Established Professional Fellow in Fiction by the Delaware Division of the Arts.
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.
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.
Tim Lynch was named a 2025 Emerging Professional Fellow in Poetry by the Delaware Division of the Arts.
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.
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.
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.
Marie Scarles‘ debut chapbook The Catastrophes, which excavates the legacies of the lands she lives with and on, mapping catastrophe’s traces from breakfast eggs to late-night shifts at the bar, will be published by Finishing Line Press in October 2025.
Adam Straus’ 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.
Anise Vance‘s book, Hush Harbor, was published in September 2023 by Harper Collins. It is also in development as a Hulu Series.
Martin Wiley’s “novel in poetic form” When Did We Stop Being Cute? was published by CavanKerry Press in April 2023.
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

All the Stars Aflame by Malik Abduh

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