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

Recent Alumni News & Achievements

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 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.
National Magazine Award for Fiction winner Michael Deagler will publish a short story collection, Early Sobrieties, following one narrator across linked stories as he returns to Philadelphia for his first alcohol-free summer, and exploring the specters of guilt and exile that haunt even a “successful” recovery. It will be published by Astra House Books in 2024.
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.
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.
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.
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, is forthcoming from Dutton in March 2024. Nina was also named a 2023 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Nonfiction Literature.
Adam Straus-Goldfarb’s story “Motorcycle Pope” was a finalist for the Iowa Review’s Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award for Veterans.
Anise Vance‘s book, Hush Harbor, will be 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 2022 Montana Prize in Nonfiction and was named a finalist for the Iowa Prize in Nonfiction.

Alumni Books

Isaac Blum

The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen (Penguin Random House, 2022)

Barbara Daniels

The Woman Who Tries to Believe
Rose Fever

Maya Deane

Wrath Goddess Sing (William Morrow, 2022)

Ru Freeman

Sleeping Alone (Graywolf Press, 2022)

Davon Loeb

The In-Betweens (reissued West Virginia University Press, 2022)

Susan Muaddi Darraj

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

Barry Graham