Ashland University MFA Program

Ashland University MFA Program faculty and staff have had an active year with many new publications announced.  Four new poetry books by AU faculty and staff have been published in 2012. Morning, Winter Solstice Deborah Fleming "Winter solstice marks the annual moment of the earth's turn from loss and darkness and its slow, incrememntal re-dedication to light and life. Similarly the poems in Deborah Fleming's Morning, Winter Solstice acknowledge the often devastating impact man has had on the landscape while they crystallize those instances of nature's steadfast reclamation. The act of naming preserves and transforms; names of plants, birds, places encode whole histories and mythologies. In these poems of witness and warning, Deborah Fleming names with specificity that is itself an act of restoration and an affirmation of vitality and place." - Christine M. Gelineau "Deborah Fleming's poems evoke through nuanced detail the disasters - familial, ...

Each month, the Ashland MFA Program receives calls for submissions and contest deadlines, which it publicizes in its monthly newsletter. Listed below are this month's calls for submissions.

Ashland welcomes J.C. Hallman this summer as one of two creative nonfiction post-thesis instructors. Photo by Laura Migliorino J.C. Hallman grew up in Southern California on a street called Utopia Road. He studied creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh, the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Hallman’s MFA thesis was titled “Utopia Road,” which was the name of a story later published in Hallman’s short story collection, The Hospital for Bad Poets. Hallman’s nonfiction combines memoir, history, journalism, and travelogue, and has been compared to Alain de Botton and Bruce Chatwin. His first book, The Chess Artist, tells the story of Hallman’s friendship with chess player Glenn Umstead. His second, The Devil is a Gentleman, is an intellectual apprenticeship with philosopher William James. Hallman eventually realized that “Utopia Road” had exhausted neither his utopian heritage nor his interest an...

The MFA Program is thrilled to announce its 2013 visiting writers: in poetry, Linda Gregerson and Alicia Ostriker, and in creative nonfiction, Brian Doyle and Cheryl Strayed.  Brian Doyle is an award-winning author, essayist, and editor of Portland Magazine .  Linda Gregerson is the author of four poetry collections, a National Book Award finalist and winner of the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Alicia Ostriker has written fourteen volumes of poetry and has twice been a finalist for the National Book Award. Cheryl Strayed is the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Wild , which has been picked up by Oprah's Book Club 2.0 and has been optioned for film. For more about these esteemed writers, read on after the jump.