"So You Want an MFA?: Everything You Need to Know."

May 26, 2021 4:00PM
Virtual Event

Tafthouse

For the Program in Creative Writing's annual MFA Panel, "So You Want an MFA?: Everything You Need to Know", current faculty and recent alumni will be here to chat about and take questions on their MFA experiences as poets, prose writers, and academics. Please come with questions on the MFA application process, the MFA experience, programs, the academy, PhDs, etc. This is open to all students interested in potentially pursuing an MFA in creative writing. Registration available at crwr.eventbrite.com. 

Panelist Bios

Jennifer Chukwu received her BA from the University of Chicago and is currently a Writing and Research Advisor in U of C's Creative Writing Program. Her writing is weird, sad, and sometimes funny. She received her MFA in Fiction from Brown University. Her debut novel, The Unfortunates, will be published in Summer 2022 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (US) and The Borough Press (UK). She was a 2019 LAMBDA Fellow, and her work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, DIAGRAM, TAYO, and elsewhere. She’s been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of Net, and was short-listed for Tarpaulin Sky Press’ 2020 Book Award. 

Dan Cronin graduated from the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program (NWP) in 2019. While at Iowa he was elected Student Ambassador of the NWP, and he hosted both the Speakeasy and Anthology reading series. He was the Inaugural 2019 Englert Arts Fellow and he has taught courses and master classes at the University of Iowa, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. He is currently back in Iowa City to finish his book. Rachel Girty is a writing and research advisor at the University of Chicago. A classical singer and cross-genre writer, she holds an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in Sinister Wisdom, Pretty Owl Poetry, Body Parts Magazine, and elsewhere. She is currently working on her first novel.

Julie Iromuanya is the author of Mr. and Mrs. Doctor (Coffee House Press, 2015), a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, the Etisalat Prize for Literature (now 9 Mobile Prize for Literature), and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Debut Fiction. She was the inaugural Herbert W. Martin Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Dayton, and earned her B.A. at the University of Central Florida, and her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is an assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.

Dan Raeburn is the author of Vessels, a memoir, as well as Chris Ware, a book of comics criticism. He studied creative writing as an undergraduate at the University of Iowa and got his MFA in Writing & Literature from the low-residency program at Bennington College.

Margaret Ross is the author of A Timeshare, winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize in 2015. Her recent poems and translations have appeared in Best American Poetry 2021, Chicago Review, the New Republic, the Paris Review, and Yale Review. Her work has been supported by a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, a Fulbright fellowship, and residencies from Yaddo. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently teaches at the University of Chicago where she is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and collegiate assistant professor of creative writing.

Rebecca Sacks is a graduate of the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. She worked for several years at Vanity Fair before moving to Tel Aviv, where she wrote dispatches for publications such as The Paris Review’s The Daily, The Millions, and Tablet. Her first novel, City of a Thousand Gates, was published in February by HarperCollins.