MFA Program:
A Season of Increase and Plenty

This has been a season of increase and plenty for the MFA Program and its faculty. I'll list highlights briefly here. First, in Academic Year 2000-2001 we have been joined by two new long-term colleagues, Peter Ho Davies and Reginald McKnight. Assistant Professor Davies is the author of two collections of short stories, Equal Love and The Ugliest House in the World; he joins us from the University of Oregon. Professor McKnight arrives from the University of Maryland, College Park; he has published short stories and novels as well as served as Editor for Wisdom of the African World. His titles include White Boys, The Kind of Light that Shines on Texas, I Get on the Bus, and Moustapha's Eclipse.

Two eminent visiting writers swelled our roster in Fall, 2000. Lynn Sharon Schwartz joined us to teach a prose fiction workshop; she is the author of a dozen books of fiction and non-fiction, as well as works in translation and for children. Her two recent collections of essays are Face to Face: A Reader in the World and Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books. Her novels include In the Family Way, The Fatigue Artist, Leaving Brooklyn, and Disturbances in the Field.

The Helen H. Zell Professorship Thanks to the generosity of Helen Herzog Zell, the Department of English is pleased to announce its first ever endowed professorship. The Helen Herzog Zell Professorship, which was established for a practitioner of prose fiction, will be occupied in the coming year by esteemed author Nancy Reisman.

Thomas Lynch is the author of three collections of poetry, Skating with Heather Grace, Grimalkin & Other Poems, and Still Life in Milford. He taught a course in non-fiction last fall--and we hope that he'll join us, on a quasi-regular basis, again. Mr. Lynch has been the funeral director in Milford, Michigan for the past twenty-five years; this employment engendered his two celebrated books of essays, The Undertaking--Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, and Bodies in Motion and at Rest.

In Winter, 2001, award-winning poet and essayist Stephen Dunn joined our faculty as visitor, and we are both pleased and proud to announce that his most recent book of poems, Different Hours, has just received this year's Pulitzer Prize Award for poetry. Mr. Dunn has previously published such volumes as Loosestrife, Landscape at the End of the Century, Between Angels, Local Time, Not Dancing, Work and Love, and A Circus of Needs. His prose collections include Riffs & Reciprocities and the newly reissued and expanded Walking Light: Essays and Memoirs.

Our "regular" faculty has also been productive. Richard Tillinghast's new book of poems, Six Mile Mountain, was pubished by Story Line Press. Charles Baxter's most recent novel, The Feast of Love, was a finalist for the National Book Award. My own new novel, What Remains, was published by Warner Books in November, and my book, The Countess of Stanlein Restored, will appear this spring. Alice Fulton published her fifth book of poems this season, Felt, from W.W. Norton; her recent collection of essays is called Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry.

Two more causes for celebration are the installation of Ian Reed Twiss as Assistant Director of the program, and a major gift by Helen Herzog Zell to establish a professorship for a practitioner of prose fiction. This is the department's first endowed professorship. At the conclusion of a year-long search we offered this post to Nancy Reisman, and she has accepted. Ms. Reisman is the author of a collection of stories, House Fires, and her stories have won the Raymond Carver Award, the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and this year have been included in The Best American Short Stories, 2000.

The Visiting Writers Series can also report increase and plenty. More than twenty visitors came to campus to read from work-in-progress and to discuss matters of craft. Our week-long residencies this year include those of Athol Fugard, Richard Ford, and Russell Banks. Our Hopwood reading was offered by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C.K. Williams and our Hopwood lecture by National Book Award winner Andrea Barrett. The Mark Webster Series--a bi-weekly performance of work-in-progress by the second-year cohort of MFA students--has also been a well-attended and continuing success.

Most gratifying to report upon is the achievement of our students (indeed, one of our present cohort, Jess Row, has a story in the same "Best Short Story" collection as Nancy Reisman--and Peter Ho Davies--this year). Poet and essayist Keith Taylor has served with distinction both as Director of the Undergraduate Honors Subconcentration in Creative Writing and as mentor to second-year MFA students while they sit at the head of the class. The program's emphasis on pedagogy has yielded real results for those who teach writing while here. Both in English 125 (Introductory Composition) and English 223 (Creative Writing), the student-teachers spread, as it were, the good word.

Book-length publications from our MFA graduates have been so numerous that I cannot list them here; for published poetry and prose (fiction and non-fiction), the prizes and honors increase--or so it seems to us as we proudly hear reports of them--on a weekly basis. We're in the planning stages for a "reunion" of graduates of the program from the last twenty years, projected for Fall, 2002, and I'll report on that when the details are in place. Let me close this update, therefore, by repeating the assertion with which these lines began: the news is good.