Whether you are curious about or actively planning to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing, we welcome you to attend this virtual panel! Creative Writing faculty and recent MFA graduates will share their experiences completing graduate degrees in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and translation. You'll get to ask about application tips, hot takes, whether the MFA path is right for you, and more!
PANELISTS
Daniel Raeburn is the author of Chris Ware, a book of art criticism, and Vessels: A Memoir of What Wasn’t. His essays have also appeared in The New Yorker, The Baffler, Tin House, and in The Imp, his series of booklets about underground cartoonists. He’s been awarded fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Howard Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Chicago and received his MFA in Writing & Literature from the Writing Seminars at Bennington College, a 24-month low-residency program.
Stephanie Soileau's collection of short stories LAST ONE OUT SHUT OFF THE LIGHTSis forthcoming from Little, Brown & Co. in Summer 2020. Her work has also appeared in Glimmer Train, Oxford American, Ecotone, Tin House, New Stories from the South, and other journals and anthologies, and has been supported by fellowships from the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program at Stanford University, the Camargo Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She earned her BA in English at the University of Chicago and MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She teaches fiction at the University of Chicago.
Will Boast is the author of a story collection, Power Ballads, a memoir, Epilogue, and a novel, Daphne. His short fiction, reporting, and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, The Guardian, Glimmer Train, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications. His first attempt at an MFA was at Indiana University. He completed the task at the University of Virginia. He then did even more workshopping through a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford and a Charles Pick Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. He's also been a Literature Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He's taught fiction and non-fiction at Chicago since 2014.
Lina M. Ferreira C.-V. graduated with both a creative nonfiction writing and a literary translation MFA from the University of Iowa. She is the author of Drown Sever Sing from Anomalous press and Don’t Come Back the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology The Great American Essay and the editor and translator of the forthcoming 100 Refutations from Mad Creek Books. She’s been the recipient of the Best of the Net award and the Iron Horse Review’s Discovered Voices award, has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and is a Rona Jaffe fellow. She moved from Colombia to China to Columbus to Chicago, where she works as an assistant professor for the University of Chicago.
Korey Williams earned his MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University—a full-residency and fully-funded 2-year program that offers 1- to 2-year Lectureship Appointments post-graduation. Although his concentration was in poetry, he pursued a cross-genre project and, thus, his thesis committee included faculty in both poetry and fiction. In addition to Cornell, Williams has studied at Illinois Wesleyan University and the University of Oxford. He is currently a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, and his work appears or is forthcoming in The Offing, Narrative Magazine, Spoon River Poetry Review, Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, and elsewhere.
Julie Iromuanya is the author of Mr. and Mrs. Doctor (Coffee House Press), 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. Her scholarly-critical work most recently appears in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, Callaloo: A Journal of African American Arts and Letters, and Afropolitan Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury Publishing). She is a 2020 George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation fellow, and she was the inaugural Herbert W. Martin Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Dayton. Iromuanya earned her B.A. at the University of Central Florida and her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Up until 2019, she taught in the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Arizona. She is currently an assistant professor in the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago.